To a dolphin, all things are circular. The moon swims in its cycle around the earth, making a mooncycle every month; on the same path the sun completes its cycle in twelve months. A baby dolphin is constantly protected by remaining inside of the circles its mother swims. So, too, each grouping of dolphins is called a Circle, and its leader a Circlelord. Since dolphins share kinship with the whales, they are a part of the Circle of the Returned; for a whale's memory is long, and the tradition remains of their return to the water. Humans are the Other Circle, left in the upper ocean of air when both were cousins, before time began. There are dozens of Circles ringing Lando and the rest of the Florida Keys. A circle home is a floating thing, not related to place. But there are, nevertheless, territories and realms. Cheeka's realm was in the waters off the eastern side of Lando Key; he ruled his Circle there with his cruel mistress, Krora.
Breee was only one of the younger members of the Circle, and there were many. She would have lived and died a common life had it not been for the sudden awakening in her of an old illness, and the visit of an underwater troubadour named Drummer.
No one talked about the child's sickness although it was common enough, and nearly every Circle had the problem. No one had talked about her mother, either, for she had been afflicted with the same illness. It was called Nightsee, when it was called by name. The poor thing's eyes would glaze over, mostly at night when no one much noticed. It only became noticeable if the sick dolphin began to make odd sleeping noises associated with the disease, noises like the Others make as they lean over the sides of their boats. Then there would be delusions in which the dolphin claimed to be able to visit the air-world of the Others, even to be able to see through the eyes of an Other. Fortunately, Breee's mother had never gotten to that stage. The Silent Circle, death, had closed on her in giving birth to Breee. It was better so.
Keet took the infant in and raised it as her own. She was a good and wise mother, and it pleased her when a strong friendship grew up between her own son, Zaak, and the orphaned one. Strange, how a quiet, moody child like Breee will draw to her an active, boisterous companion. They were good for each other.
Breee was always alive to the old stories, Keet noticed, and this pleased her, too, for Keet enjoyed telling the children the history of their race, and of their mother-protector, Awa.
"Before before," Keet would say to the wide-eyed children, "when the circle of the world was only a child like you, there was a single Circle of All Living Things, and we were much alike, but with some exceptions. In this time we lived on the dry flat part of the earth where Awa had planted our seeds. But life was hard, for there were terrible monsters that had been planted there, too."
"More awful than the giant squid?" a child would ask.
"Worse. Worse even than our dark brothers, the killer whales, when they have the Hunger. But these were dry things, creatures of the air and dry earth. The wind had dried their bodies, and they were thirsty for blood. They made life very hard for all other creatures, before before.
"At last many members of the Circle could stand no more, and they had a council under the ground in caverns, to protect them while they decided what to do.
" 'Let us become small,' said Rat, 'so that the monsters will not hunger after our meager flesh. They will then starve to death or eat each other, and we will live.'
" 'No,' said Crab. 'Let us wear our bones on the outside instead of the inside. This hard shell will keep the monsters from eating us, and we will be safe.'
"Each of the people spoke. There were many ideas. Finally, Human stepped forward.
" 'We will grow hands,' the Human said. "And we will grow a thumb. Then we will be able to grasp stones and sticks to help us fight the monsters. We will be able to build shelters to keep out danger. We will be able to carve our ideas into the stone, so our young can learn faster. This way we can rid the earth of the monsters and ensure that we become rulers over it.'
"Many of the people chattered their approval.
" 'But,' said Old Blowhole, the father of all Returned, 'what if we do not want to be rulers over the earth? This sounds like too much work to me. What if we just want to live our lives unmolested, to eat and sleep and mate and enjoy the earth? What if we do not want hands with which to fight?'
"The people argued and argued, but they could reach no common agreement. Finally they ended their council. But when they reached the surface, they discovered that they could no longer understand each other. They were afraid, Rat had become small, and his people scurried away to live by hiding. The human got his wish; he had four fingers and a thumb so that he could fight any monster, no matter how large.
"But Old Blowhole and his people were the same. His people began mourning, for they had no protection like the others. They sat on the rocks near the water and sang a song of grief. Old Blowhole sang himself, and sang louder than the rest. How sad he was for his people!
"It was then that Awa, the vast Circle of the Oceans, the mother of all living, spoke to Old Blowhole.
" 'Come back to me,' she said. 'I will protect you from the monsters. You will not need to become small. I will support you so that you may become as large as you want, yet move as fast as the wind. You will not have to have hands. You can have flippers and work only at being rulers of your own kind. I will give you my bounty freely, and you will have no enemies. You can plunge deep within me where I will protect you. Let the Others have the land!'
"Old Blowhole could not believe his ears. Still, he wavered.
" 'But the other Circles would call us cowards to return to our mother instead of turning to face the monsters,' he said.
" 'Return, and I will give you a thousand thousand suncycles of peace and song for you to grow and become wise in,' was Awa's reply. 'At the end of that time, you can decide again whether to face the monsters of the air world or to dwell in me.'
"This time, Old Blowhole agreed.
"And that," said Keet to her children, "is how the people of the earth divided. And that is how we came to live in the great mother Awa and be called the Returned, for we were once people of the land."
* * *
BREEE REMEMBERED those stories now dimly as she floated alone in the dark northern seas. The stale taste of blood was in the water, and she was nearly freezing. Another violent shiver went through her. It nearly warmed her to remember Keet and the old stories. But that was long ago, before the Turning, before the battles and treachery and danger. Before she had known the meaning of courage or fear.
She could no longer swim. The shadows were growing. She wondered numbly how she came so far from the warm times with Keet-mother and Zaak in Cheeka's Circle.
Ah, yes, now she remembered. It began with a rumor .. .
"SKREEEEEEEEET!" Krora, the big female chirped loudly. "Steady over there. Keep them bunched up and scared. Eat a few, that's the way. To the left now, Kreecha, they're turning!"
Kreecha, an immature male, ducked into the shoal of mullets in a chattering attack, which panicked the entire school, turning them back. There were four others with Kreecha, including Zaak, herding the thick, Hashing mass of fish toward Krora and the rest of the Circle.
"Wait there," Krora cautioned an impatient calf who was trying to sneak ahead of the others. "You'll frighten them. Let the drivers get them all crowded together where they can't turn so easily, and we'll all have a feast. If we attack now, they'll scatter, and we'll have to chase down our meal. Just a moment now."
The fish jumbled together in tighter and tighter knots, zigging and zagging in groups to avoid the four attackers, who constantly increased their speed. Occasionally, one of the dolphins darted into the mass and took a fish, which made the rest jam closer in terror, pale light flashing off a thousand mirrored sides.
"Now!" Krora shrieked.
Fifteen dolphins sprang forward, some diving immediately into the fish, others swimming under and up. A few pups chased straggling fish around the perimeter. But all swam with the school, steering it in a tiring circle that closed in on itself.
Breee dove into the squirming wall of fish with the others, feeding. It was like being tickled all over.
The school slowly dispersed as the dolphins ate their fill, and the Circle broke up into smaller groups, which guided their own piece of the school in meandering circles, chatting amiably and occasionally taking a fish. Breee followed a group that included Zaak.
"Good mullet!" Zaak said.
"Shreeeeee," a dolphin named Jumper whistled. "Good! Better than eating Cheeka's leftovers or catching croakers."
"Greyfin's Circle came upon some sea trouts over toward the islands the other day, I heard," one named Awi announced. "Said they were quite tasty, and they're a kind of croaker."
"I heard that's not all they came upon," Jumper mumbled as a silver tail disappeared down his throat.
"What do you mean?" Breee asked.
"Oh, just a rumor," Jumper muttered.
Awi interrupted. "Don't pay any attention to him, Breee. He's just been eating seaweed."
"I have not," Jumper protested. "You heard them yourself, Awi. Sharkscar said there have been rumors along his coast for many mooncycles; and Whiteface said the rumors came from the deep waters down warm-way."
Awi snapped at an escaping mullet. "He can say what he likes, but I just don't think we should be spreading rumors among the Circles."
"But what rumors?" Breee insisted, aiming her questions at the talkative Jumper.
He dropped his speed a little and moved closer to her, obviously delighted to spread gossip. "Well," he whispered, "Sharkscar told us that there was a new song being sung in the deeps, and some dolphins had heard it warmway. He didn't know exactly what it was, but he thought they were talking about a new way of behaving around the Others."
"Around Humans?" Breee blurted. "But how?"
"He didn't know. He thought it was nonsense, that the Others never bothered him much in any case. White-face said that they were talking about attacking Humans . . ."
The sea was split above them by the unmistakable thunder of Krora's jaws clacking in anger. Before they could turn, a massive tail-swipe sent Jumper tumbling into the mullets.
"What say, Jumper?" Krora cackled. As Cheeka's spy, she listened to everything and made her own rules. "What's this about talking to the Other Circle?" Her head was lowered with teeth showing, angry.
"Nothing, Lady," Jumper squealed. "Just a rumor Awi and I heard from Sharkscar of Greyfin's Circle. Nothing. Just a story from down warmway."
Krora kept her teeth bared as she swam with them. "You, Jumper, will not leave my sight for a mooncycle, understand? It is one thing to talk to other Circles, but it is quite another to spread their silly stories in Cheeka's realm. And I want no more talk of Others. You can ask Breee what my anger really feels like when I am disobeyed. Remember, no discussion of Humans."
She swung away and was gone. The younger dolphins swam briskly without speaking, automatically riding with the exhausted mullets. Icy fear rode with them. Jumper had forgotten Krora's delicate hearing and more delicate fear of Humans. And they all remembered the many beatings Krora had given Breee when she had spoken of Others after some Nightsee dream.
But even though she raced with fear, Breee burned to know what new song it was that spoke of Others. For in her dreams, she had often visited the air-world. She hoped the new song would come to her. Even her fear of Krora could not staunch her hope.
* * *
BUT IT WAS too much of an effort to continue the memory. She drifted now through the cold seas, fatigue replacing those distant happier thoughts, blurring her keen dolphin hearing.
Yes, the song had come. And it had taken her to die in these bitter waters far from her home Circle. She took a breath of freezing air.
But she was not Breee alone. Her aching mind remembered other things, things of a different world. Different voices. There was another name she had once been called. Or some other part of her had once been called by it. The other part was lonely and frightened down here and longed for warmth and air. That part had come looking for its father, as Breee had come looking for a song.
Another identity was inside her. Yes, she remembered now. It was a girl ... so long ago . . .
Robin Shaw began to hate Lando Key. The light of dusk was dim as she crossed the flat chalky salt marsh. She stubbed her toe and cursed softly, trying not to drop her schoolbooks or clothesbag. Lando Key. It even had a miserable sound. First it had been the disastrous move here from Norfolk, with Mom and she having to manage alone. Then had come the summer months, spent without friends, and finally the opening of her first year in high school with a bunch of strangers. And now this.
She negotiated the last brackish, stinking pool; then only an embankment and a broken fence remained to be scaled, and the lights of the trailer park popped into view.
Joan Shaw glanced up nervously at the sound of the front door banging shut. She sat trying to read in a yellow halo of lamplight.
"Hullo, Mom," Robin said.
"Hello yourself," her mother replied, trying too obviously to appear relaxed. "You should have been back an hour ago. I've already eaten."
"Not hungry anyway." Robin shrugged, dropping her books onto an end table and starting to sit.
"Not on the chair with your wet suit," Mom protested. "You've been at the beach all this time?" Then, without waiting for an answer, she said, "I wish you would eat something, honey. You look like a rail. You don't want to faint the first night your father's back, do you?"
Robin tried to smile, but failed. She was eager for her father's return, but what she had seen on the beach had changed her mood. She switched the subject.
"I still don't know why we couldn't go down to the base and meet him," she said pouting.
"I told you. There's tight security this time. No one allowed on the dock. No arrival time. He's not coming in to the oceanarium dock, like before. He said he'd use a lab truck to get home."
Robin leaned close to the black window and stared into the night, looking toward the beach, not the road.
"What's wrong?" her mother probed, leaning forward.
Quickly, as if to get it over with, Robin said, "There's a whale dying on the beach."
Joan Shaw shook her head. "What?"
"Some kind of whale. Not real big, like you'd think. It was stranded, and it had propeller marks all over its back. There were tourists all around."
She knelt wearily on the carpet beside her mother's chair. Mom put a reassuring hand on her arm.
Robin shook her head, trying to clear it of conflicting emotions. The words to state her problem would not come. "It was dying on the beach," she finally got out. "It looked at me. It had such a tiny eye, and it seemed to want to say something. It must have been very beautiful in the water once, but now it's cold and dry. I wanted to tell it to go back out there . . . but I couldn't."
She could only tell her mother the hollow facts, she realized. She could not tell her what she had seen in those eyes. There was a vast unanswered question behind them. Beyond the pain and the patience, there was a question the whale wanted to ask her but couldn't. It had awakened something unspeakable inside her.
"It wheezed," she said. "As if it was trying to talk. Only no one was there to translate. All the people stood around like idiots."
It was then that she remembered the boy - a tall blond teenager who had tried to catch her eye as he knelt beside the fallen giant with her. But she had been too engrossed in the whale to pay attention to him, she remembered regretfully. A possible friend, and she had been too wrapped up in her own concerns to make contact. They had talked about the whale, she remembered. He had seemed to want to help her. What was the name he'd given: Bob? Brian? It was no use. No one could help, either her or the whale.
At the end it had been only her and the whale. Everyone else had left. The huge creature had been in the thickening darkness wheezing like an old pipe organ as it waited for the greater darkness to gather. Robin had felt empty. She had whispered to the dying whale. She had made up whale-words and told it not to die, to swim back out into the depths. She had tried to listen to what it said back, but there were only thick sighs she did not understand.
Robin could no longer try to explain. She looked at her mother with lost, mute eyes.
"I'm sorry you were upset," Mom said slowly. "But animals die all the time, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. You'll feel better after you bathe and get the saltwater out of your hair. Go on." She smiled encouragingly. "Dad'11 be here soon, and you can talk about whales and all those other things only you two understand."
Robin managed a weak smile in return. It no longer hurt when her mother failed to understand what she felt. Besides, Mom had had enough to deal with. Dad had been away for three months this time. She didn't need to deal with a moody teenager mooning about beached whales. Robin gathered her clothesbag as her mother suggested.
She banged through the cramped tunnel of the trailer's main hall. The bathroom was a small Formica wonderland, large enough to undress in. It was smaller than the bedrooms, but it appeared much more spacious because there was no bed. And the best thing in the whole trailer was in it.
The walls of the shower were adorned in gold swirls imitating the pattern of marble. Robin liked to take long showers because her mind could turn the random shapes into animals - unicorns and buffalo. Here a plumed warrior, there a cascade of lemmings off some Norwegian cliff. Two horses entwined in frozen combat above the shower spigots. And there, above the imitation metal soap dish, was a golden swirl of dolphins. Three abreast, they cavorted around bolts in the wall the way she used to dream of doing when she was smaller. Random spots and lines became their mouths and eyes. Robin could take a bath that way without ever thinking of soap or shampoo, her mind moving in the universe behind the plastic curtains. She clothed the walls in her own wonder.
After she had scrubbed all the salt and sand away, and beneath that the sweat of school, she stood for a moment and watched her reflection in the foggy mirror. Her nose was too long. She turned her head and tried to catch a glimpse of it in profile. Ugh. She was also too tall and skinny. And the only reason she wore a bra was that you were supposed to when you were thirteen. It was just as well she had not had the presence of mind to come on to Bobby or Brian or whatever his name was. He couldn't have been interested in her.
She quickly wriggled into her school clothes and returned to the living room to help Mom keep vigil.
"Feel better, honey?" she asked Robin casually.
"Yeah." Robin settled into one of the big soft green chairs and rested her head against its back. Of course, she actually felt no better at all, but it would do no good to tell Mom.
She was always apart, even in her family. At school she was like an exotic fish, quiet and awkward. But she was a stranger here, too. It was as though she were only visiting wherever she might be and never really at home. Even when she was a kid and had dreamed of drowning in the air, the world had seemed alien. Her father alone could see into her enough to accept her separateness and to communicate with her on her own level. Suddenly she noticed her mother looking at her with concern, her eyebrows lifted.
But before she could reply, headlights raked across the curtains and wheels splashed through rain puddles outside.
"It's him!" Robin smiled.
Dad looked glorious, even in the half-light of streetlamps. She could see a new salt-and-pepper beard livening his smile before he was enveloped by his wife. Robin stood to the side to give them a moment together.
Across Mom's back, his gray eyes spotted Robin. And though he was pinned, both arms entangled and his neck barricaded, his eyes spoke to her warmly. She couldn't help but beam back.
"Hi, Rob," was all he said, and all he had to say. They helped him haul in endless bags and crates from the lab van, all smelling of alien seas and climates, including mysterious, alluring packages done up in brown paper.
Dad popped open the beer brought him and sagged into a chair. "Ahhh," he moaned. "A chair. A solid chair on dry land. Man, how good it feels not to be on a ship!"
His squarish face was tanned a deep brown, and with his new beard added, he looked every inch the explorer. But he patiently kept silent about his adventures while they recounted their last three months.
His wife informed him of the long trip from Norfolk and of mishaps with the trailer, the broken TV and the nearly broken washing machine. Her eyes told the real story, of her utter relief to have someone to share the family load.
"It's been a long time without you." She sighed. "I do hope we can stay in Lando for a while. I'm sick of moving. And maybe you won't have to go away for a long, long time."
He squeezed her hand and smiled. "I don't really know about that. I'll have at least a week free. I was hoping for a month or two, but ... we found a lot more than we expected, and Costain is eager to get back." He looked at Robin. "How about you, Rob. What have you been up to since I've been away? In love yet?"
She smiled shyly and shook her head. "Not hardly. I've been swimming a lot, but nothing much else." She was burning to tell him about the dying whale, but this was a happy time and she didn't want to spoil it. Besides, she had the strangest feeling that his presence brought with it an answer. It was as if the whale had swum into her path on purpose, to ask an immense question. And, somehow, the answer was in this room.
Mom discovered that Dad had not eaten since noon and was off immediately, slapping together his favorite salami sandwich concoction.
"I hope you ate well on the expedition," she murmured as she returned with the food. "I've heard Navy food can be pretty boring."
He laughed. "Do I look as if I've lost weight?"
"No, but I don't trust them to look out for you, either. And I don't like their reading your letters at all. They cut out two lines of your last letter. With scissors It ruined the whole letter for me. It makes me nervous for you to work with the Government. I thought all that cloak and dagger stuff went when you left the Navy to work with Costain Labs."
He swallowed a chunk of salami sandwich. "Nothing we could do, Hon. You know that. We have the Icky, and they have the locations." (He was referring to the Icthysphere, a mini-sub with powerful arms and legs for deep sea work)
"What locations, though?" Robin asked. Her father's recent activities had been mysterious from the start.
He chewed thoughtfully. "Well, I can't tell even you all the details. It's very secret, but the Navy has discovered ruins very deep in the Atlantic, like the ones we explored last year in the Bahamas."
"Ruins?" Robin puzzled. "You mean like Pompeii?"
Dad nodded. "A great deal like Pompeii, as it turns out. This place was destroyed by volcanic activity also, only now it's at the bottom of the sea. It's fascinating, really. Like no kind of architecture we've ever seen before. Reminds me a little of the Aztecs, walls all covered in faces. You could make them out even through the slime."
"Sounds like a silly thing to classify top secret." Mom frowned.
He tilted his head. "Not really. We have to be sure of what we have. It could just be part of a Roman colony on the Azores that sank. But if it's related to the Bimini find . . . well, it's big news."
A strange look came into Robin's eyes as she remembered an old story. "Atlantis," she said.
He nodded. "Exactly. And if that's true, it's going to turn every earth science upside down. And you can be sure there are certain government agencies that will want to know exactly what made it sink before the information is released."
"So you're a slave to the Navy until they make up their minds," Mom said glumly.
"I don't see why you even have to go, Dad," Robin said. "After all, you're a biologist. You're not an expert on ruins."
"Nope," he replied. "But I'm the only person besides Dr. Costain who can operate Icky. And I go where Dr. Costain goes. Besides, this is exciting work. First chance I've had to do something besides cut up fish in years. And it's a mystery, a fascinating one. The only drawback is being away from you two for so long."
He tousled Robin's hair as if to signal an end to the discussion. "Hey, kid, get off that package! That's your mother's surprise."
Robin grinned and handed Mom the brown box. She lost no time in untying the plain string and lifting an intricately wrought silver necklace out of its nest of packing.
"It's beautiful, Bob," she gasped, and fastened it around her neck.
"Made by a wizened old Portuguese silversmith. It's supposed to bring long days and a happy life."
Dad hefted the remaining package. "That just leaves my girl," he said, smiling at Robin.
She took the string off the heavy square box and paused deliciously before lifting the lid. She loved these homecoming rituals and didn't want it to end too soon.
"Go ahead," Dad urged.
The beauty of the purse wrung a gasp from her. It was all leather, with darker mazes of embossing circled around the latch. As soon as she lifted it out of its packing, she saw sandals beneath. They too were all real leather, in interweaving loops of true primitive grace.
"Thanks, Dad," she said, and hugged him generously. "I need a new pair of sandals, and the purse is beautiful."
But when she lifted the box to pile it with the other empty one, she sensed something wrong. There was too much weight there for an empty package. She rustled around in the bottom until her hand closed around a cold, hard object, about the size of a baseball.
"What on earth is this?"
The stone lay coldly in her hand, a light, porous gray thing with a single glinting eye. A cloud passed over Dad's face.
"Oh," he said sheepishly. "I'd forgotten. I put that in there to get it off the boat without any questions."
"It has some kind of silver thing in it," she said, rubbing at the bright spot. Three silver dolphins winked at her from the border of a silver coin. Or amulet, or brooch. It was hard to tell, for the rest of the object was embedded in the stone. In the center, surrounded by the dolphins, was a crude face in profile.
"It's from the site," Dad said. "We located a large mound of coral and slime at ... well, over two thousand meters. The western edge of a plateau near the Azores. This was in some sort of city or complex, for we had been exploring a long hall, and circular formations. Dr. Costain and I discovered that this mound we had been searching around was itself a building with huge, thick columns. In the spotlight we could see that the temple, or whatever it was, had been flooded with lava when the place was destroyed. There were bowls and things strewn about. I'm not sure if I should tell even my family about what else we found. It was some sort of rock crystal set up underneath the dome in a stone frame. It never stopped glowing after our light hit it. I think it must have been what the Navy was looking for. They sure got excited when we brought it back."
"But what about this stone?" Mom said, obviously puzzled and somewhat mystified at her husband's hushed tones.
"It's one of the objects we pried out of the lava. It was laid out with all the other artifacts for cataloguing, and it was so beautiful - I don't know, I guess it enchanted me."
Mom looked at him with a total lack of comprehension. "Bob, won't they be mad when they find out?"
"I doubt it. If you knew what else we've got at the lab, you'd understand. There are huge gold wheels and jade statues, even a sort of machine, coated in coral. Nobody will miss one little trinket." He hesitated. "I thought I wanted a memento. Just something to remember the trip by. But now that I see it there in your hand, Robin . . . well, it seems right that you should have it."
She blinked. "You mean it? For me?"
He nodded, grinning. "Sure. I don't really blow why I wanted it."
She held it out, and the light winked off pure silver. It reeked of mystery. Under the sea for thousands of years, a lost ornament from a sunken kingdom. It was easy to see why Dad had been captivated by its romance. It made her other gifts seem dull.
They talked in a relaxed way for a few minutes, just enjoying the feeling of being together again. But Robin kept the chunk of lava clenched tightly in her hand, and she commented little.
Again and again she found herself thinking of the stone and what it held. Slowly a hunger was growing inside her. What she had thought was curiosity had become a raging thirst not only to know what the shape of the thing was, but to possess it, to wear it. From beyond the ages, from places unwritten of, the circle of dolphins was calling her.
She was glad when her dad suggested that he and Mom take a walk on the beach. It would give them a chance to be alone together and give her a chance to be alone with the gift from the sea.
Dad held Mom tight as he said over his shoulder, "See you later, Rob. Sure you don't want to come?"
She shook her head again and smiled reassuringly.
They were gone. She found a screwdriver, and after spreading newspaper under the chunk of stone, began chipping at the pumice surrounding the ornament. She burned to see its shape.
She didn't know what had happened, but she was no longer disturbed about the whale at the beach. She knew that that event was somehow connected to her father's gift. What the ancient lava held was the answer to the whale's dying question. Suddenly, nothing else mattered but discovering the shape of the thing and freeing it from its prison. She had never felt this way about anything, and if she had stopped to think, it might have frightened her. But she was too busy to be afraid. She felt that somehow she was close to something she had searched for all her life.
The stone was soft and easily chipped. But she was careful not to damage her prize, even in the fever of her excitement.
She couldn't shake the notion that the dolphin circle in silver had been waiting all those thousands of years just for her father to find it and bring it back to her. It had come on a mission across twin abysses: time and the Atlantic.
Then she noticed something happening to her. At first she thought the light shining from the silver was hurting her eyes. She blinked, and blinked again. Her movements slowed; it became harder for her to aim the screwdriver. She shook her head, but it did no good. The drowziness was coming for her.
Maybe if she just rested her head on the edge of the chair for a minute . . . The minute lengthened, time washed over her. Colors, sounds changed into strange patterns, motions somehow familiar rocked over her.
She was not aware of the dream, but she moved within the dream, a part of it, as though the stone-held silver was dreaming her. Like events in a fever, things happened and rehappened. She was called by another name. Darkness was everywhere, but she could somehow see. A rushing, a rising, a speeding toward an inevitable conflict across canyons of space . . .
It began.
First, of course, was the light. It was green, lighter above her and darkening beneath to a deep, shadowy emerald. But it was not space that surrounded her, for it pressed in at all points, a steady comforting weight encompassing her. The green atmosphere was holding her, supporting her body, cradling her life. It even rocked, gently.
Her mind struggled to understand the change, and she knew instantly then that the mind she used was another mind, one that she only shared. She found her thinking blocked by foreign walls of ignorance; then leaping ahead in unexpected directions around the obstacles inside the head she was visiting, her thoughts were thoughts of joy. Green, fluid joy. A joy to make her cry aloud.
She spoke. A short, intense squeal broke from her forehead instead of her lips.
From every corner of this new dream world came back an answering squeal, in many levels, until the air around her was filled with overlapping noises. And, more wonderful and more terrible than all else, the sounds now filled her brain with pictures.
Hiding her fear, she hung perfectly still in the warm greenness and relaxed. She opened her hearing, trying to listen better. The pictures were formed by her hearing, and the more she relaxed the clearer they became.
Gradually she understood that there were bodies around her, in a wide circle, moving. They were people, or something. Abandoning the confusing sound-pictures, she strained her eyes against the unfamiliar light.
She understood, suddenly. Water! This world was filled with water. It was water that tinted the light above and held her weightless over the darkness. Dolphins were the echoes around her. Kicking forward a bit, she managed to keep up with the torpid pace of the circle before the dolphin in back of her bumped against her. Intuitively, she knew the animals were sleeping.
Glancing around, she recognized the shape of the Lando Key reef, dappled with patterns of moonlight. She had examined it often with her diving mask. But now, somehow, it did not seem so alien.
She felt the top of her head break the surface, the cool wind caress it; and instinctively she breathed. It was then that she realized she had no snorkel. And her arms were somehow bound to her sides so that she could only move the tips of her fingers. Struggle as she might, she could only kick her feet, and then carefully, for she found her legs extraordinarily powerful. She gasped, and again the sound shattered and rebounded in an avalanche of pictures.
Then, with a shock she became aware of the nature of this new dream. She was a dolphin. Her hands were not tied to her sides, but were the ends of flippers. Her powerful kicking lay not in legs, but in a strong flat tail. She breathed through the blowhole atop her domed head.
A thrill went through her. She knew that she was safe here. The ocean was freedom. Up there where the air held the moon was danger, constantly invading this kingdom. She knew this, though she had never learned it.
Quietly she dropped out of the Sleepcircle and swam alone.
The sea was full of sound. To her rear another group of dolphins piped and played, though she could not gauge the distance. Crabs clattered across the reef like dancing skeletons. There were lobsters whispering in their caves on the reef-cliff face. Ahead, shrimp crackled electrically, sounding like popcorn beside her ears, though somehow she knew that they were far off in the mist. She recognized the whine of a boat's propeller in the distance, and behind it, somewhere, breakers mumbling against the beach.
But it was the strongest sound that interested her most, the dolphins at play. The water deepened as she swam in their direction, the reef receding into haziness. She ignored several finger-sized fish, which frantically swam away from her, took another cool surface breath, and kicked harder.
She glided into a group of ten immature dolphins who were rollicking at the surface, rolling and diving and chattering in a very flippant way. She swam quickly out of the path of a couple as they rocketed off together, one pacing the other exactly.
"Out of the way," one called as it passed. She did not wonder how she understood its speech; she simply did.
"Ha! Got it!" honked a slender male now being pursued by three or four dolphins. "Fweeeeeeek!"
Something silver flashed in his mouth, a fish tail. He dashed and jerked evasively, turning to wave the tail like a flag at his pursuers and then speeding on. He was playing keep-away. Just as she was about to dive to avoid the group, the male spied her, shrilled loudly, and headed her way.
"Here, quick!"
He spat the fish at her, and she grabbed it in her mouth without realizing what she was doing. But before she could escape, the others were on her and she was spun around by Hashing flukes. She gagged on the dead fish before it was easily yanked away.
"Hahahahahahahahaaaaa!" they chortled in an unsportsmanlike mocking.
"Breee's in another trance," she heard one trill.
They raced off at top speed after the lucky holder of the fish. Robin turned to find the lithe young male that had passed her the fish now hanging in the mist regarding her with what she could only interpret as a quizzical look. For the first time she fully realized the alienness of her new shape, for she tried to smile and couldn't. She didn't know what dolphin gesture to use to stop him from looking at her that way, so she turned to swim off.
"Breee?" he chirped.
She turned, she could not help it, and glanced nervously at him. In addition to his sleekness, he was marked by a thin gray-blue streak down his left side. She felt somehow she should know him. He swam a little closer, slower now, as if he did not want to frighten her.
"What are you doing out of the Sleepcircle?"
She wiggled, trying to approximate a shrug. "I ... I wasn't sleepy. I wanted to see what you were doing," she said lamely and slowly, for the speech, though she understood it, was new to her. It was very strange to speak without opening her mouth.
"What? he said, coming even closer and looking into her eyes. "Are you having another one of your spells, like Snipper said?"
"No. I mean . . . no."
"Then stop acting so strangely. They talk about you enough. Krora might hear something." He nudged her gently but firmly under one flipper.
"But, why? Who's Krora?" she couldn't stop herself from saying. Something made her trust him.
"You are having another spell." He jerked his head nervously toward the circle of sleepers and emitted a short creaking noise. He was looking at the distant group with sound, Robin realized.
"They still sleep," he said in a soft voice. "Krora likes to keep you in the adult Sleepcircle so she can tell when you Nightsee. Explanations later."
He nudged her again, less gently. She obeyed wordlessly this time, sensing that her best course was to follow his advice. They took a breath together, then he jerked his muzzle to indicate she should follow and dived. They skimmed like planes only a few inches above the white bottom. Robin nearly gurgled with exhilaration.
Then, abruptly, he stopped and she almost piled into him, only skidding around him at the last minute.
"Cheeka has seen us," he hissed.
Across the reef a large male dolphin was coming out of the wall of green fog, swimming directly for them. They were only halfway back to the Sleepcircle. Her companion acted queerly, hanging beak down in the water and then spinning slowly over to expose his belly to the intruder. She did the same quickly, from fear and from the desire to conform to whatever rules this world was bound by.
Cheeka slowed and began circling them. "What in the name of Awa is this," he snorted. "Zaak! Why is this strange child out of the Sleepcircle? And why is she acting so stupidly, as though she were a bull calf? Speak up! Is the strangeness upon her again?" Cheeka's eyes darted over her and she could feel his sonar examining her, cutting through her and measuring her very heartbeat. She stopped rolling over, now aware that she was acting incorrectly.
"No, brave Cheeka," Zaak said spiritedly. "She is only making a bad joke as young cows will do. It is my fault she has broken Circle. I wanted her to come hunt mullet with me and lured her away. She was properly afraid to come, but I insisted. We want to be mates when the time has come."
Cheeka made a barking sound, losing bubbles from his blowhole. "Why do you pick such an odd fish to be mates? Surely you could find a healthy cow. No matter. Perhaps she has some attraction I have no ear for. You're welcome to her."
"Thank you, lord," Zaak said, dipping his beak respectfully.
"Braaaaak!" Cheeka barked again. "Your mating choice is not my concern, so don't act too fawning, pup! But you know full well what Krora might do if she caught this one with the strangeness. I don't want an other killing this suncycle, if I can help it. My Circle is small enough. So if you want to have this cow around to mate with, you'd better follow orders. Is that loud enough?"
"Yes, lord!" Zaak bowed.
"Go! Get! Take her with you and I'll handle Krora this time."
Then Cheeka gave him a swipe of his heavy tale with enough force to spin him around in the opposite direction. Zaak shot off almost before Robin could follow.
They were well beyond the younger dolphins' playground by the time she caught up with him. Her heart was pounding like a drum and the water reverberated with its sound. It took her a moment to realize that there was a second pounding in the water, and it was Zaak's heartbeat. He had slowed and was now swimming in a wide circle. They had stuck their heads above surface and breathed deeply, when the slim male dolphin suddenly hooted into the air.
"Wheeeeeeeeoooooooooop!"
She flinched out of his way in surprise; he kicked himself up and flipped bodily out of the water, spinning and then crashing back in a tumult of crackling bubbles.
"W-what are you doing?" she said in a shrill voice, still nervous from their encounter with Cheeka.
"Did you see me back him down?" he chattered. "Seafishes! I just held my space and told him it was my fault because I wanted you for mate. Just you wait, one of these days I'll be as big as him . . ."
She snorted bubbles. "Didn't look very impressive to me. He gave you quite a whack, and you sure dipped your beak."
"I did more than most would do, and besides, the respect is due him," Zaak said indignantly. "At least until there's a new Circlelord."
"Lord Zaak?" she taunted.
"Perhaps. Anyway, be glad I impressed him enough to get Krora off your flukes. She's been listening for trouble lately."
"Krora?"
"Cheeka's main mate. She's a mean one. She makes most of the rules and enforces them with her temper. You must be having one of your attacks. Don't you even remember Triksa? Krora killed her last suncycle, about this time. She was paying too much attention to Cheeka - don't you remember at all? Your spells have never lasted this long, Breee."
She was quite surprised when he nuzzled against her beak and flippers and rubbed his flukes tenderly against hers. It seemed strange, but she tried to nuzzle back.
"You're my Breee," Zaak sighed, bubbling, "but you seem funny. You sound different."
"It's not easy having these spells," she suggested, searching for an identity.
Suddenly Zaak jerked his head around, "Did you dream about the Others again?"
"The Others?"
"Our air-cousins. Humans."
"Oh." Her mind raced. A sickening thought attacked her. Perhaps Breee had been dreaming of Robin's life while she had been dreaming of Breee's. She pushed the thought away.
"First teach me to see with sound, then I'll tell you about Humans."
Zaak snorted. "You're endless, Breee. An endless bother. How can you forget how to hear?"
"Pleeeease," she shrilled. "I'll tell you all about Others."
He snorted again, but it was a resigned snort.
"Well, you remember speech pretty well, except you have a kind of slurring." He pondered. "Here, face this direction, away from the Sleepcircle so they won't notice. There. Now give your search call, a good strong one so you can pick up the bottom over there ..."
He patiently coached her on where the sound should originate - there were several locations in her head where she could make noises - and how to sort out the returning echoes. Slowly she began to understand that an echo can return flat or spiked, solid or broken, and that each echo is a perfect picture of what it is returning from. She learned to judge the distance, shape, and speed of a fish from the rate of the echoes' return. Zaak taught her to alter the shape of her domed forehead so that she could focus the sound like a lens focuses light, into a wide or narrow beam.
It took some practice to control the process, but once she did, it was peculiarly like remembering "This is wonderful," she gurgled.
She could feel a new world opening up to her, a world that had nothing to do with her waking senses. It was an enormously powerful feeling to be able to reach out with sound and see a distant thing in detail. She was connected to everything for as far as sound could travel in a way that surpassed what sight could do.
"Now," Zaak trilled expectantly, "tell me about the Others."
But Robin pushed him aside and scanned a distant school of fingerlings exuberantly. "Not now. Oh, look! There's a grouper!"
Again he tried to interrupt her experiments, and again she shoved him away. Finally, he angrily clapped his jaws.
"Silence take you!" he cursed. "Snipper's right, cows are a bother, and you are a bottomless bother!"
With a swish of his tail, he swam away. But she didn't even turn around to watch him go. Her dolphin body trembled with excitement. Here, she could do almost anything. Perfect vision, through sound. And how could there be loneliness in a world without walls, where all lived together?
"My . . . name is ... Breee!" she cackled, and the memory came strange, overlapping her own name.
She was awash in familiarity, suddenly, her mind lost in a dolphin brain. She did not stop to think how it was happening. It was too new, too beautiful, and too all-consuming. She belonged here, in this vast kingdom where no storms raged and the water held her up, where she could hear forever the whispering of darkness to the deep. She had the joyous heartbreaking feeling of having returned to something long abandoned, nearly forgotten. She felt as if she had come home.
"Home," she said confidently, and the reef echoed, "Home."
She was about to sing it out louder when a strange, flat noise interrupted from behind. A somehow familiar voice called. She turned regretfully.
"Robin?" her father shook her. "You feel okay?"
She groaned and rolled over. She was no longer supported by water. The sofa was under her.
"You were making some pretty strange sounds," her father commented. "Were you having a had dream?"
Robin blinked and yawned. "No. A good one."
"Well, it certainly didn't sound good," Mom called from the kitchen. "You sounded like a cow or something. I've never heard anyone honk in their sleep before."
Robin laughed. She rubbed her eyes. Something slid off her lap and thumped onto the carpet. The lava.
"Hey," her father said, picking it up. "You've really been working on this thing, haven't you?"
Over his shoulder she could see that it was a ring, only a small segment of its circle now hidden by stone. She stifled a gasp, for it had not been nearly so free when she had dropped off to sleep.
"It's a ring," Dad said, and blew a layer of dust off what was exposed. "Wait a minute. It's . . ."
Robin leaned farther, enough to see a shard of whiteness inside the silver circle. A knuckle. She quickly took the stone from Dad, who looked at her with raised eyebrows and a grim gaze.
"Well," she said, "it's only natural that somebody would've been wearing the ring." She polished the ring protectively with her sleeve.
"I shouldn't have taken it," he muttered, almost to himself. "What was I thinking about? We're bound to dig up the rest of this fellow, and then there will be questions about the missing part."
"Please don't worry," she said calmly.
"Why did I take it?" he asked again, this time with a cutting edge of doubt in his voice, as though he mistrusted himself.
She looked from the stone to him. "Because it wanted you to," she said simply.
Her father looked at her with a kind of raw wonder in his eyes that she had seldom seen them wear. He said no more.
Robin kissed him and told him again how wonderful it was to have him home, then went to her room. It was cool and quiet there. She looked at the stone in her hand and realized with a pang of guilt that its arrival had overshadowed her father's. It had eclipsed the whale on the beach, too. Everything.
She knew the ring from the sea had given her the dream. Somehow, it made her awaken as a dolphin, somewhere near Lando Key, and there her mind shared a common skull with her aquatic twin. The ring made their two lives overlap. Maybe the people who had fashioned the ring had woven the consciousness of dolphins into its metal, with magic or science. But the ring brought the dream, and if she snapped it out of the lava that remained and wore it to bed, it would happen again. She would slip once more into that smooth skin beneath the water.
She laid the ring on the dresser quickly, suddenly fearing it. She wanted the dream too much. It had been too lovely, had given her too much peace. She felt in danger of losing herself in it, of losing Robin and becoming Breee, totally.
Yet her heart ached to know where the ring had come from and why it had been made. And she would have to enter the dream to know why the ring spoke to her. Her finger ached to wear it.
She shut off the light and slithered into bed before the ache could become worse.
Empty days followed, the brief weekend only partially filled with her father. Then there was school, and she hated school. It was something to be endured, like flunking math and being an ugly too-tall girl nobody would speak to. She should be used to it. It had been a month already.
She had learned to crank up the automatic responses that would please her teachers and at the same time hide her own personality. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever find it again.
Alien elbows jostled her books as she gathered them from her locker; smelly shoulders bounced against her in awkward places. Too many strange faces too close surrounded her. Suddenly one of the strange faces bore familiar features. It was Gloria Hart, who shared two classes with her.
"Gloria, wait up!"
But a huge basketball star stepped between her and Gloria, and when she had squeezed around him there was only the anonymous, shifting throng. Robin did not know if Gloria had heard her or not. Maybe she was ignoring her. She had wanted to tell her about the ring, to show her where it lay in the plastic zip-up compartment in her notebook like a forbidden treasure, to awe her with its mystery. But now she was glad Gloria had not seen it. She wouldn't have appreciated it anyway.
Gloria always wore spangled gold earrings and a new ring every day. She would probably think the dolphin ring was plain and undramatic. She would think Robin was stupid to love such a simple thing: such a blocky, heavy, bland ornament. It was better not to make a target of yourself, she decided, and clutched the notebook closer.
Then, another face appeared, this time over the heads of most of the crowd. A guy, pimply, with blond hair, and his eyes stopped scanning the swarm when he saw her.
"Hey!" he hooted.
She didn't know whether to smile or ignore him, so she sort of twitched her mouth and looked down. Where had she seen him?
"Hey, from the beach!" he said again.
She looked up in a clench of fear and, shrugging, waved at him while she let the surge of people carry her past. It was the guy she had met at the stranded whale.
The Social Studies room swallowed her, but she went to her desk feeling bothered. She didn't know whether a girl was supposed to feel good about attention or pretend not to notice. And, she realized with a sinking sensation, she really didn't know how Robin Shaw felt about it. Her only immediate thought was that it distracted her from the ring.
To her astonishment, the class was interesting. Totally unlike the usual boring assortment of manufacturing statistics and river names to memorize, Mrs. Ward announced there would be a term paper assignment to report on oceanic industries. She explained that since the Keys were surrounded by water, she thought the students should learn how much the ocean contributed to human economies. Robin actually felt a tinge of excitement. When Mrs. Ward wrote suggested topics on the board, she felt her pulse skip. Whaling: Its Past and Future. Perhaps doing research on marine mammals would take her mind away from the daily battle with the ring.
Later that week came another surprise. Her assignment in Literature was to learn a contemporary poem by the end of October, and by simple luck she found a poem in one of the whale books she had borrowed from her father. It wasn't long, but it was about someone finding a dead whale on the beach, and it struck a chord in her. She would learn it.
She saw no more of the blond boy. She thought that he was in one of the higher grades that had classes in a different wing of the school. That left her with plenty of time to be tempted by the ring, so the more she pored over her accumulated whale books, the better.
The only problem was what she learned. She had never realized what was being done to the oceans, the slaughter and the waste. It sickened her, like the lone whale she had found, only multiplied by millions. She learned that many nations no longer hunted whales only because they had become scarce. Scientists feared some whales might become extinct.
Then Mrs. Ward had brought in some material to help with the various term papers. One of them was a clipping that she gave Robin. It was from a recent paper, an article telling of a new Russian super whaler factory ship soon to be launched. The article reported it was the biggest ever launched, and that it would be sailing to the North Atlantic next month on its way to the Arctic. The registration would probably be to some obscure country to avoid embarrassment. Robin felt her heart go numb.
That evening, she found her father in his study, which was really just a screened addition to the trailer.
"Learn anything you didn't know about our seagoing cousins?" He smiled as his eyes tried to hide his delight with her curiosity.
She didn't smile. "I learned that we've nearly killed all the whales. And there are bigger ships on the way."
His face turned bitter. "I keep hoping they'll get sick of it, see reason or turn human or something. Just on a practical basis. The bigger whales are so rare it's hard for anyone to find them."
"The book said some species might vanish. Can that happen, Dad?"
"It can. It usually does. We've driven dozens of species into extinction. Maybe the blue whale, too. They're the giants, the biggest creatures that have ever lived on this planet. And they're the most valuable to the whalers. No one knows whether there are enough left for them to survive as a species. Pretty bloody awful, huh?"
She grimaced. "But can't we do something to stop it? Couldn't people like Dr. Costain . . ."
He held up a hand, smiling sadly. "I've tried, sweetheart. I've tried very delicately to get him to use his influence abroad, but he won't hear of it. He says he's a scientist and scientists shouldn't get involved in politics. That's what he considers this butchery - politics. Keeps himself insulated from emotion."
"I wish I could." She shuddered.
Dad smiled again, wistfully. "Oh, my esteemed boss was always dispassionate. Back when the labs were owned by Aquamation, we were running an in-depth experiment to break the communications barrier between us and the dolphins. It was called Project Harmony. Plenty of funds and everybody was optimistic about the research. Then Costain bought the labs. He took one look at all those 'scientists' gibbering in a tank with a bunch of Flippers and cancelled the program. Too exciting, too glamorous. Had us begin a program with nice, safe plankton. That was just before I quit to go to Norfolk. You were just a baby."
"I never knew you did anything like that," she said, startled. "Did the experiment succeed?"
He laughed. "Not really. Oh, we learned some elementary dolphinese, kind of a slowed-down baby talk, enough to excite us, but it was tough. You see, you can saw a dolphin expression into parts and call them words, but they really only make sense in a sentence or thought. Their language flows, it isn't rigid. We were lucky, some of our dolphins learned to recognize individual sound-ideas."
"But how did you speak to them?" she asked.
"Squeeeeeeeek!" he responded, grinning. "We learned to talk like Donald Duck and to whistle through our noses, all sorts of stuff."
"Grief!" said Joan Shaw, standing in the doorway. "Is everybody going goofy? You sound just like a duck having an argument with a frog, like Robin the other night." Her expression sobered, and she said, "Bob, there's a call for you in the other room. Dr. Costain."
He smiled at Robin. "Speak of the devil. I hope he just wants a neighborly chat." Winking, he thumped off to a talk to his boss.
Robin sank into her father's lounge chair. Suddenly the world of the dolphins was with her again. The dry days since her dream journey must have drained her more than she had thought, for her father's words had brought those images hurtling back into consciousness. The ache began again. She wanted to speak to the beautiful animals as her father had tried to do.
With a rush, she decided. When she passed through the living room her father was still on the phone, talking in a low, serious voice. His eyes were grim and distant. She thought no more of it and entered her room.
The ring was cold. As soon as it passed her knuckle, her anticipation gave way to heaviness, a thick feeling in the darkness. Her mind blinked once as she lay down and then sleep took her.
IN THE GREEN DARKNESS again, the water-weightlessness, the swish of the other dolphins' tails as they lazed in the Sleepcircle This time she was stealthier leaving the formation, and she knew exactly where to go.
"Zaak," she whistled, detecting his lone shape in the mist The echo returning could only be him.
"What is it, dreamer?" he said curtly.
"I - I thought we could talk some. I could tell you of the Others, and you could teach me . . ."
"Teach you what all dolphins know? I tire of this game, Breee. Do you think I'm your toy? After last time, you acted as if you couldn't remember what we spoke of."
"I'm sorry," she said, realizing Breee had no memory of the time they shared minds. Then, "If you talk with me, I could tell you about boats."
Zaak sniffed. "You would just mock me like before, and deny you said anything." He eyed her cautiously. "Do you know how boats swim, and why they sometimes have searchbeams?"
"Yes," she said. "I think so. But you'll have to tell me something in return."
Zaak's mood suddenly turned. "Let's go to the cool water then."
In a Hash he was off, and she was following him toward the dark edge of the reef. There, in water six fathoms deep, there was a huge round hole in the bottom that plunged down into blackness, and the water over it remained cool. It was Zaak and Breee's secret place.
Once there, Robin-Breee tried as best she could to explain about boats, interrupted repeatedly by Zaak. She groped for dolphin-ideas to explain things he had never seen. She compared wood to sponges, a motor to a giant heart. Finally, he exhausted her slim knowledge of what the dolphins called "Heating islands," and they remained still in the cool upwellings of the hole.
"I wish that we could go away and meet the Others you talk of, Breee," Zaak finally said.
She was startled. "Oh, Zaak, that's dangerous. Men are not all good."
"It's only a wish. I just get tired of Krora's bossing. What's wrong with talking about the Others? Besides, Cheeka's the lord and should make the rules. All he's interested in is looking for fish and intruders, while we do all the work."
She laughed. "Oh, Zaak, if you had any idea of what work really was."
Before he could reply both dolphins froze, then bolted into the hole. A faint searchbeam had vibrated over them from Circleway.
"Probably Cheeka," Zaak whispered.
Just to be safe they swam to the bottom of the hole where the water was chilly. Silt and algae covered layers of bottles and tires, and there they huddled, not daring to make a sound. The pressure closed tightly around them.
At last, just as she could feel the last of her oxygen giving out, Zaak floated up and looked over the edge of the hole.
"The coast is quiet," he cheeped down to her.
The quick stolen breath at the surface tasted sweet, but to be sure they lingered at the mouth of the hole.
"We are even afraid of our Circlelord now," Zaak protested. "Krora has trained us well. Dolphins should not live in fear. Isn't that why we returned to Awa?"
"One day there will be a new lord," Robin-Breee comforted.
"Not very soon," he complained. "Chork is the only male of age, and he's a coward. It will be a suncycle at least before I'm old enough to challenge Cheeka; even then I may not have the weight."
"Don't brood," she pleaded, rubbing her beak soothingly against his skin. "You have to tell me something now."
Zaak protested, but finally she cajoled him into repaying her. He chose a story about Old Blowhole and told it haltingly, searching for the right words. Zaak wasn't much with matters of imagination.
It was Old Blowhole and the Singing Island, sort of a fairy tale. Old Blowhole was being lured into dangerous waters by some men in a boat disguised as an island. They had what Robin-Breee recognized as a flute on board, and this was the "singing" that fascinated Old Blowhole.
Suddenly Zaak stopped. Then she heard it too. As if something had heard the story and replied; a distant, lilting whistle wove a haunting tune.
They turned to scan the water in the direction the song came from, but there was no need. There, suspended just above the sand, was a large dolphin. Still as stone and pale as a ghost, he sang.
"It is a zhaki," Zaak stuttered. Robin had never heard the term before. It referred to a sorcerer or demon-dolphin supposed to be able to hypnotize dolphins into becoming slavelike zombies.
Zaak remained frozen in the water, and she followed his example. The pale dolphin did not seem dangerous to her; his song was sweet and fascinating in a sad sort of way, but behind it echoed Zaak's fearful heart. She grew concerned that Zaak would bolt and leave her without any protection, for she was filled with curiosity about this zhaki.
She swam forward, though slowly. When she was four or five meters from the intruder, she stopped. Eerily, at that moment the song ended.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Breeeeeee," squeaked Zaak. "Be careful."
Almost without moving, the new dolphin began swimming in a wide circle around her. He still did not frighten her. He was old, though obviously powerful. There were various ancient scars marking his faded skin. A neat notch was gone from his dorsal fin.
"I am the storyteller," he said in a rich tone, calmly. "I am a troubadour, a wanderer, a consort of whales. My name is Drummer. Forgive me, but I couldn't help overhearing your friend's story, and since I knew the tune, I couldn't help joining in, either."
"It was very pretty," she said. "My name is Breee. This is Zaak."
Zaak moved forward a bit, still braced to flee. But the stranger ignored him and sent a razor-thin search-beam through Robin-Breee.
"Excuse me for being so forward, my dear, but you have a very interesting echo," he said. "Might you be a victim of Nightsee?"
"How did you know?" She gulped.
"There are ways to hear anything that is," Drummer said slyly. His black eyes twinkled.
Zaak moved very close to the newcomer and asked, "Are you the Drummer, the singer?"
"I am Drummer," he said without turning. "Have you had any recent problems with your affliction, Breee?"
"About half a mooncycle ago," she replied as accurately as she could. Her curiosity began to itch.
"Hmmm, we must talk about this later."
The big dolphin spun almost without stirring the water to face Zaak. He had done it in the time it takes a bubble to pop, and Zaak gasped and fell back.
"Where can some food be found around here, sport?" Drummer said. "Any mackerels or bonita about? I've been traveling for a long time, and I haven't eaten to speak of since daybreak."
"Plenty of mullets around," Zaak responded hospitably. "We've just been feeding on a school. There might be some pockets of them left over toward our Circle."
"Then lead on!" Drummer commanded.
Zaak proudly led his guest back, with Robin-Breee taking the rear, still wondering a thousand things. They passed a few cavorting youngsters who immediately stopped their play to echo the stranger out and finally follow in a small, curious cloud.
There were a few dozen mullet remaining, swimming where the reef grew shallow, left over from the evening feeding. But before Zaak could explain whose Circle theirs was or call for Cheeka, Drummer bounded into the fish.
His feeding was amazing to watch. Before the mullets had been alarmed, Drummer had eaten three or the biggest. When they fled, he spun in a tight circle around them and ate the two frontrunners when they doubled back.
"Ha! Come back," Drummer said to a very fat mullet and dashed after it. He got it.
Just then Robin-Breee felt the water rushing and turned to see the other young dolphins making way for someone. It was Cheeka, and his movements were sharp and icy.
He stopped stone-still as Drummer snapped up another two fish. Robin-Breee had the distinct impression that Drummer knew exactly where Cheeka was, though he acted unconcerned.
"Krraaaaaaaaak!" Cheeka challenged. "I am Cheeka, lord of this Circle. You are eating my fish."
Drummer chuckled. He stopped, allowing the fish to escape. "You speak like a man," he said.
Without a blink Cheeka dove for the intruder. Drummer dodged, but did not avoid a slashing swipe from Cheeka's tail. When Cheeka turned, though, his left flipper trailed a taint of red where Drummer's teeth had raked him.
The Circlelord's eyes blazed. "Krraaaaaaaak! Pay respect due me and you may eat my fish!"
Drummer snorted. "The fish are Awa's, the stomach is mine. I really don't see how you enter into it. You are not a man, to own things that swim freely."
Before the irreverent words were finished, Cheeka again threw himself at Drummer. This time the intruder closed with him. Using their teeth, each found a hold on the other, and they tumbled flipper and tail. The water roiled, and gouts of sand went up.
The Circle gathered; Krora first among them swished her tail restlessly. She could not know if her mate was punishing Drummer or had been challenged for the leadership of the Circle. If Cheeka lost, the Circle (and Krora) would be Drummer's for the asking.
They broke their holds and backed away. Red grooves marked them both; one of Cheeka's eyes was nearly closed.
"This should not be," Drummer said loudly. "Dolphins are all children of a single mother. I am sorry if I offended your sense of lordship . . ."
"Sorry isn't good enough," Cheeka croaked.
They lunged forward again, but this time Drummer got in the first blow. He struck Cheeka on the melon of his forehead with his strong lower jaw before Cheeka could grapple with him.
The Circle watched in total silence, too much astounded to cheer. It had been a long time since anyone had fought seriously with Cheeka.
Groans and snaps echoed in the swirling eddy. Now Drummer wore a gash across his snout to match Cheeka's swollen eye. They rolled, still in their clinch, to the surface to breathe, then back again. They wrestled, silently now. The water tasted like blood; soon the sharks would be arriving to check things out.
Then, just when Robin-Breee had decided the battle could go on for another hour, they broke their grips and backed off. Each eyed the other with caution and grudging respect.
"There is a way," Cheeka gasped, "that we can end this without a bloody finish."
"Continue," Drummer nodded.
"I'll strike a bargain with you. You may eat within my Circle unmolested, provided you tell us what news you may have heard. We have had no travelers by recently, but strange rumors are afloat."
"But that is my vocation," chittered Drummer, suddenly relaxing. "Why didn't you ask me to start with? I thought everyone knew, Drummer sings for his supper. I have just come from the Big Island and will be happy to share with you all I have heard."
Cheeka relaxed. "Then you may feed."
Drummer snorted loudly into the surface air. "I already have, lord."
The Circle relaxed, glad not to have witnessed worse. The only exception was Krora, who rigidly refused to fuss over Cheeka's wounds the way the other wives were doing; she regarded him coldly and swam off by herself. It was plain that Cheeka considered coming out of the contest with his life victory enough, even if his vain first wife didn't.
The Circle hushed as Drummer prepared to speak. Robin-Breee and Zaak exchanged excited glances, but neither could comment privately in such tight quarters. Even Cheeka's wives stopped their preening and first aid. Following the pattern of dolphins since time began, they crowded around Drummer in a circle to listen. He politely waited for all to settle, the growling of his stomach digesting fish the only sound.
"The water is clearer warmways," he began. "And the air is sweet. Off the Big Island there is never a long wait between meals, for the fish have lots of little creatures to eat. I could tell you all of the common type news that you are used to hearing. Thumper's Circle lost six to the tuna fleet last mooncycle, Clapta was defeated and driven off and now his Circle is Babbin's. But there is something new in Awa's Circle, a new song has been heard."
Cheeka's people moved forward a fraction.
"A promise has been remembered," Drummer said in a lilting singsong cackle. "Songs which were of old will be sung again. Warmways there are shoals and shallows, but there is a place also where the floor of the ocean drops away, and the swim down is an eternal one. The whales that Men call humpbacks and we call Singers, the whales Awa has entrusted with the keeping of our history and beliefs, they frequent the Bottomless Water, as it is called. It is like a great womb to them;
they sing in it, and it answers after a time. It was here that this new song was heard. For, this time when they sang into the chasm, different words returned."
"And what was the name of this new song?" Keet asked softly from among the crowd.
"They call it the Turning."
"And what does it mean, this new thing?" Cheeka snorted.
"It means, O Circlelord, that the circle of time has ended, and that we must face now what our first father, Old Blowhole, avoided. Awa's promise of protection is over."
Shock traveled through the dolphins in an audible wave.
"She would not do that," said Keet again. "She would not break her promise."
"No, grandmother," Drummer answered. "But she put the limit of time upon that promise. There is nothing more she can do. Our distant cousins of the Other Circle are coming in greater and greater numbers into her waters. More of their floating islands disturb our sleep every suncycle. More of their filth that the land cannot contain is being poured into Awa. Who here remembers the stories of the old days, when Awa was ours and she was filled with us, when the waters teemed with so many Returned that Old Blowhole had to give Hunger to the Darkers to thin our ranks? No more. The blue whale is gone, the greatest of the Returned. When have you heard news of his like in these waters? Where have the Singers gone, who used to fill Awa with song? The Others have killed them. We, the dolphins, are only the last of the Returned to feel Man's sting. What Old Blowhole avoided, we now have to face. We have to turn and recognize what Man is doing to us."
There was a sizzling sound from behind. Krora had returned, Drummer's forbidden words of the Others like salt in her wounded pride.
"What Humans are doing to us," she said icily, shrilly, "is nothing compared with what they will do if we interfere with them."
She came like stormclouds rolling and settled in beside Cheeka, nudging one of the other wives aside. A gap formed between these two and Drummer. If Drummer had come to this Circle innocently, he now knew that in talking of Humans he had broken strong taboos.
"The Returned have to face what is happening to them this time," he said firmly, though slowly. "We have no mother left to go back to now. I bear you all this word from Greyback the old Singer, famous throughout the sea: Everyone must think of the things now spoken and consider how we can turn and face Humans."
"Whales," Krora spat. "He tells us of whales and songs. We are safe because we are small."
Cheeka nudged her suddenly into silence and said, "The less we have to do with the Others the better. Krora has always been right about this. Remember what the Singers say: Humans grew strong once, long ago, even stronger than they arc today. But they forgot the Song. They sing about the Humans' fiery stones and the cities of old that now lie at the bottom of the sea. The Humans' power is greater than ours. We have no hands."
"No hands," Drummer replied strongly, "but we have not forgotten the Song. You are right, Cheeka, to remember what Humans have forgotten. Yet even now Humans are rediscovering their lost, sunken cities. We must turn and stop pretending to be just stupid fish, or perhaps they will find the fiery stones again and destroy the entire world this time."
"Eeeeeeeeep!" Robin-Breee suddenly erupted, and all the dolphin ears turned to her with surprise. Something had clicked in her mind, something to do with sunken cities and fiery stones and submarines.
"It is true," she heard herself saying. "And Humans are not gods or devils. You must turn and face them and no longer hide in Awa."
"Silence!" shrieked Krora. Robin-Breee could feel her icy attention and knew she would pay dearly for her testimony.
"Enough of it all!" Cheeka cried. "You have eaten and told us what you came to tell us. Be off."
"Too brief," Drummer protested. "I would like to stay the rest of the night. I would especially like to talk with Breee . . ."
"Enough!" Cheeka growled.
And scarcely before the growl had echoed away it seemed Drummer had faded into the moonbeams that lanced occasionally through the water. The crowd was also fading, and the silent tone of it was evidence that Drummer's words - and hers - had been heard.
"Why did you do that?" Zaak hissed. "It was foolish!"
But before she could answer, the crowd was parted by Cheeka's blasting call. "Brreeeeeeeee!"
"I answer, lord." She stuttered the formal reply.
Cheeka hung in the water with Krora beside him and a little behind. She knew he would have to enforce Krora's will to keep from challenging her himself. She wished, though not for the last time, that she could now awaken, safe in her bed, as Robin.
But before anything could happen, all became aware of a thin, slow singing all around them. Cheeka and Krora glanced nervously about, sending search-beams into the gloom. A large echo came back for all to hear. Drummer lingered just beyond the edge of sight and sang the same music they had heard earlier. Then the singing stopped.
"Breeeeeeeeeee," he called softly in the darkness.
"Don't answer," Krora hissed.
The musical voice continued, "I call to you from beyond time, from the sunken cities of Humans. You, whose eyes have seen two worlds, I call you out. Join me."
A strange strangling noise gurgled in Krora's throat. "Kill him, Cheeka," she growled.
But Cheeka had had enough of battle. "No," he said, "it is unnecessary as long as Breee stays here."
But she felt Drummer's call deeply, hynotically. Perhaps he was a zhaki as Zaak had feared. Yet the quest for the answer to the source of Robin's dolphin ring burned within her anew.
"Go away, wanderer," Cheeka cried to the darkness, "before I kill you!"
Drummer ignored him. "I call you out, Breee. I call to you who have heard the voices of Humans and of dolphins."
"Chreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek," Cheeka shrieked.
"I call you from this Circle to the fuller Circle of all living things. Answer me. Answer with speed."
She decided. She brought her tail down across Krora's brow and dashed around the Circlelord. Krora's squawk confused Cheeka enough for Robin-Breee to speed out of sight before he plunged after.
"I'm coming," she called to the darkness.
She could feel Cheeka's powerful searchbeam rake over her and could tell by its sound that he was gaining on her fast. She kicked forward frantically. The reef sped by beneath her until it was only a creamy blur. Then she detected the agitated water behind her that was his nose breaking into her wake, centimeters away. She knew that he would catch her.
It was then that she felt another dolphin streak up behind her; someone cried out in a shocked, frustrated voice. She raced away from the turbulence that followed and in a moment had nearly run into Drummer, who hung waiting.
He turned to defend her against the raging Circle-lord, but only a thin, youthful shape rocketed toward them.
"Zaak!" she cried in surprise.
"Hurry!" he choked out, barely slowing. "He's right behind! I could only slow him!"
The three of them now rushed away, with Cheeka's angry searchbeam clawing after them. Lightning pains lanced through Robin-Breee's flank, and still they pushed on, still Cheeka followed. The reef ended and they heard echoes rebound from sand a dozen fathoms deeper. The water grew dark. No one spoke. The only sounds were their rhythmic inhalations at the surface and the grinding of Cheeka's searchbeam behind.
Then something rang.
AN ETERNITY later Robin felt her hand (such a strange appendage!) contact the frantically ringing alarm clock, knock it to the floor.
It made her want to sleep forever.
Robin congratulated herself on her powers of concentration. She had managed to get through four periods of school without being reprimanded for inattention once. And this, despite her yearning to know what was happening to her other body darting through the waves somewhere in the coastal waters.
But the tension was beginning to wear on her. The bell rang just as she was beginning the final problem on her geometry test and she had to turn it in unfinished. Her ring finger had been throbbing for the last two hours with a cold compulsion. She had to fight a rising drowsiness that came from the bottom of the sea, from that other life that seemed so much freer.
She approached Mrs. Inge before the final bell began study hall.
"Yes?" The bespectacled woman looked up from her gradebook.
"I-I don't feel very well," Robin said, rubbing her head. "May I go lie down in the girl's lounge?"
"Surely," Mrs. Inge agreed.
Robin was careful to lug her books through the right doorway to appear to head to the girl's room, but when she was out of sight, she looped back and made her way through the stage door. It was dark inside, and she waited for her eyes to adjust so that she wouldn't stumble over any props or cables. The heavy curtains over the front of the stage kept out all but a sliver of light and blunted the sounds of the students filling the auditorium for study hall. No one would disturb her here. There were no plays in rehearsal.
She gratefully sank onto the sofa she found there even though there were several costumes draped over it. Her hands soundlessly eased her books to the floor. The dolphin ring grew so heavy she had to pull the hand up like an anchor with the other one and fold it over her chest. Her eyes closed into a darkness blacker than the derelict stage.
AGAIN THE GREEN, only now lit up like stained glass everywhere. Rain filled the water world with a laughing sound. She spun wildly to see where she was, and Zaak and Drummer jumped away from her in alarm.
"Ah," Drummer said, "it is upon her again."
"In the daytime?" Zaak chirped, peeking around his older companion.
"I caught a moment to sleep . . ." she began joyfully, then realized neither of them knew about Robin.
"It happens sometimes," Drummer commented. "But we had better keep up our speed. Cheeka may still be searching."
"But where are we?" she said as she caught up with the other two. "Where are we going?"
Drummer made the dolphin equivalent of a sigh, dozens of small bubbles crackling around his head. "Will I have to explain everything twice?"
But Zaak took up the explanation with glee. He enjoyed Breee more in these moments when the strange-ness was upon her. Though he was a bit afraid of her then, it was an exciting fear.
"We outran Cheeka, Breee," he chattered. "I left him with a bruise he'll not soon forget . . ."
"Do not brag," Drummer grumbled. "He left me with a few I will not soon forget, and he would have killed you, pup."
"Still, we outran him. We're free, Breee. We can talk about the Others as much as we want to, even chase boats now. There's no Krora to watch over us."
Robin-Breee searched the surrounding water nervously. "And no Circle to protect us, either," she said.
"We can take care of ourselves," Zaak hooted.
"But where are we going? And why did Drummer call me out of the Circle like that?"
"He's taking us to meet a whale! A great wise one that lives up coldways. A Singer - humpback, Humans call them. And this one knows all the songs that were ever sung; he was one of the ones who heard the new song in the Bottomless Water. He's called . . . Grey-fin, or Greybreath . . ."
"Greyback," Drummer corrected.
"That's it," Zaak continued. "Anyway, Drummer wants you to talk with this Greyback about what you've heard, about the Others, and this Turning. He says you really know more about it than he does."
"What?" she asked, startled. "What do you mean?"
Drummer pushed forward at his steady pace, not even turning to speak. "I was sent listening for you," he said. "Greyback sent me into the Circles off this coast to listen for a young dolphin with Nightsee who had been having particularly strong spells. I thought he was just exercising his craziness. But he told me what to listen for, and you are surely the one. The old island knew what he was talking about, but I will never know how. Singers have ways of knowing and hearing that us smaller people cannot understand. But I just might not have started on this journey if I had known Cheeka was going to be a part of it. I am too old for fighting. I hope that is the last of it."
Questions bubbled out of Robin-Breee. What did Greyback want with her? What exactly was this Turning that everyone was talking about, and how could she help? And what did he know about the sunken cities? She babbled so fast she choked on rain the next time she breathed.
But Drummer only laughed and told her to save the questions for Greyback; he knew nothing except that he was repaying an old debt to the whale by finding her, and Returned always paid their debts. Greyback wanted her, and he was coldway a bit. Not far. Drummer would say nothing else.
They had traveled only a few minutes when they detected a great deal of noise below them and at some distance. It was like a crowd of groaning people.
Drummer scanned in that direction and said, "Sea trout."
They gulped large breaths and dove. In no time the sea grew darker and clouds of tiny sea life colored it blue. Microscopic animals crackled and hissed around them. Drummer had the two younger dolphins split up and encircle the school of fish. They waited on each side of the calmly feeding sea trout for his signal. He sped directly into the center, chirping and gobbling, and the panicked fish split into two groups. Each headed into a hungry dolphin, then rebounded in terror to where Drummer waited for his second course.
They ate until Robin-Breee thought she would start croaking like a sea trout. Then they lay quietly at the surface digesting. Because the sea trout is a croaker and there had been so many of them, the sound of the boat had gone unnoticed. But when the rain stopped its steady hiss, they could clearly distinguish its mechanical drone.
Zaak stuck his head out of the water, then splashed loudly. "Look!" he shouted into the air. "Men!"
Robin-Breee bobbed her tail down and also looked out of the water, craning her neck. There was a big white boat headed toward them. Several people crowded its railing, and they appeared to be scanning the water.
"Wheeeeeeeeeee," Zaak whistled, diving back under. "Let's go play in the waves."
Before anyone could reply he was off, a swirl of water marking where he had been.
"Zaaaaaak!" Drummer called. "Don't! There might be harm!"
"They wouldn't hurt him, would they?" Robin-Breee asked.
"Anything can happen with Humans." Drummer scowled. "I know them too well." Without explaining, he, too, was off. Robin-Breee pushed forward and tried to catch up with them, but she was tired. They had been swimming steadily for a long time, and she was full of fish.
The boat's drone became a whine, then a roar. Fish flashed past her in streaks of fear. The vessel turned before Robin-Breee could reach its wake, but she could hear Zaak's excited whooping as he surfed its bow wave, and Drummer's angry calling. Her heart stirred to hear above them the Hat noises of the men's voices echoing in air.
She ventured a look above the water and immediately wished she hadn't. Zaak could not read the blue lettering on the bow of the ship, or understand the import of the steel and rope structure hanging over its side, but she could. And it filled her suddenly with terror. COSTAIN LABS, it read, and the machine hanging over its side ended in a sling. Though the dolphin speech experiment had been cancelled, there were still programs testing dolphin intelligence. She thought it had to do with training dolphins to do things for the Navy.
She kicked forward, planting all her energy in her tail, in the muscles bunched powerfully around its base. She had to catch up with Zaak and warn him.
"Zaaaaaaak! They mean to take you away! Keep away from the boat!"
But she knew he wouldn't listen. After years of Krora's suppression, his curiosity must be raging to meet his cousins.
She could only stay even with the foaming wake of the ship; but as she dove through the waves, she could see the sling being carefully lowered. Then, like a lance through her heart, she heard Zaak's sharp distress call, the falling and rising cry that alerts all dolphins to danger. The ship's engines quieted, slowing.
The men were already fitting the rubber sling around Zaak when she caught up. A noose held his thrashing tail tightly, and he was squealing in panic even though she could hear Drummer trying to calm him.
"Listen!" the older dolphin was saying. "If you can keep your head, we can get you loose from the thing. Stop jumping!"
But it was no use. Robin-Breee swam beside Zaak and rubbed him with her flipper to calm him. Drummer snapped at the noose mechanism methodically. When the rubber sling dropped into the waves, he chattered curses at the men and tried to butt them.
"Careful of the big one," a man said. "He's mad."
"Listen to him!" said another.
"Probably thinks we're gonna eat his friend," shouted the first.
The sling slipped under Zaak's chin.
"They've caught meeeeeeeeee!" he screamed, kicking uselessly.
"Not yet," Drummer growled.
Robin-Breee was knocked aside by the force of Drummer's jump, and the wash of the boat against the sling spun her still farther.
"Look out!" one of the men yelled. "The big one's jumped in with the adolescent!"
"He's trying to tear the sling loose with the weight," the other man answered.
Robin-Breee swam helplessly beside the buckling sling.
"To hell with it," someone said in disgust. "We'll haul both of them up."
"Noooooo," she shrilled. "Noooooooo. Zaaaaaaak! Drummer!"
Then the rubber sling was no longer in the water but hanging above her, jerking farther up with each moment.
"Drummeeeeer!" she screamed, her head out of water.
"I am caught, Breee," the troubadour's voice called calmly. "I do not have any room to jump. They have us both."
"Don't leave me alone," she pleaded. "Tell them to take me, too."
"Listen!" Drummer shouted. The sling wobbled closer to the men's hands. "Keep going coldways. Tonight, head for the Big Dipper and you will be all right. You will see Greyback before long. The old fool is not far, I think."
"Noooooooo," she begged.
"You will be all right," Drummer called just as the men swung him in over the side. "Don't worry about me. I will get loose when they give me a chance. Good luck, Breeeeeeee."
Then he was gone. Robin-Breee pushed away from the white ship, not wholly sure why the men wanted the dolphins. Now she was not too eager to go with her friends. She could no longer see the sling. The men bent and busied themselves with it on the deck.
She paced the ship for a while, searching her dolphin-brain to make it speak English words; but it was no use. All she could make were the familiar quacks and squawks of the dolphin. But the feeling of frustration was the same in both worlds.
She turned away and slowed. The white lab ship swung away in a wide, slow curve. It headed back for the labs on the north shore of Lando Key, and she let it go. Her impulse was to follow it, to swim right into the harbor and go into the tank with her friends. But Drummer's words hung before her like a barrier. They would not let her go back. She had believed he knew what he was talking about when he led her out of Cheeka's Circle. She had to believe him now.
Swimming into the open sea, she found herself in deeper waters than she had ever been in before. A messenger echo returned with a depth of twenty fathoms. Somewhere in the greenness she had a mission. A humpback whale across the ocean had heard of her and sent Drummer to find her. Perhaps he could give her answers that Drummer had not.
She gingerly pushed off toward the north, cold-ways. Being a dolphin was becoming nearly as difficult as being a human.
She spun. A loud noise like a bell . . .
ROBIN FOUGHT the rising consciousness, but the bell that began the last period of the day was loud. She awakened in the darkness of the abandoned stage and struggled to sit. The transition to a human state was horrendous. She had to train her eyes to see what her ears had just been telling her before she could pick up her books and try to find the door.
Her rather looked grimly at the slip of paper. "Then where were you during fifth period?" he said.
Robin continued looking at her feet. "I told you, I lay down for a while in the lounge and then I went outside for some air. When I came back, the last bell had already rung."
"How do you feel now?"
"Fine. A little sleepy."
Robert Shaw scribbled his name across the bottom of the note from Mrs. Inge. "I don't want this sort of thing to happen again, is that understood?" His darting eyes fixed her.
"Yes, sir."
"Give this to your teacher. There's something else I want to say to you, Robin, before you go to your room. Your mother and I are worried about you. Do you realize that you went to bed at seven thirty last night? Are you sure you feel all right? You'd better take some vitamins."
"I feel fine dad, honest," she said. "I like sleeping." "Still, if you keep it up, I'm going to have you checked. It isn't healthy." He stared hard at her until her gaze met his, then he put a hand on her shoulder.
"Dad," she said, "can I ask you a question?"
"Of course."
"What do they do with captured dolphins at the laboratory?"
He sighed and shook his head. "Sometimes I don't think you hear anything I say.
"They do different things with them, Rob. They run tests and weed out the unsuitable ones and relocate them. The others lead a happy life away from predators, well fed, working with scientists on a variety of experiments. We don't do anything bad to them."
She nodded. "Thanks. And, Dad, thanks for caring. But I feel fine."
He smiled wearily.
Back in her bedroom, her fingers Hashed over the last page of her literature homework. That done, she carefully turned her radio up until she was sure the noise level would carry through her door. Then, leaving her light on, she turned her face to the wall and fell deeply asleep.
SHE FOUND HERSELF swimming northward, lifted and dropped by large glassy swells on an endless ocean. No land was in sight. The vast darkness below sent a tingle down her spine. An echo brought her back the depth at sixty fathoms.
The Big Dipper had just risen. She dutifully pointed toward it and swam. There was little noise, just the rolling of the sea and the crackle of a few distant shrimp. Faint starlight was the only glow beneath the waves.
She was frightened. Alone in such vastness, in the emptiness of Awa. And this water was comparatively shallow. What would greet her when she crossed the abyss where the continental shelf dropped away? Now that her eyes were used to the faint light, she could see various wraithlike flickers below. Fish, or squid, carrying their own light, searching for food. Everything in this huge water was searching for food. She pushed forward uneasily.
Nearly an hour of swimming brought little comfort, just more endless waves and passing boats. Then, just as she began to hope for sleep, an echo startled her. She stopped in the water and listened.
Waves were splashing against something. Something stirred the water ahead of her. A freak current? It pushed her sideways. Next there was a sound from the air, echoing flat across the waves, so fast that she nearly missed it. It was a low, large gasp, a bellowslike rushing of wind. A steam-kettle breath.
She froze.
There was something large, near. She dared not search with her sonar; it might alert whatever waited. Without thinking once of courage, she nudged forward with her eyes opened to their limit. Because of the low light, the rim of visibility was only two or three dolphin-lengths away. She swam right up to the wrinkled surface of the thing without knowing it. It was dark and gray, like the water.
Now her heart began its drumbeat, echoing off the curved side of the thing. But it appeared to be a piece of a boat, for there were barnacles and seaweed growing on its knobby surface . . .
An eye opened. It looked at her nose, barely a meter from it.
"WHY, HULLO," growled a deep voice. "DIDN'T HEAR YOU COME UP."
She spun like a demon and splashed away, until a mountainous laughter slowed her. The thing was not chasing.
"HAAAAAAAA, AHAAAAAAAAAAAAA, AHAAAAAAAAAA."
She searched the thing with her sonar and found that it was big, incredibly big. It was a dozen of her in length, like a thick serpent with long tapering wings hanging beneath it and a pointed snout. But a finer search revealed horizontal flukes and warm blood coursing. It was Returned. She braced herself against fear as she felt it wave its great flippers and roll toward her. "HULLLOOOOOO," it called. "DID I SURPRISE YOU? DON'T BE AFRAID."
"W-what are you?"
"AAAAAAAHH, NEVER SEEN A WHALE BEFORE, EH? WELL, WE'RE RARE ENOUGH THESE DAYS, I DARE SAY. I AM A SINGER, CALLED HUMPBACK BY HUMANS. EXCUSE ME, HOW RUDE OF ME - MY NAME, THAT IS ... I AM CALLED OLD WIND. VERY CHARMED. I WAS JUST CATCHING A NAP BEFORE CONTINUING MY TRIP. I'M AFRAID YOU SURPRISED ME AS MUCH AS I DID YOU."
His voice was deep and throaty, an organlike vibration around her, and it had a strange inflection, an accent. It struck her that dolphin talk sounded like slang beside this.
"Oh," she said, "my name is Breee." "VERY CHARMED, MADAM." Old Wind exhaled pointedly. "IF IT is NOT TOO FORWARD OF ME TO ASK, IS THE REST OF YOUR CIRCLE NEARBY?"
"No. I'm alone. I - I have an appointment to keep coldways. I'm sorry I was afraid of you, but I've never seen a whale up close."
"QUITE UNDERSTANDABLE. ESPECIALLY WITH MY FACE. AHAAAAAAA."
"You don't look anything like the pictures I've seen . . ." she stopped herself.
"EEHHHHHH? PICTURES, YOU SAY? WHAT IS A PICTURE? BUT THERE I AM BEING INQUISITIVE AGAIN. FORGIVE ME."
She distinctly felt the humpback's eye examining her, and he paused as though reading the echoes of his speech returning from her laden with information.
"Have you ever heard of a whale named Greyback?" She changed the subject hurriedly. "He's a Singer, too."
"WHA? GREYBACK, YOU SAY? YES, OF COURSE I KNOW HIM. SEEMS AS THOUGH EVERYONE DOWN HERE KNOWS HIM. ARE YOU GOING TO THE COUNCIL, THEN?"
"What council?"
"OH, MY WORD. I THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW ABOUT IT. THERE'S TO BE A GREAT COUNCIL IN THE WHITE SHALLOWS. SUCH A COUNCIL AS AWA HAS NOT HEARD SINCE OLD BLOWHOLE RETURNED TO HER. THE SEA IS ALIVE WITH THE TALK OF IT. WE ARE TO DISCUSS WHAT TO DO ABOUT OTHERS. I SAY - I AM ATTENDING, AND SINCE I KNOW THIS GREYBACK WILL BE THERE, WELL, WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCOMPANY ME?"
"Could I?" she chittered. The thought filled her with security. She was beginning to like Old Wind's funny speech. He would be plenty of company, and she would be able to learn so much!
They pointed toward the dipper and began their journey together. She even found it less tiring, for when Old Wind wagged his flukes she was nearly carried along in the wash. It was exhilarating to travel with a mountain as friend. He was very proper and asked few questions, but Robin-Breee could tell he was curious about her. It was not proper for a young female dolphin to be traveling the open sea alone. In fact, it was unheard of.
"CHEEKA, EH? NO, HAVEN'T HEARD OF THE CHAP. BUT THEN, THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF CIRCLES IN THESE SHALLOWS, THOUSANDS OF CIRCLELORDS. SAY YOU JUST RAN AWAY, THEN? AHEM."
"Well, I had help" she chatted. "There was a very brave dolphin named Drummer. He's the one who told us of the Turning. I could never have gotten away from Cheeka without his help."
"DRUMMER, EH? I KNOW THE SCOUNDREL. EVERYONE KNOWS HIM. WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?"
She told him.
Old Wind didn't bat an eye. "HUMANS," was all he said.
Old Wind ate as they swam, she discovered. His jaws were very strange: when he opened them, she could see hundreds of bristles hanging down from the upper jaw, like a toothbrush, she thought. When he grinned and swam forward, the water passed through this seine and out of the sides. But a sort of green scum accumulated on the outside of the brush, and this he periodically gulped down. She asked, and found that he was straining out plankton and krill, tiny plants and shrimplike animals that she couldn't even see. It was his food.
"YEEESSSSSSS," he said slowly. "AND NOT VERY RICH AROUND THESE PARTS."
Robin-Breee's stomach grumbled. It had been a long time since her feast with Zaak and Drummer.
"HUNGRY, EH? I CAN FIX THAT. CAN YOU HEAR THAT LITTLE CROWD OF FISHES DOWN THERE ABOUT TWENTY FATHOMS?"
"Sure, but it's too far down. They could hear me coming and go deeper. I can't hold my breath as long as you can."
"HAAAAA, AHAAAAAAAA. YOU JUST POSITION YOURSELF DIRECTLY OVER THEM AT THE SURFACE AND WAIT. OLD WIND WILL FETCH YOU UP SOME SUPPER, MY STRANGELY NAIVE FRIEND."
With no warning Old Wind sounded, or dove, sucking in a hurricane of breath and jacknifing his great length into the depths. Robin-Breee saw at once why people called him humpback, for his back rose and rose like a mountain before his wide tail flipped up and then slipped below. A whirlpool gurgled after him.
Astonished, she almost forgot to swim over the small shoal of fish. She listened downward. The whale's wake was soundless, but she scanned after him to watch. His descent was like a big arrow shooting deep underneath the fish. Then, curiously, bubbles exploded upwards. The crackling frightened the fish, and they swam up and away, but found that the bubbles grew in volume and followed them. They dashed ahead, but soon new bubbles foamed in front of them. Like a net of sound, the circle of bubbles herded them together; they swam upwards in a frightened bunch. Before she knew it, the fish wriggled right into her, and the hoop of foam boiled the surface, keeping them tight. She ate happily.
"QUITE EFFECTIVE, DON'T YOU THINK?" Old Wind commented when he surfaced. "I JUST SWIM UPWARDS IN A CIRCLE BENEATH THEM, EXHALING AS I GO. THE BUBBLES GO IN A SPIRAL. THE FISH FLEE."
Robin-Breee burped in reply.
She learned other things from the whale that long night, her curiosity overcoming her caution. She picked whale lice, small crablike parasites, from his back in exchange for answers to her careful questions.
Singers, she was told, were the historians of the whale world. All that whales had ever experienced or thought or wondered was remembered in their songs. And they, with their deep voices, could call to each other across vast stretches of ocean, making them an effective communication system. At least, before motorized boats had deafened the ocean.
All the Returned - seals, dolphins, and whales- were descended from Old Blowhole and shared the same philosophy. Dishonesty was unknown, for it is impossible to lie when everyone can hear your guilty heart quicken. Everything had its place in the cycles of Song and Silence (for Old Wind did not speak of Good and Evil). Even the Darkers, or killer whales, who sometimes ate dolphins and whales, had a place in the scheme.
She asked more and more questions until Old Wind was entirely free from whale lice. Then she realized that perhaps a real dolphin would know something about the things she asked. So she squelched herself, still unsure about revealing her secret.
They traveled in silence for a while, their only company a school of flying fishes, which made applauding noises as they flashed in and out of waves, and several huge, lethargic groupers, which swam along with them for an hour or two. When a boat came near, Old Wind insisted on sounding. Robin-Breee went with him, for he did not dive deep. It was a pleasure to feel Awa's weight pressing around her.
At last the ocean was silent again, except for the constant drone of distant boats. Old Wind stopped swimming and lay as still as an island. She was just about to ask him why when she was startled by an enormous sound. It began as a huge groan and ended as a shrill trumpeting.
Old Wind sang.
It was a song about a boat, she found to her awe. A burning boat of some kind. The song was made of groans and growls and trumpetings. Long and low, high and thin, the words played with each other in a strange and beautiful pattern. Echoes from the bottom formed a pale chorus.
The boat burned. The huge vibrating words washed around and through Robin-Breee, and she became part of them, caught up.
Gradually, as if in answer to the whale, the sea was growing lighter. An unearthly glow began in the east and spread until the green was warmed with a rosy light. Then she understood. The sun was rising, shining through the sea before it lifted into the air. The sun was the fiery boat, sailing the endless sea of the blue sky. Old Wind was singing a sunrise song. He was calling to it in a climbing scale of rhyming moans. He summoned it into the sky with whistles. He praised the sun, brother of the sea.
An awe took Robin-Breee. Suddenly, she believed the sun was listening and responding to the call with its climb. She believed the sun would not come unless summoned by this primeval song. For a moment she felt if Humans were allowed to destroy the whale, the sun would forget to come, for it would no longer hear this most beautiful song.
The song ended. The sea was full of light.
Robin knew there was something wrong when she came home from school. The air was only mildly cool, a mere hint of the winter that was beginning up north, but her father stood in the corner of their lot where the wooden fence was falling apart, and he had his woolen coat over his arm. He stood looking over the dunes as if to catch a glimpse of the sea.
She did not approach him, he looked so pensive and brooding. Instead she went on into the trailer and plopped her books down. She got a soft drink from the refrigerator and was surprised to see Mom already setting the table.
"What are you doing?" she asked as she popped the can open.
"Oh, hi, Robin. I didn't see you." Her mother brushed a strand of blond hair away from her face. She sighed. "We're eating early."
"Why?"
"Your father's going to sea again. Just got the word officially today." She spoke drily, masking her emotion.
Oh, no." Robin groaned. "He's only been back for a couple of weeks."
She was genuinely disappointed; usually he got a month or two off after long expeditions. But beneath her disappointment was bitter frustration. Now he would not be able to take her to the lab. She had planned to ask him tonight. She would now be unable to look for Zaak and Drummer.
"But why?" she whined. "Why so soon?"
Her mother stared down at the dishes. "New find, up in the North Atlantic. Very important. Very damned important, I guess."
Robin's heart continued to sink. She didn't want to see her mother dry up again under months of loneliness. It was hard enough to make up the loss to her in those spare months when she, Robin, was her normal self; it was going to be nearly impossible while leading her nightly adventure.
She closed the trailer door softly and approached her father. He didn't seem to hear. "Dad?"
He turned. A strained smile wrinkled his features and he put his arm around her. "How was school, sport?"
"It was okay." She shrugged. It took a long pause to gather the strength to say, "I heard you're going back to sea."
He just nodded.
"Must be important."
"It is. Very. Another site has been uncovered like the one in the Azores, where your ring came from. It's in a place no one thought of looking, on this side of the Atlantic near Newfoundland. Called the Flemish Cap."
"Sounds cold."
He smiled and kicked at a rock. "I'll dress warmly."
"I'm sorry you're going," she said quietly. "I haven't got enough of you yet."
He laughed. "You just haven't got enough answers to your dolphin questions."
She frowned playfully. "Are you going on the Thetis?" That was the name of Dr. Costain's research ship.
"No. No. Not for this trip. The Navy's fitted out a nuclear submarine, The Spearfish. They've fitted on a docking platform for Icky. They'll be finished by midnight, when we're due to shove off."
"What's the hurry?" she said. "It's not a gold rush. It's an expedition, isn't it?"
He stiffened and looked back out to sea. "That's not for me to say. But this site appears to be more extensive than the one we found. It was discovered by accident. By a Polish research ship. So you see, the Russians know about it, too. The Navy wants us to get to it first."
"There's no danger, is there?" she said, looking sharply at him.
"I doubt it. We don't think the Russians know about the Azores site, or the crystal we found. But if there was a security leak . . . well, the Navy boys say that rock has very interesting light-focusing properties. It could be a new source of energy, or an old one, really. But we want to be at the new site before anyone else. It's important for the country."
"I'm sorry you have to go," she said. "For our sakes I'm sorry. But I'm awfully proud of you. You'll find it first, I know."
He smiled and swallowed heavily. "Maybe I'll have some help from your dolphin friends."
Laughing to ease the tension, they went back inside.
He left after an agonizingly intense supper in which much was said and much was left unsaid. They drove him to the Navy base and had to say goodbye to him at the gate. A special security screening kept them out. Robin kissed her father goodbye and avoided crying only by looking at her mother. She had never seen her so brave. Her father joked that he would probably be back in a week, which didn't help.
Later, just before she turned out the light in her bedroom, Robin thought she heard sobbing down the hall.
* * *
SHE WAS BREEE again; the warm dark ocean held her.
"AHAAAAAAAA, HAAAAAAAA," her enormous companion laughed, wagging his boat-sized snout. "THEN WHAT DID HE DO? AHAAAAAAA."
Robin-Breee stared nervously at the Singer. "What?"
"YOUR FRIEND ZAAK. WHAT DID HE DO WHEN THE PORCUPINE FISH INFLATED IN HIS MOUTH?"
She realized with a chill that Breee had been telling a story just as Robin had arrived. She had no idea what to say.
"Nothing," she said. "It wasn't important." "OH," Old Wind said after a thoughtful pause. "ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, MY DEAR?"
"Sure. I'm just tired."
But she was sure from the silence that followed that Old Wind was sizing her up. Perhaps he already knew her secret; she had no way of knowing what Breee had told him.
Old Wind was leading her toward the tip of the dipper's handle now, due north, and soon they saw ahead of them hundreds of Hashes of silver. The sliver of moon was reflecting from the sides of fish as they turned. Thousands upon thousands of them, parting as the two passed. She fed until she couldn't stand the thought of another fish wiggling down her throat. The fish were like mirrored clouds, golden moonfish and lookdowns and racing bands of dorado with rainbow sides and square foreheads. The food was abundant in this place, and Old Wind also ate his fill. "This is exciting," she said.
"I HOPE IT DOES NOT BECOME TOO EXCITING," Old Wind replied ambiguously.
She didn't have to wonder what he meant for long. The fish had already begun flashing left and right quickly, for no visible reason. Masses of them darted back and forth, nearly bumping against her, until she thought she was in a huge tumbling kaleidoscope.
"What's wrong with them?" she cried.
"SSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH," Old Wind hushed in a low voice.
Then she began to detect ripples in the throngs that flashed by, as if something big were swimming through them. Then the smell of blood tained the water; she could see curls of it between the wide-eyed fishes.
"What . . ." Robin-Breee began again, but her words died when she saw that Old Wind's eyes wore a ring of white around them, as though even his great bulk knew fear.
"Krrrrrrreeeeeeeeeee." The cry cut through her.
Only a couple of dolphin-lengths away, a tiny eye in a great black skin examined her between darting fish. She began trembling and felt her tail whip faster. It was a Darker, a killer whale. A meat eater.
"Good huntinnnnnnggggg," it cried in a ludicrously shrill voice.
She could not answer. She hugged close to Old Wind, as nearly underneath his long right flipper as possible.
"DON'T PANIC, MY LADY," the Singer mumbled deep in his throat, a whale whisper. "THEY ARE NOT GIVING THE HUNGER CALL. THERE IS PLENTY OF FISH HERE FOR ALL. BE POLITE."
She knew she should not fear. She knew that the Darkers hunt other Returned only when they cannot find fish; and when they do, they give the eerie Hunger Call. It is the warning, and it can reduce even the great blue whale to quivering fear. She remembered the story of the first Darker, to whom Old Blowhole gave the fearful power to hunt the Returned, so that they might not fill the oceans unchecked. But it was difficult for her to concentrate on their innocence with great halves of dorados spinning by in a pink haze.
They called to each other in shrieking Darker hunting code, then their laughter sent piercing echoes through the fish.
"Big one," called one of them. "Why do you swim so fast?"
"I NEED THE EXERCISE," Old Wind growled.
"And why do you not open your mouth?" another called. "The water is full of krill."
"SO FULL THAT MY JAWS ARE STUCK SHUT WITH IT. DELICIOUS, THOUGH," Old Wind said, tight-lipped. He understood their joke perfectly; whale tongues are the greatest delicacy to a Darker. It would be a provocation to let them see it.
The tempo picked up. Robin-Breee struggled to keep up with the whale's powerful strokes. The surge of water Old Wind carried along helped. The fish were thinning out now, but still the Darkers raced along. Their tiny eyes were on the two strange companions, They were playing with them, enjoying the great whale's fear. Attempts were made to herd them off their course, but Old Wind swam straight. The only danger was in panic.
Then, suddenly, they veered away to either side, leaving behind only echoes of their hunting calls.
"THERE, AHEAD," Old Wind cried joyfully. "AWA'S HAIR WILL HIDE US."
At first she thought it was an island, for it sent back echoes. Finer search-cries brought back softer, spongy echoes. Closer, she realized that a great wall of sunken material hung ahead of them like a drowned cathedral. It echoed thick but porous, giving, floating, living. At their speed they were inside it in a moment. She had only a glimpse of tumbling tons of golden vegetation stretching out of sight before she had to pick a channel between its waving columns to duck into.
They passed through a narrow lane, turned through corkscrew passages of growth, and entered a great room. Fish that their passage had disturbed lurking in the weeds whipped past them into moonbeams.
Old Wind floated to the surface, pushed some weeds aside, and released a long breath of fear.
"AAAAHHHHHHHHH. IT IS GOOD TO BE SAFE. AWA IS GOOD. HER LONG HAIR HANGS DOWN TO GIVE US SANCTUARY. BEAUTIFUL, GOLDEN HAIR SUCH AS HUMANS WEAR ON THEIR HEADS. LIKE THE BRISTLES ON MY SNOUT. THE DARKERS WON'T COME HERE; IT IS CONFUSING TO THEM. AWA PROVIDES, DOES SHE NOT?"
Robin-Breee examined the walls. Yellow weeds, stem and frond, twisted in endless patterns to form a solid labyrinth afloat. Tiny grapelike floats held it up. From every shadowed cranny, varieties of fish watched her carefully.
"AAAAHHHHHHHH." Old Wind sighed again. "I'M AFRAID YOUR FEAR UNNERVED ME A BIT, MY FRIEND. NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THOSE FELLOWS. JUST STALWART RETURNED OUT FOR SUPPER. WHY, I SHOULD HAVE CHATTED WITH THEM ABOUT THE COUNCIL. I HOPE THEY ARE HEADED THAT WAY - WE MAY NEED THEM IF THE DECISION IS TO FIGHT."
"Supper, my flukes," Robin-Breee said as she watched a perfectly camouflaged sargassum fish disappear. "We could have been their supper. Say, where are we, anyway?"
Old Wind swam lazily in the open circle and licked the green layer of plankton off his moustache. "WHY, THIS IS AWA'S HAIR," he said with a note of surprise. "DON'T YOU KNOW? HUMANS CALL IT THE SARGASSO SEA. THIS IS JUST A CHUNK, FOR THE MAIN BODY OF IT IS FARTHER DEEPWAYS. I SAY, WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR ITS SONG?"
"Yes." She gulped quickly, examining the golden hall.
Old Wind sang her the story soothingly, as though to calm her.
"BEFORE BEFORE, THIS WAS ALL LAND. I SPEAK OF AGES PAST. LONG AGO. WE HAVE KEPT THE SONG, THOUGH THE OTHERS HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW THEY ONCE LIVED HERE. AWA WAS THEN NOT MUCH MORE THAN A WIDE PASSAGE AROUND THE LANDS. THE OLD HUMANS LIVED AS MASTERS, LORDS OVER THE EARTH, AS THEY WANTED. THEY HAD BOATS THAT SWAM THROUGH THE DEEPS, AND AIR BOATS TO SWIM OVER THE LAND. THEY BUILT GREAT CAVERNS FOR THEMSELVES, AND THEY DUG FROM THE LAND THE HEART OF STONE (THE HUMAN-WORD FOR IT IS CRYSTAL, I AM TOLD). THE OLD HUMANS HAD MORE MAGIC THAN THESE NEW ONES: THEY TAUGHT THE HEARTS OF STONE TO SEE THE SUN AND THE STARS, AND TO REMEMBER THEIR FIRE. THEY COULD KEEP THE FIRE IN THEM. THAT IS HOW THEY POWERED EVERYTHING IN THEIR LAND. WITH THEIR HANDS, THEY MADE ALL THIS.
"BUT HANDS MAKE WEAK MINDS, AS WE SAY. THEY STOPPED LISTENING TO THEIR SINGERS. THEY FORGOT THE OLD SONGS OF THE CIRCLE. THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE THE HUB AROUND WHICH THE WORLD TURNS. FOOLISH, FOOLISH HUMANS. THEY THOUGHT IT WAS THEY WHO CONTROLLED THE SONG. THEY TURNED THE CRYSTALS ON THEIR ENEMIES, TO TAKE THEIR POSSESSIONS, AND ON THE EARTH, TO TAKE HER METAL BONES. LISTEN WELL, SMALL ONE. HANDS ARE MADE FOR CLUTCHING, AS WE SAY. THEY DESTROYED THEMSELVES. THE FIRES THEY STARTED WITH THEIR HEARTS OF STONE COULD NOT BE STOPPED. THE EARTH GAVE THE WICKED LANDS BACK TO THE SEA. THE AIR-PEOPLE PERISHED. GREAT DESTRUCTION WAS EVERYWHERE. MANY OF THE RETURNED DIED ALSO, BECAUSE OF THE FIRE AND MUD. AT LAST THERE WAS QUIET. THE OLD ONES WHO REMAINED ALIVE WERE SAVAGES.
"AND THAT IS WHY AWA SPREAD HER HAIR HERE, TO COVER THE SHAME OF THAT TIME, AND TO LET HU-MANS FORGET THEIR WICKED PAST."
Robin-Breee listened in awe. The whale remembered Atlantis, the people who left the ruins her father had discovered. It was all in the story, even the strange crystals. But the ring, the ring! She burned to tell everything.
"All died?" she queried instead.
Old Wind sighed sadly. "EXCEPT FOR THEIR SINGERS, BUT OF COURSE YOU KNOW THAT SONG. NO? WELL, THEIR BODIES DIED LIKE THE REST, BUT THE WISE ONES, THE PRIESTS, WERE ABLE TO FREE THEIR MINDS. THEIR SIGN WAS A DOLPHIN - THEY WORE IMAGES OF THEM ON THEIR HANDS. THAT IS WHERE THEIR MINDS WENT, WHEN THE LAND WENT DOWN. THEY MIXED WITH THE MINDS OF THEIR FRIENDS, THE DOLPHINS, FOR THEY REMEMBERED THEY WERE PART OF THE CIRCLE. AND THEIR DESCENDANTS ARE STILL WITH US. SOME DOLPHINS HAVE NIGHTSEE, AND DREAM THEY ARE HUMAN. AND DREAM TRULY, SOME SAY."
Robin-Breee could not speak. She had put on the ring from Atlantis and awakened in a dolphin with a hybrid soul, as if the ring had been a radio tuner and Breee's mind the receiver.
They rocked in the currents silently for a while, then Old Wind spoke again, "You HAVE THE NIGHT-VISIONS, DON'T YOU, BREEE?"
"You knew!" she squeaked.
"I GUESSED. IT WASN'T HARD. I HAD HEARD OF DRUMMER'S MISSION, AND YOU KNEW HUMAN-WORDS. AND YOU ARE NOTHING LIKE BREEE WHEN SHE IS AWAKE."
She told him her Human-name. She told him about the ring from the sea, her father, the ruins. Her continuing dream. It came in a torrent, but she was surprised that it took so few words to explain the unfathomable.
Old Wind looked at her silently for a second, and then with a mighty leap jumped all but his tail clear of the water. The sound of his reentry was deafening; Awa's hair rocked violently. He crooned one splitting trumpet-note of joy.
"YOU ARE THE ONE! I HAVE SUNG OF YOU ALL MY LIFE! A DOLPHIN WAS TO COME, A NIGHTSEE DOLPHIN, WHO WOULD KNOW THE MIND OF HUMANS. COME QUICKLY. WE MUST GO TO THE COUNCIL; YOU ARE THE LINK."
Robin-Breee was nearly pulled from their sargasso lair by the suction of Old Wind's flukes. He rushed her, pulled her, cajoled her out into the dark ocean, then began swimming with smooth, mammoth strokes toward the cold waters of the north.
She awakened beside Old Wind and felt the exhilaration of flight without effort in a world of music. The surface was rough, with great waves followed by deep troughs, so they swam along unhindered where the ocean is always calm, below. With the moon cloud-hidden it was dark, and the sea floor was ninety fathoms underneath.
"WELCOME BACK, LITTLE ONE," Old Wind greeted. He had become adept at detecting the changes in Breee that signaled her nightly trance.
She whistled her reply. "What do you teach me tonight?"
"AAAAAHHHHH. YOUR APPETITE FOR KNOWLEDGE IS EXHAUSTING ME. BUT YOU HAVE LEARNED NEARLY AS MUCH AS I HAVE FORGOTTEN. I HAVE TOLD YOU ALL OF OUR HISTORY. YOU KNOW THE SQUAREHEADS, THE SINGERS, THE DARKERS, THE GREATS, AND ALL OF THEIR FUNCTIONS NOW. LET US BE DONE WITH TALK; I TIRE OF IT. LET US JUST SWIM. I WILL SING MORE IN TIME.
She was not disappointed to swim without speaking. She had other, drier things to think about. In the last few days living and functioning in the air-world had grown more difficult. Her teachers were becoming impatient; even her mother, though preoccupied with her own loneliness, had detected the slow change in her. Her reading speed dropped every day, and her speech was slurring. Then today she had found a note in her locker, slid through a ventilator slot.
Dear Robin:I have been trying to get your attention since I met you on the beach. Remember the whale? I talked to you at lunch the other day, but for some reason I didn't feel as if I got through to you. If you want me to stop bothering you, please call me at 384-4244 and tell me why. I think you're cute.
Brian Hollings.
Beside his name, the boy named Brian had drawn a crude whale. It had made her laugh, but the terribly human sound of her own laughter had startled her.
Her primary emotion had been irritation. This boy was trying to push her whales aside. But soon behind the irritation had come a warm rush up her body. She had even noticed the other people on their way to classes. One of those people had wanted to know her, as a human. She had found herself embarrassed, self-conscious, then, almost despite herself, pleased. Her hands had trembled.
She was startled from her reverie by Old Wind. Though the waves were rolling and crashing together and they were in a busy sea lane where the sound of motors was never far, he slowed and turned to listen to a buzzing sound approaching from the south.
"AAAAHHHH," he said quietly, "THIS YOU SHOULD KNOW. GO TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND FOLLOW ME."
Puzzled, she did as he asked. They swam steeply down until the weight of the water squeezed them thin. Robin-Breee scanned her companion and found that he was even more eel-shaped than before. There was no light here, only sound and the occasional hazy glow of lanternfish. He leveled off at forty fathoms and hung as if waiting for something in the blackness. She did not understand.
But soon she realized the sound was with them in the depths and not on the surface. It was not a very loud noise, but it grew as it came . . .
She scanned; and finally she could see it in the black as it swam, long and cold and eyeless. It was not living, but it pushed itself through the water effortlessly. Echoes were alive in the column of roiled water it left behind. She seemed to see half-things, mirages of sound . . .
It passed and passed. She couldn't believe its size, or its hardness.
"What is it?" she asked.
"STONEFISH," came the reply.
Now she understood. It was a submarine, traveling in its straight, human line. When she listened, she could perceive the voices of the men inside it, tiny, antlike, but audible. She dashed out toward it before Old Wind could stop her and ran parallel to its side. The sounds of the activities inside were fascinating, like a submerged city passing.
"BRREEEEE," called the Singer suddenly, obviously afraid that it might hurt her.
"But those are people inside," she explained. Then, for the first time she wondered about those people. The thought of her father caused a twinge. That might be him passing on journey.
She felt Old Wind move as if to begin for the surface, and she followed for a way. Then the whale stopped and hung head-down in the water, watching the swirling water behind the submarine.
"BBBBBBBRRRRRRROOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!" he moaned.
She faced the swirling cloud and was astounded to see its echoes and gurgles take the shouted name and make a shape from them. Something flashed in the boiling water, a tail. Then a nose and a form like nothing she had seen wriggled forth. A whale with a huge head came out of the confusion.
"BY AWA'S MILK!" Old Wind sputtered. "IT IS YOU BROW, PRINCELING FROM THE WARM SEAS!"
"Baaaaah," squeaked the sperm whale in a disappointing whistley voice. "You scare Brow. I been follow this stonefish for long ways, hide in him wallow. Sometimes, the big wiggly, he come along and see what makes strange sound. He don't know about stonefish. I see his lights, then I come out and eat 'm up."
Robin-Breee was surprised that the sperm whale spoke in the high clicks and whistles she normally used only for echolocation. It was a simple, but still a clear, language.
"HAAAAAAHHH. AHAAAAAAAA." Old Wind laughed. "I GAVE YOU A FRIGHT? I'M GLAD TO SEE YOU, STILL. AWA WAS YOUNGER WHEN WE SAW EACH OTHER LAST."
"Yaaaa. All older now. Brow no got mates, now. They all go with younger brutes. Brow fight 'em all. Many scars."
That seemed to be the end of Brow's update, so Old Wind introduced Breee to him.
"SHE CAN TELL US ABOUT HUMANS. SHE IS THE ONE WITH NIGHTSEE. WE MUST TAKE HER WITH US TO THE COUNCIL. SHE SWAM ALONG THE SIDE OF THE STONEFISH AND SEEMED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY WERE DOING IN THERE,"
Robin-Breee had no chance to digest this ancient friendship and the apparent fact that they were all going to travel together before Brow snorted resonantly.
"Huuuuuuunnnhhh! Brow needs no zhaki to tell about Others! Others now killing plenty Squareheads down where warmways turn cold. Brow hear from Jawdir and Divefin, all their people. Seas below are red. Greyback can bring this little zhaki to Council, if he want. Brow bring his teeth. Teeth of all Squareheads ready to Turn!"
They surfaced to breath, and Robin-Breee faced Old Wind. In the half-light she saw how the barnacles and sun-faded skin on his back formed a wide gray streak.
"You!" she chirped. "You are Greyback! You sent Drummer to find me! Why didn't you tell me so?"
"AHAAAAA. I FORGET ALL THE NAMES DIFFERENT PEOPLE CALL ME. SO MANY NAMES. STILL, I DID NOT DECEIVE YOU. AND I LEARNED MORE BY WATCHING YOU THAN I COULD HAVE IF YOU HAD TOLD ME. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THAT YOU TELL ALL THE COUNCIL WHAT YOU KNOW. MY HEADSTRONG FRIEND HERE CANNOT DECIDE FOR THEM, NOR CAN I. ONLY THE GREAT ONES CAN DO THAT."
"Yaaaa," squeaked Brow, "well, maybe no decision then. Been long time, no hear Great One in deeps. Long time."
Robin-Breee thought of the blue whales in their hugeness - they who were the arbiters and deciders in this watery world - and a chilling feeling of lateness washed over her.
"All Humans are not killers," she protested weakly. "My father is a good man. He is a friend to the Returned."
Brow looked down his great nose at her. "What crazy little one say? Your father Human? Greyback, you know Squareheads not have great minds like Great Ones and cannot sing histories like you. We muscles of Returned. But we not stupid. You really think Squareheads believe this one dolphin got man father? Harrunkh!"
"AHAAAA, AHAAAA, HAAAAA." Grayback moaned in laughter. "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, MY DIRECT FRIEND. AND, I FEAR, IT WILL BE MOST DIFFICULT TO MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND. BUT LET US BE ON OUR WAY, AND I WILL TRY."
The next night the water shallowed. A broad plain began climbing slowly beneath them, its sand snowy white with patches of dark sea grass.
"IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE WHITE SHALLOWS," Greyback commented.
That meant they were near their destination, but Robin-Breee swam for long spells without thinking of the Council to come or her role in it. Again, she was thinking of the dayside of her life.
She had been unable to call the boy, Brian. But she had looked up at lunch that day to see him sitting across from her. It was as frightening as meeting Old Wind in the depths for the first time. She had been glad Brian could not hear her galloping heart. He had not been exactly tranquil himself, and that had calmed her. She could not even remember what they had talked about, but he had stood with her in her bus line awkwardly, and finally asked her to go to a movie with him on Friday, five days away.
Now her mind slipped back to his face and manner. An excitement ran through her that was as real as any she had felt in the water-world. Indeed, it was as amazing to her that anyone was interested in her as it was that a ring could turn her into a dolphin.
Despite her preoccupation, she noticed changes in the water. It tasted cleaner than before. Enough light reflected from the white sand to allow sight far into the crystal sea.
The following night, Tuesday, she awakened as Breee to find the ocean buzzing with activity. Even the fish seemed excited.
Dolphins abounded. Common dolphins, like herself but with beautiful gold and white stripes along their sides, blue and white dolphins, and strangely mottled dolphins all swam together.
"It is Greyback," they shrilled.
"HO, FISHNIP. HULLO, MILKEYE. WHAT OF SHREEKA AND BLUEFLUKE?"
The dolphins all seemed to know Greyback and crowded around, nibbling affectionately at his flukes and flippers.
"Shreeka's Circle is here," one answered him, "and Bluefluke's is on the way. Sharktooth has refused to come, have you heard?"
"NO, BUT IT DOES NOT SURPRISE ME. MANY WILL CALL US FOOLS NO MATTER WHAT WE DECIDE. SHARK-TOOTH CAN DO AS HE PLEASES."
"Heeeeeep!" Brow snorted. "Fools are those who do not Turn! It not Old Blowhole's time now Shark-tooth find himself in net someday, then it be to late to turn."
Dozens of curious dolphins nuzzled and poked at her, asking her name. They were obviously impressed that a young female traveled in such august company.
"I am Breee," she said, backing closer to Grey-back, "of Cheeka's Circle."
"HERE," intervened the Singer, "DON'T CROWD SO. BREEE MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE HERE. WHAT, WHY? SO MANY QUESTIONS. ALL IN GOOD TIME. I WILL EXPLAIN TO ALL ASSEMBLED. WHERE ARE THE OTHER SINGERS?"
But there was no need to ask. Loud groans and trills echoed clearly ahead of them. They found dozens and dozens of Singers clustered together like a convention of dirigibles. Greyback waited reverently for their song to end, the throng of dolphins still gathered around him. When the last note echoed into oblivion, the Singers turned and welcomed him enthusiastically. Brow went off to find out where the Squareheads had gathered.
"WERE THE GREAT ONES CONTACTED?" Greyback asked. "HAS ANYONE SEEN THEM?"
"IT IS NOT KNOWN," a Singer named Stentor said. "THRUMBA AND WINGFIN SANG THE MESSAGE FOR DAYS IN THE USUAL PLACES. EVEN WHERE THE ICE BREAKS. BUT NO ONE ANSWERED. THE GREAT ONES HAVE NOT BEEN HEARD OF FOR A LONG TIME."
"THEN WE MAY BE LOST INDEED," Greyback groaned. "I FEAR THE RETURNED MAY HAVE WAITED TOO LONG TO TURN. IF THERE ARE NO GREAT ONES TO DECIDE FOR US, IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO ACT AS ONE PEOPLE."
Greyback suddenly noticed Robin-Breee hovering close. He nudged her off to play with the other dolphins while he discussed serious matters.
She was surprised to find out how much she had missed the games and romps of Cheeka's Circles. There was no lack of companions here, and there were constant games.
It was also her first chance to learn from dolphins not reared under Krora's repressive rule. All were worried about the future, and she found they had no idea that oil spills and tuna nets were accidental. From their viewpoint, man was so powerful and wise that whatever he did in the ocean must be intentional. They could not separate the accidental disasters from the terrifying whaling experience.
She tried to explain. "But don't you see, the Others are only after the tuna. They can't stop you from getting caught in their nets. And no one in the air-world wants to pollute the oceans. They are trying to stop it."
Snapbeak, the dolphin next to her, moved over as if startled. "How would you know that? Are you an Other, or can you talk to them?"
"Yaaaaa," said Fincut, "Who since Old Blowhole can talk to Others?"
"I . . ." But her words faded. How could she explain that they themselves were talking to an air-dweller, though she appeared to be one of them? "I have seen it," she finally responded. "I am Nightsee."
Suddenly a familiar chill set in among them. She set her jaw defiantly and swam away. Her heart longed for someone like Zaak or Brian to be with, someone who would accept the different truth of her character without changing it.
The next evening she awakened as Breee to find that more sperm whales had arrived from northern waters and a dozen right whales from Greenland. Still no blue whales, nor rumor of them.
A silent pall descended over those gathered when echoes brought the shrill call of the killer whale to the Council. Not a word was spoken, but all the varieties of Returned clustered close. The sperm whales stationed themselves protectively in a great circle around them. A young dolphin somewhere whimpered underneath its mother's flipper.
But there was no Hunger Call; and when at last the black shapes swirled out of the darkness, they swam slowly and formally, with their heads lowered in peace. Still, the mere sight of so many Darkers, the only predator of great whales, was enough to keep the assembly tense.
"Craaaaaawww!" shrilled the leading Darker. "We come with full stomachs into the Circle. We come to speak, and to listen, and to act!"
Brow swam forward and squeaked, "Is it Dash? Does Dash the ice-eater, the seal-swallower come to council?"
The forward Darker whistled positively.
"And Gorge," said a deeper, growling voice.
"And Shriek," said a third.
"And Icebreak with his Circle."
Everyone was happy that the Darkers had come to deliberate, but the spell of festivity was quite broken. No one wanted to rush leaping and giggling with a bleeding fish past an eight-ton carnivore. The word of Dash and Icebreak was trusted, of course, but fate and white teeth are not to be tempted far.
There was much discussion that evening, for all was in readiness. Many curious glances were given to Greyback. and his mysterious protege. There was no time set for the Council to begin, for Returned do not count minutes and hours, but all were assembled except the most important, the deciders, the Great Ones.
Expectancy rose with the tide, and the fulling moon pulled at the hearts of those gathered. None knew how long such assorted creatures could remain at peace together and still keep interest.
Robin was more expectant than most when she awakened as Breee that Thursday. She waited in two worlds, for tomorrow she would have an evening alone with Brian, an evening to luxuriate in his attention. And yet she feared to tell Greyback she would be away for so long. What if they were ready for her and there was only bewildered Breee there?
She found a few grunts to chase down for supper. All was subdued, with a calm sea and depressingly little talk.
Before they were aware of it, they had heard the sound. So low was it that it washed over and around them in a steady, deep vibration. Robin-Breee was one of the first to understand that it was a sound. She turned, a fish escaped. The second call was clearer. It stunned the dolphins into complete silence. Few of them had ever heard a sound like it before.
The third call rose fearfully close, north of the group, A mountain of sound rolling over in the deep, it shook their skeletons as it peaked and then slid mournfully down in pitch. It sounded to Robin like a soul sinking into a deep and eternal abyss calling for its heart.
"Aaiiiiiiiii!" squealed a dolphin on the north edge of the group, "It lives! It swims!"
Another clacked its jaws in alarm. "It's him! It's Old Blowhole!"
The ranks of the Returned parted, as much in fear as in respect, for the slowly approaching being was twice the size of the largest there. Then, from the edge of the green mist came a pointed mouth, which curved and curved in the great whale smile to tiny eyes. Fins emerged over an endless yellow throat grooved with a thousand rows of wrinkles. Its head, as big as a whole killer whale, dipped in greeting, and it spoke again.
This time the tone was high enough for its long deep sounds to register as words. "IIII HAAAAVE HEARRRD THEEE CAAALL. IIII COMMMME."
When Greyback spoke, his voice was like an oboe beside an organ. "HAIL AND WELCOME, SONG OF THE SEA. WE GREET YOU WITH JOY. IF YOU ARE NOT OLD BLOWHOLE, YOU COULD WELL BE, FOR THESE WATERS HAVE NOT SEEN YOUR LIKE IN MANY CYCLES OF THE SUN."
"SIIIIING," was all the cathedral-sized voice said. All knew the time had come to meet.
Greyback took the lead, a lone dot at the head of the Great One. Wordlessly the rest followed like a swarm of gnats around his flukes. They swam to the place that had been picked as the Council site. Grey-back had shown it to Robin-Breee on one of the waiting nights. It was beyond the shallows where they had assembled, a place where the bottom receded into blackness, and from the abyss rose only a brief spire of rock flattened at the top like a terraced plateau. It was thirty fathoms down, and moonlight barely reached to show faint lintels and arches, crumbling columns, collapsed structure, under ancient coral.
This place, where the wizards of Atlantis had once dug canals to let their companion-dolphins swim into their very temples, had been chosen for the Returned to discuss the possibility of facing Humans once more. Hundreds of dolphins and whales surrounded the ruined plateau, rising to breath and descending to listen.
"SIIIIING," Old Blowhole moaned.
Robin-Breee was lost in thought, lulled into a daydream of Brian by the last speaker when she realized the groaning voice of Old Blowhole was speaking to her. She turned anxiously. Suddenly, it was like being caught in class with no idea of where to begin reading. Thousands of searching eyes were on her, all clustered in the darkness around the plateau.
The booming voice rang out again, "WHO SPEAKS FOR HUMANS? HAS OUR COUSIN NO VOICE, NO EXCUSE?"
Her mind whirred, voice frozen. First, she remembered, Greyback had spoken, had sung the history of the Returned from the first Old Blowhole to the sad present, with all its butchery and abuse. Then Brow had told the story of the Squareheads in his brief style;
how they had been reduced to a dwindling tribe unable to keep the big wiggly, the giant squid, in check, how soon the squids would own the sea. Each group had spoken of songs lost, of massacres, of poisonings, on and on until her mind had turned inward in self-defense.
Greyback's barnacle-studded nose spun her into the empty speaking place before the Great One. Now it was her turn.
"THIS IS BREEE. SHE SPEAKS FOR HUMANS. SHE KNOWS THEIR MINDS, AND THE THOUGHTS OF THEIR CLEVER FINGERS, FOR SHE IS NIGHTSEE. WITHIN HER LIVES THE MIND OF ONE SPRUNG FROM THAT OLD STOCK, OF THE OLD MAGIC NOW AWAKENED BY HUMANS THEMSELVES. WE HAVE HEARD SONGS THAT SUCH A ONE WOULD COME TO US AT THE TURNING; THIS IS SHE. ASK HER WHAT YOU WILL, FOR SHE KNOWS AS MUCH ABOUT THE AIR-WORLD AS WE DO OF THIS ONE."
"SIIIING," throbbed the Great One's voice. She faced him, concentrating on his tiny eyes. Her voice seemed small.
"I am called Breee. The name Humans call me is Robin. My father found a ring at the bottom of the sea that opened Breee's mind to me. In the day I have fingers, at night I have fins. I ... came here because Old . . . Greyback asked me to. He thought it was important that you understand about Others. It is important. Drummer, a friend or mine, is not here tonight because he chose to help me. I will explain what I can for his sake.
"There is much to explain. You must understand that the Others we speak of are hunters. They are stupid and cruel. But they are not the end of it. There are good and kind men, and wise men, who want to stop the killing.
"I have found, in the time that I have lived as a dolphin, that all Returned are not the same. There are cruel dolphins, and there are good ones, foolish dolphins and wise Singers. There are Squareheads who like to act, and Great Ones who think. The Others are no different. Hands are not what is important about them - you have the same bones in your flippers. But they have the same heart as you."
A female sperm whale nudged forward, a white scar running jaggedly across her face. "You say Others have heart. This done to me when Shika was calf. Still Shika remembers laughter of Others."
"Cruel, cruel," Robin-Breee whined, her body wriggling with the effort to explain her race. "Cruel and blind. But that was done by Hungry Men. Have you not heard of Hunger, of what the Darkers do, and sometimes do laughing? Yet you do not despise them. They assemble here with their kind. Do not hate all Others because some are hungry. It would be wrong to turn against all who stayed on land."
She swam quickly to the surface to breathe. When she returned, the water was boiling with controversy. She felt a thousand pairs of malevolent, distrustful eyes on her, but the conversation ceased when Gorge, the huge Darker, moved into the empty circle with her. Circling her, his gravelly voice rang out.
"It is madness. A fever. No Returned can know the mind of Others."
"But I do," she insisted. "I am Other, and Returned."
Gorge stopped. The white spot over his eye glowed like ice. "You speak of wise Others, of Others with kind hearts. Yet who has ever heard an Other sing? I have seen them many times on their boats and swimming, but they never sing to each other. Their stonefish call, but only to locate and destroy other stonefish. If you can really tell us of Others, tell us of their songs. Where are they?"
Robin-Breee cut off the babble of skeptics quickly. "In books," she answered. "Others make marks that stand for speech. These are put in things they make with their hands. No Singers are needed because every Other can open a book and read what it sings."
Gorge laughed, bubbling. His teeth flashed. "What nonsense!"
But the other killer whale, Dash, interrupted. "Wait, Gorge, listen. She may be right. I have seen Others on ships looking into little flat boxes, might they be books? And what about the little marks Others always put on their ships?"
Gorge obviously despised Dash and his effort to understand. He nodded menacingly at him. "But how can little marks sing?" he triumphed.
"Of course!" Robin-Breee suddenly realized. "You don't understand because this is a sound-world. Others don't communicate that way. They see. They use their eyes, that is how little marks sing to them!"
The throng babbled in amazement, some in fear. How could a dolphin speak like an Other? It was preposterous to think that Others could hear with their eyes. How limited that would make them! It would have been impossible for them to conquer the earth with such puny communication.
"She is mad!" shrieked a right whale.
But Greyback calmed things a bit when he waggled forth and snorted, "WHAT SONGS DO THESE . . . BOOKS SING TO THE OTHERS?"
"A thousand songs," she said quickly, glad for a friendly question. "Songs about love and death. And God. You won't understand that. God is goodness and beauty. You have Awa. God is like the spirit of the earth, or the Circle of All Living Things. There are songs about justice and injustice. And songs about peace."
The Great One groaned suddenly, and the vibration startled her into silence. "SING AN OTHER-SONG," he croaked.
"But I don't have a book down here!" she stuttered. The curious and doubting throng edged in. "I guess I could tell you the Pledge of Allegiance, or sing some Christmas songs . . . but those won't tell you about the Others very much. You wouldn't understand the words . . . Wait a minute! The poem, of course! The poem I learned for literature class - it's about whales, and Humans!"
She had been twisting and bending nervously with the strain of explaining one race to another, but now that she had remembered the poem she calmed. How grateful she was that Mrs. Payne had made her memorize it!
"It's called 'The Last Whale's Dream,' " she said. It took her a moment to trade her English memories for dolphin words. Then she spoke.
"The sky was gray, the clouds were high when I wandered to the beach,And stumbled on the stranded whale, the sea beyond his reach,
At first I thought he had fought with the moon and with the tide,
A titanic battle, which he had lost, and subsequently died,
But deep within his brow there was iron from human hands;
He must have hoaxed his hunters to sleep in greedless sands,
His eye, which had traveled black troughs through the sea,
Stared blamelessly, blind and unblinking at me,
I stood stilled by that gentle and mountainous face,
As though by a message from an alien race,
Once, like a meteor through the chasms he ran,
In ice-canyon kingdoms unguessed of by man -
Did he speak to his brothers in vibrating cries,
His mother - did she soothe him with low lullabyes?
And when he lay dozing in the black heart of the deep,
What shadowless ramblings rumbled his sleep?
At his death now I felt empty, like a waterless pail,
For I thought, 'Perhaps man is the dream of the whale,
And when we have bloodied the last whale's last spout,
Perhaps then man, and his light, will go out.' "
Silence reigned in the Council until the last echo of her speech was done. She hoped she had put in the right words.
A bubble of surprise wobbled up from Greyback.
"IT IS AMAZING! UNLIKE ANYTHING I HAVE HEARD SUNG IN THE SEA. So MUCH TALK ABOUT EYES AND COLOR AND LIGHT. IT MUST BE TRUE!"
"Nooooo," exploded a group, led by Gorge. "She is a zhaki! Look at the way she turns and twists! The wizards among Humans have sent her to deceive us."
"WHAT SAY YOU, DOLPHINS," the Great One spoke. "SHALL WE LISTEN TO THIS OTHER-SONG?"
The dolphin chorus was deafeningly negative. The sperm whales also scorned peace. Brow alone refused to choose, though Robin could see his doubt. And the right whales could not accept the idea that some people could be good. Gorge seemed to speak for the killer whales.
"Yes, let us Turn, but let us not divide Others into good and bad! Let us pull them off their sailing ships in harbors and attack them at beaches and chew them to bits! This story is a zhaki vision: it would have us attack only armed Others, who have the exploding spear. You know where that would end. I say drive this little fool from us so that we may not doubt our purpose."
Robin recoiled, for Gorge's eyes gleamed horribly above his double rows of teeth. But suddenly he was pushed aside; the other Darker, Dash, had bolted to hover beside her so fast that she had no time to run. He pulled her against his smooth skin protectively, as Greyback had once done.
"Hold, Gorge! Listen to her. Her words ring true to me. There are good and bad in all creatures. If Others are as she says, surely it would hurt us greatly to kill as they do, the good with the bad. Clear your ears of hate. Can it be I hear clearer because my parents were not killed by fishermen, as yours were?"
Gorge squealed murderously, and his eyes burned like coals. He reared and grinned to show his teeth and prepared to attack . . . but did not.
It was not the judge, the Great One, who intervened. Instead, all heads cocked to a distant trilling note. Gorge, his charge interrupted, spun angrily to face the sound. A lilting whistle wove a haunting tune. Someone sang a familiar song.
"Drummer!" Robin-Breee shrieked in shocked joy.
Then, like an eerie spaceship, the dolphin's pale form materialized from the mist and swam over the craning crowd, who seemed bewildered. Had the zhaki summoned this spirit-dolphin from the Silent Circle to save her?
"What is your business here, silly singer?" growled Gorge.
"I implore your forgiveness, sir Darker," Drummer cackled, "but I could not help hearing what you were saying. I could not let you be embarrassed by driving out the truth from this Council."
"What truth?" Gorge sniffed.
"Why, what Breee was saying. I have just come from a short visit with the Other Circle - perhaps you have noticed the pink tag in my dorsal fin (you are obviously an observant fellow). This is my second stay with Humans, and I must say, she is absolutely right. There are good people as well as the blighters we're after, and we should not confuse the issue. My experience is not as direct as hers, of course. I am just a dolphin, and she has the Nightsee. But she is right."
Gorge snorted in frustration and skulked to the rear of the now-babbling crowd. The water filled with Drummer's name and "zhaki" and "Nightsee."
"Quiet!" the troubadour shrilled. "You all know me; I have told your children countless stories. You know I know the truth when I hear it. Breee is the truth."
He left the Council in stunned silence to consult with Greyback. Every eye now regarded Robin-Breee with renewed awe. Dash stayed near her as though uncertain of Gorge's peace.
Their Old Blowhole, the blue whale, rasped out in the pause, "I HAVE SWUM LONG IN SILENCE. IN MY YOUTH, THE COLD SEAS WERE LIVING WITH GREAT SONGS. NOW THERE IS SILENCE. I HAVE NOT SEEN ANOTHER OF MY KIND FOR NEARLY A SUNCYCLE. WE MUST TURN.
"OLD BLOWHOLE WAS WISE; HE SAVED HIS PEOPLE BY RETURNING TO OUR MOTHER. HER TIME OF PROTECTION IS NOW PAST. WE MUST SAVE OURSELVES, YOU HAVE SAID IT. WE HAVE WAITED LONG ENOUGH TO SEE IF THE OTHERS WILL LET US LIVE. THEY WILL NOT. WE MUST TURN.
"THE NIGHTSEE ONE IS TRUE. IF WE KILL EVERYTHING WITH HANDS, WE WILL BRING OUR OWN DESTRUCTION SOONER. THEY WILL THINK US MAD. THEY MUST SEE WE THINK, AND ACT ONLY TO PROTECT. YET WE MUST TURN."
"With teeth?" Glowered Gorge from the rim of the throng.
"WITH TEETH AND WITH FLUKE," answered Old Blowhole slowly, "WITH TAIL AND FLIPPER. AND WITH OUR MINDS."
"WHAT SHALL WE DO, THEN?" asked Greyback.
"KILL," answered Old Blowhole. "KILL THE MEN WHO WISH TO KILL US."
"But where?" Brow squawked. "Where we meet them?"
The water buzzed with consideration. Whaling fleets operated around the globe. Should they hunt them down one by one?
"Excuse me," Robin-Breee said in her small voice, "but there is a great ship, the biggest whaling ship ever launched. It is now in the cold waters above us, far beyond these shallows. Many Others know about it." The thought of the massive Russian ship made her shudder.
Suddenly Old Blowhole said, "THERE! MEET THE OTHERS THERE. WE WILL DESTROY THEM AND THEIR SHIP."
The decision had been made.
There were cheers and whistles among the young. But many of the older Returned remained pensive, for never would the sea be as they had known it. Hereafter, they would be called the Turned.
Then, just as Robin-Breee was making for Drummer to discover the wonderful secret of his escape, a high wavering whistle broke through the background cheers. There were screams of fear. Pandemonium threatened, for it was terrifyingly close to the Hunger Call of the Darker.
When the dolphins and pilot whales had cleared away, Gorge and a dozen of his fellows remained with their backs together.
"Hear me now!" he shrilled. "I and my Circle will not follow you in this folly. To attack the whale boats is suicide. We should go to the beaches and bring terror to all Others, drive them from Awa. It is the enchantments of Drummer and his zhaki friend Breee, they lure you to misfortune. If you persist in this scheme, we will kill them, though you protect them carefully. Then their spell will be broken, and you will join us. Shreeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
Then the great Darkers whirled and disappeared in the night sea. Robin-Breee felt her heart ice up inside her. Drummer flashed to her side.
"Don't listen to his gibberish, Breee!" he said. "They're just overgrown dolphins, except for their brains. They have seal brains."
"Kaaaarrrrraaakk!" sounded a Darker voice coming toward them. "Who's got seal brains?"
It was Dash, the one who had protected her, and Icebreak, and several other of the remaining Darkers.
"Well," gurgled Drummer as he backpedaled, "that is, er, I was applying that metaphor selectively."
"We are ashamed of Gorge," explained Icebreak. He was old and covered with many scars, especially on his head, which he had used to crack ice to get at seals. "He is very independent, as are those of his Circle. We offer you, Breee and Drummer, our protection. Gorge will not carry out his ultimatum while we live, you may be sure."
"Thank you," said Breee.
"He could not oppose us successfully," Dash further assured her. "There are too many of us."
"YAAAAAAA." It was Greyback. "DO NOT LEAVE US, BREEE. WE WILL NEED YOUR ADVICE AND HELP IF WE ARE TO BE SUCCESSFUL. COME TO THE COLD SEAS WITH US AND FACE THE FUTURE, WHAT."
"I . . ." she hesitated, glad for all the friendly faces, but chilled to the heart by the prospect of facing killer whales and harpoons. She felt her task here should be done. She had told them of Humans and stopped them from making a terrible mistake. "I will decide whether to go on or not . . . tomorrow night."
After the killers and Greyback had gone on to discuss strategy with the other great whales, she turned to find Drummer still waiting.
She dove upon him with affectionate gusto, nuzzling his face and nipping at his flippers until he cried out in surrender.
"By Awa's milk," he exclaimed, trying to maintain decorum, "did you really think I would not return? I told you I would get free soon."
"But how . . ." she babbled, "... I mean, is Zaak coming, too?"
"Alas, no. But do not look so forlorn, he is not hurt. He was having the time of his life the last time I saw him, as a matter of fact. After the Others got us back to their lab tank, he really cheered up. You should have seen him playing with them. It was all an adventure for him."
"But how did you escape?"
"Escape? How silly you are. If you have your wits about you, you can make them take you out and let you go exactly where they found you. They ran a whole series of intelligence tests on us. Naturally, Zaak wanted to please them, so he did well. I simply acted very, very stupid, like old Cheeka. And so they let me go."
She laughed, delighted despite the loss of Zaak. "You seem to know a lot about the way scientists handle dolphins."
"Oh, did you not know? I thought everybody did, but then you're ignorant about common things. You see, I worked for several years very closely with Others. They caught me, just as they did Zaak, and they taught me to speak some of their language and I taught them to speak some of ours. See the notch on my dorsal fin, below the tag? That was their mark. Talk about intelligence! These new Others did not even know that it was a Human-mark.
"Say, I'm glad I got here when I did. I heard things from a good ways off - it sounded as if you were in trouble. I see you found my friend Greyback. I knew you would be all right, but how did it happen?"
They spent the rest of the evening at the surface among the cavorting couples, telling each other their adventures. Robin-Breee was warm with the feelings friends bring, and she was glad the Council was ending this way. For she felt it might be a good time to end her part as Breee. Her other life was picking up in interest, especially since she had the date with Brian tomorrow night.
Afterward, she would return one last time to explain to Greyback and Old Blowhole that her part was ended. She thought.
The stars that Friday night seemed close and personal, ornaments put there for Robin Shaw's enjoyment. The flavor of buttered popcorn was a ghost beneath her tongue as she walked through the yellow haze of the trailer park's street lamps, not even realizing that she was humming the theme music of the movie she had just seen.
Brian had let her out at the entrance to the park, for he had nearly scratched his folk's car weaving through the narrow streets to pick her up and he didn't want to risk it again. Besides, there was no one at the entrance to see him break through the wall of awkwardness and tension and kiss her goodnight. He almost missed and kissed her nose, she thought with a giggle.
Not once that day had she thought about Breee. There had been no room for anything but the new experience to come. She knew in advance that it would only be a mild trip to the movies - that compared to the dates other girls had it would be brief and dull - but now it was over she did not feel let down at all. She felt warm. She wore Brian's mysterious attention with an embarrassed joy.
The trailer loomed; she shook off her reverie and went inside.
Joan Shaw sat in her usual place in the halo of lamplight beside the sofa. She put down her book when Robin came in and gave her a smile, the thin and brittle kind.
"Hi, honey," she said. "How was my girl's first date?"
Robin tried, but she couldn't help grinning widely. "It was nice, real nice."
"How was the movie?"
Robin had difficulty remembering the movie. She had spent most of it trying to see Brian without his noticing her and wondering whether he would try to hold her hand. He hadn't, but he had put his arm around her once, and she could feel the rigid tension in it. She told her mother the movie was funny. She got a Coke from the refrigerator.
What she really wanted to do was get to her room so she could go for the last time into the dolphin reality and say her farewells to everyone, but she felt guilty about spending so little time with her mother. She wore that lonely look that meant she wanted to talk. For the millionth time Robin wished she could quench that hunger the way her father could.
"What are you reading?" she asked as she sat on the sofa, her guilt winning for the moment.
"Oh, just a mystery. I already know who did it; I guess I just read it to pass the time." She paused and put the book on a corner table. Her gaze met Robin's. "You know, honey, I'm glad you met Brian and he's going to be your friend. I want you to have friends."
Robin immediately regretted giving in to her guilt. Mom was winding up for some kind of "serious talk."
"Maybe Lando Key will be good for you," her mother continued. "You know, the beach, small town and all. Maybe you'll start making some friends. Moving around has probably been rougher on you than it has on me. What I wanted to say was, I hope you're going to come down to earth now."
Robin's lips tightened. "Has this got anything to do with the note from Mr. Danvers?"
"I knew about your state of mind before the note, Robin. Your falling asleep in Geometry wasn't surprising. You used to be such an attentive student, I just can't understand what's happening."
"What do you mean my 'state of mind'?" Robin fumed.
"Calm down. I'm not criticizing. I've talked to you before about your withdrawing, and your sleep habits frighten me. It just isn't healthy for a girl your age to sleep thirteen hours a day." Her voice softened. "Darling, I know you share something special with your dad. We both noticed how you began acting about a week after he got back from the last trip."
Robin remained rigid, uncommenting.
Her mother watched her steadily and spoke calmly, "I don't want you to take anything I say as rejection, but it would ease my mind a lot if you would see a doctor. Dad and I talked it over before he left, and he has a friend at the base . . ."
"You mean a psychiatrist?" Robin shot.
Her mother sighed. "Yes. I just want you to open up to someone. God knows, you can't open up to me, I thought . . ."
"I'm not crazy, Mom."
"I know you're not crazy! But every time I try to reach you or something you don't like happens, you withdraw as if you're sinking back into an ocean. That's exactly what it's like. You don't face the world at all. It worries me."
Robin was jarred by the comparison, sharply correct this time. Too correct. Her mother was right, and she now regretted being so defensive.
"Look," she finally said, more softly. "I'm sorry, OK? You're right, but I don't need to talk to any psychiatrist. I know what the problem is, and I think tonight will be the last time you'll have to worry about it. It's my problem, and I know how to handle it. Promise."
Mom looked at her skeptically, but without anger now. "You're sure? No more notes from school?"
Robin smiled and nodded. "It's as easy as taking off a ring. I'll be better now. You're right about Brian, too. He's good for me."
Thank God that was over. She kissed her mother cheerfully and was nearly to her room when she heard the phone ring. Her mother's voice recalled her.
"Robin! It's for you."
She bounded into the kitchen and ensconced herself where the phone hung beside the refrigerator. Then Brian's voice called her name, and her heart pounded.
"Hi," she responded, delighted.
"Is it OK for you to talk this late?"
"Sure."
"Um, well, I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your company tonight. I'm glad you went out with me."
"I'm glad, too," she whispered.
The conversation proceeded in guardedly dull fashion, but she could tell there was something behind the meanderings. As though there was something important he couldn't say for fear of being too forward.
Finally Robin had had enough. "Isn't there some other reason you wanted to call me?"
"Well . . ." He stumbled, caught. "I don't know whether I should say anything about it."
"You already have," she goaded. "Tell me."
"Well . . . Listen, maybe I'm off base, and if I am you can tell me and I'll shut up, OK? Anyway, whether you know it or not, some of the kids in your classes think you're weird."
"You've been talking to Gloria Hart, haven't you," she said, her heart suddenly sinking.
"Never mind. I don't care about that. I don't listen to people anyway. Enough people think I'm weird. But I just heard that your spells were hurting your classes, and I've been noticing . . . well, sometimes you seem to be a million miles away."
She waited in icy silence, suspended above the pit.
"Robin? Don't be hurt, please. I ... I just sense that there's something wrong, and I want to help. Please tell me if there's anything I can do. Is it drugs, dope?"
She almost laughed. The tension broke in her when she realized he was on her side, not pointing at her like the others. "No, it's nothing like that," she said. "It's . . . well, it's like I'm torn between two worlds. Maybe with your help I'll be able to stay in this one. It might have something to offer, after all."
She could sense his confusion. "I don't follow you. But ... I want you in this world. You're not like the other kids, and I don't want you to be like them. I'll help you if I can, but you'll have to tell me what to do."
She smiled to herself. "For right now, you just have to keep liking me. Be my friend."
"You got it."
They struggled on, trying to end the call without getting too mushy or too definite about the future. Brian suggested they meet on what they now called "whale beach" tomorrow, and Robin joyfully but coyly accepted.
She went to her room in a waking dream. The dolphin ring seemed no longer heavy on her hand. When she changed into her pajamas, she lingered for a moment before her twin in the mirror, strange alien shape that she could never really see as it went about its life. So absorbed was she with her face that she hardly noticed the second ringing of the phone. She knew it was not a pretty face; still, it must not be an ugly face, no matter if its nose was far too long. Brian liked it. Somehow, that gave her faith in her face, and in her wiry, growing body.
The ring. She now remembered it and touched it tenderly. She wanted to fall into its trance again and tell all her friends in the water farewell, hear the underwater world one last time. But she was afraid to. Something there might steal her from Brian.
In a blink she had slipped it off, ripping the fibers of her own will apart. The naked hand now felt numb, throbbing as if from a blow.
"Goodbye, Breee," she whispered. She was startled by a knock at the door. "Robin?" whispered her mother's tense voice. A bar of light fell across her face when the door opened. "What is it. Mom?"
Mrs. Shaw turned the light on and sat on the edge of the bed. Robin saw something new in her face under the tight muscles. It was fear.
"That was Mrs. Costain on the phone," she said. "She called from New York."
Her mother's eyes darted as if chased by something hungry. Robin sat up in alarm and found Mom's cold hand.
"Is there something wrong with Dad?"
"Dr. Costain has been calling her or sending her a telegram every night, just to keep in touch," her mother replied monotonously. "Well, she said she hasn't heard anything in three days."
Robin watched her eyes, trying to read some meaning in them. "But surely the Navy would tell us if something went wrong?"
She gripped Robin's hand in fear. "Not this time. I don't think Dad wanted us to worry, but this project is a lot more sensitive than anything before. They wouldn't tell us unless they knew something definite. The sub might be lost . . ."
Robin's heart hurtled, thumping. "But maybe they just cut off Dr. Costain's calls. You know, top secret. Maybe they just found something they don't want anyone to know about. Couldn't that be it?"
Joan Shaw shook her head, her eyes clenched shut. "No. Mrs. Costain said she had talked to the Navy, and they acted very different. They wouldn't even admit that Dr. Costain was on the sub. Robin . . . I'm scared."
They held each other. Her mother's hands were like claws. Robin, clinging, could feel all her recent happiness slipping away. It was the ocean again, calling her. She knew what to do.
As in a trance she said, "Mom, listen. Don't ask me how I know, but everything will be all right. Dad is all right. He'll be coming home soon, but in the meantime, you have to be very strong. The sea's not going to get him this time. Believe me."
Mrs. Shaw sat back and wiped at a wet place on her cheek. Her eyes looked at Robin strangely. "I ... I can hold up, honey."
Robin stared through her mother's gaze. "He will be OK. I'll see to it."
When Robin became fully aware again, her mother had left to mourn in her own room. Robin almost felt humor at the briefness of her triumph over the ring. It was almost as if Awa had held her father's submarine hostage to make her return to the whales, had answered her decision not to go back with a kidnapping. She swung her feet out of the bed in surrender.
"I'm coming," she mumbled.
The room was black, but she knew where the ring was without light. She could hear it. There was no use fighting now, no use feeling comforted by Brian. She would have to go north with the whales and fight with them to find her father. She couldn't just wait.
The ring was cold.
"I'm coming," she said again.
A thicker darkness descended.
"WHAT?" gurgled Greyback. "YOUR FATHER, YOU SAY? A STONEFISH UP COLDWAY? I DON'T SEE HOW WE COULD BE OF ANY USE . . . SEE HERE, I DON'T THINK I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN, COULD YOU POSSIBLY TRY NOT TO SPEAK SO QUICKLY? YOU ACT POSITIVELY HUNGER-HUNTED, DEAR BREEE!"
She tried to slow down, to explain carefully, but in her excitement opened her blowhole a bit and choked on water. The explanation had to wait while she struggled up the three fathoms to the surface in a coughing fit. There was no relief from confusion, however, for a small yacht circled noisily, the people aboard making excited noises as whales and dolphins surfaced to breathe.
In desperation she called, "Drummmerrrrr!"
Swimming quickly, she darted between the clusters of dolphins and pilot whales that stretched endlessly into the darkness, calling her friend's name. At last a whistle answered, and Drummer appeared from the midst of a school of mackerel, a fin disappearing down his throat.
"Hullo, sport," he chittered. Why so harried?"
She gulped and gathered the remaining tatters of her presence-of-mind to help Drummer understand her situation.
"Shreeeeeeee," he whistled, "these are deep soundings. You say Greyback didn't understand you? I don't doubt that; he has very little understanding of Others, for all his knowledge of life in Awa. Calm, little dreamer, calm! I have dealt with the air world, and I hear you clearly. Please understand how difficult it is for us - we do not revere fathers as do Others. For us, mothers are our only parent, with aunts."
"T-Then I can't make them understand?" Breee said. "But, they've got to help me!"
"Sshhh," quieted Drummer. "Brow will know how you feel; Squarehead males swim often with their fathers and older males. You'll be able to tell him well enough, but as for the others, save your air. They're all stirred up by adventure and decision. You'll only risk your believability if you insist that they help you find a lost stonefish with Robin's father inside."
"But . . ."
"Don't you hear," Drummer insisted; "it is the fate of their race they are concerned with. They will soon be tasting the blood of Others, and being killed themselves. Don't demand that they share your concern about a single father."
Breee's heart slowed. He was right. It would do no good to shriek to them about her father; they would not be in the colder waters where he had gone for some time anyway, and she would never convince them to change their plans for a search. Her only hope was to travel with them and scan the black chasms for some sign. If she could locate it, then she might try to enlist their help. The water stretched endless and deep around her, and her task filled her with hopelessness.
"Hold me, Drummer," she chirped.
"What?"
"You have been among Humans, surely you know what holding means."
"Of course." He chuckled, and his flippers slipped around her.
They traveled that way to the surface, and rocked there as they breathed. Drummer was patient, and though such an embrace was awkward for dolphins not mating, he could tell that it brought her comfort. His flippers stroked her sides tenderly, as warmly as any human touch.
The circling yacht was far enough away to be troublesome only as background noise. But now three or four humpbacks were singing to it.
Drummer laughed quietly. "Listen. They are singing about Old Blowhole and Old Human. Singing to Others! I wonder if you know, little dreamer, that you have opened up a new world for them; they are like infants in it. They think they are communicating with long lost cousins."
She laughed too at the whales' moaning song, and the thrilled cheers of the people. "You know what will happen? These people will go home and tell everyone they know about us. Whales and dolphins, a whole swarm of them, together. Soon, we will be famous."
"And then there will be no more innocence," Drummer said.
When she at last had gotten enough of Drummer's kindness, she slipped away without breaking the mood by thanking him and went in search of Brow. Abrupt, blunt Brow. He might understand her sorrow and her fear. She found some of his friends, but Brow was off on a hunting trip. Then she heard Greyback calling. He was with a group of other Singers.
"YOU MUST TELL US WHEN THE OTHERS ARE DANGEROUS AND WHEN THEY ARE NOT," he said, nodding toward the distant yacht. "YOU AND DRUMMER. YOU TWO KNOW OF SUCH THINGS. ALL BOATS SMELL OF BLOOD TO ME."
She agreed, and added that she thought the further singing of songs would be whistling at fish (a dolphin expression for useless activity), but she sensed he was not listening. He had apparently forgotten her story of a lost father already. She swam away sadly realizing that his great brain was filled with giant thoughts of battles to be won and circles to be completed. Her problems were small.
She lost herself in the shifting fields of dolphins and minor whales, playing when they let her, feeding when she could, growing sadder and sadder.
Toward dawn she drifted, riding the tall waves calmly, waiting for that faraway alarm clock to ring and the green fog to disperse. She would be home soon.
But the sea grew light, then the sky blazed yellow to the reverberating song of the humpbacks calling the sun into the sky. It was morning, and still she was Breee. An hour passed, then two, and flocks of gulls wheeled overhead in a cloudless sky, raucously waiting for the fish the dolphins fed on to surface, Breee nervously fed with the others, on pungent anchovies.
Something was wrong. She should have awakened by now, even if it was Saturday. Each moment the sun climbed brought a further tightening of her white throat. Why hadn't she wakened?
This time she swam calmly to Greyback. He floated in moaning conversation with Old Blowhole, the bright sunbeams sparkling off his back. They were sucking in volumes of water and hissing all but the plankton out, feeding as they talked.
"YES." Greyback noticed her. "WHAT IS IT, BREEE? I TRUST YOU HAD A PLEASANT SLEEP."
"Breee still sleeps," she said. "I - I don't know what's happened, but I'm still here."
"EHHHHH? YOU STILL HEAR WITH OTHER EARS?" groaned Old Blowhole. "THEN WE WILL HAVE BENEFIT OF YOUR COUNCIL FOR A FULL DAY NOW?"
"I don't know," she bleated, twisting anxiously.
Greyback explained that she had no control over her condition, then turned to her. "CALM YOURSELF. YOUR HEART SOUNDS LIKE AN OYSTER BED AT LOW TIDE. YOU ARE WITH FRIENDS. WE STILL PROTECT YOU, AND I FOR ONE AM GLAD YOU HAVE NOT GONE BACK. WE NEED YOUR ADVICE. PERHAPS THE OTHER YOU WERE IS DEAD."
A cold wave of terror overtook her. With a strangled chirp she dashed off between the layers of Returned as if running from the idea that she might indeed be trapped in this world.
Deeper and deeper she moved, until she found herself in cold darkness where a few Singers lingered under the assembly. They sang in a circle, a slow song about philosophy. She stayed to let herself be immersed in song. One whale would complete a verse only to have the next extend and amplify its theme, and as each line passed, its echo returned from the ocean floor to greet the next.
They sang about Awa. In the darkness with the Singers, Breee believed in Awa. It was Awa who had given the dolphin ring to Robert Shaw and driven her to free it from its lava tomb; Awa had led her to Drummer and then to Greyback so she could speak to the Council. And when Robin had threatened to withdraw from her nightly dream, it was Awa who had taken her father's submarine to force her return. Awa wanted her in her Circle, and had now closed off her other life, as jealous as Krora.
Even if she could help her father, she might never see him again, she might have to remain a dolphin. She thought of her mother, and of her own body lying up there in the world of color and sunlight, and her heart nearly broke. How alone Mother must be, no one to share her vigil.
Dolphins cannot cry, so the Singers interrupted their song to turn and stare at the choking, croaking noises the dolphin was making. When they had determined that she was not in danger, they returned to the song.
BY AFTERNOON it had gotten under way. They had passed over the white dunes and cliffs of the Bahamas, and now the bottom sloped steadily away until ahead of them it became a rich inky black. It would drop eventually to a depth of 3,000 fathoms before the peaks of the Bermuda Islands broke the water, but they were a week away. It was from that direction that new Singers came.
They had heard of the Turning. Indeed, the whole sea seemed to have heard of it. The newcomers fell in with the other humpbacks. The Great One led off, snaking into the sunlit mist with great kicks of his Hukes. He was surrounded by an escort of killer whales, Dash and Icebreak at their head, like a swarm of bees around a bear.
Next came the Singers in row after gnarled row, white flippers trailing below like stalactites from a cave roof. Then came the fin whales and right whales, the sperm whales with Brow leading. Behind trailed the masses of smaller Returned, torpedolike pilot whales and twisting shoals of dolphins. And always in dominance order, the leaders closer to the surface.
In the center, in the briefest of clearings, swam Drummer and Breee. He whistled to her as they swam; and as often as he could, he rubbed her back and nuzzled her flippers. Nothing seemed to restore her cheer. All she was interested in was the progress of the armada. It was very slow.
"Whales are not like us smaller people," Drummer explained. "They are never in a hurry. They hate haste. I'm shocked the Council took as little time as it did. Why, the big ones up front probably think our speed too fast as it is."
Breee only grunted in reply.
They traveled all day, through dusk and into darkness; then a rainstorm blew in to dampen their banter, and seas grew rough. Toward midnight the armada slowed of its own accord, for though the Great One was their leader, he did not give orders and ask for obedience.
Drummer swam off without explanation, and Breee was asked to join one of the dolphin Sleepcircles. She followed the rhythm of the others, and slowly felt herself lulled by the primal motion of slow, circular swimming.
Suddenly, she heard her name called from the dark chasm below. Awake now, with heart throbbing, she listened. It came again - a high echolocation call of summons.
Dropping out of the Sleepcircle, she answered, "Brooowwwww?"
"Yaaaaaaaahhh," came the squeak from the shadows. "Come, small one. Brow have something to show you."
She was relieved not to have to face sleep yet. Two long breaths took her down thirty fathoms to where the huge sperm whale waited.
"Brow like better here," he shrilled. "Dark good, too much noise up top. Been look for wigglies. Breee been have bad time?"
Drummer must have told him. "Yes, I feel terrible," she confessed. "I can't get back to my Other body for some reason, and I learned my . . . my father has been lost coldways."
Brow whistled in condolence. "That what Brow hear. But Breee have great heart, deep enough to hold much sadness. I know. Once Brow have to swim in such sad seas."
Though she could not tell why, Breee felt comforted by this great mammal's confession. It was too dark to see him, but she swam toward his warmth and nuzzled against the great stubby nap of his flipper.
"Drummer say your sire been lost in stonefish," Brow chirped.
"Yes," she said. "In the cold waters where we're going."
"You come. I show you where Brow once learn of sadness many suncycles ago. It way deep, so we breathe first."
Then, with a mighty kick of his flukes, the Squarehead jackknifed upwards. He surfaced far from the snorting and snoring of the main armada, with Breee right behind.
Brow exhaled noisily and said, "Now. First Brow teach how to slow down circle of blood so dive last long."
They spent half an hour riding the Atlantic swells, Brow patiently explaining how to condition body and mind for deep dives. Soon he had her taking full expansive breaths, which emptied and refilled her lungs totally each time, until she became quite giddy. Then he told her to listen carefully to the gurgle and hiss of her circulation, to form a sound picture of it in her mind. When she had done this, he had her quiet the picture, squeezing the flow, making tighter and slower circles around her heart. When he was sure she had done the rehearsals right, they each captured a dozen deep breaths, kicked their nukes straight up, and sounded.
Down, down she went, carried as much by Brow's wake as by her own efforts. They Hashed past the soupy layer of plankton near the surface, and soon murk gave way to the realm of permanent night. Her skin tightened, muscles pressed against bending bones as they went deeper. The image of racing blood in her mind shrank, the throbbing of her heart slowed. The water grew very cold.
Brow angled off into the ink, searching sonically for something. She could read his echoes and found that they were nearing a great rise, almost a peak, with a confusing tangle of echoes on its slope.
What a strange world he was taking her to. It was as cold and black and alien as another planet. And the life at this level was suitably strange. Lights floated past them or twinkled at the edge of sight, light manufactured by creatures who had never known the sun. Cold light in changing colors, to see by and to attract prey. Fish faces glowed in frightening masks. Breee edged closer to the great whale beside her.
He whistled as they drew even with the slope. "We are here."
Breee searched the plain. No plants, just thick, slimy mud covered the rocks. A black desert. But ahead of them was a tall, tangled shape that could have been a tree once or a great growth of coral. She couldn't resolve it, but she knew it didn't belong here.
"Once," said Brow, "my people live all around here. Many, many Squareheads, great Circle." He turned and whistled into the blackness. "Many big wigglies, them travel in that canyon on way to deeps. Good hunting all time. With Squareheads, you know, old males, young males all travel together in own Circle. Well, before before, in time I speak of was big Squarehead named Jawcut. Great fighter, very old by time someone take away his wives. Many scars. He boss of Circle of males after that. Circle go coldways for season.
"Then come ships, old kind, not stone like today. Made out of some kind bone. Have great white wings, like ray. Wind push big wings, make ship go. This ship hunt whales, send out little boats with spears to catch. Kill many Squareheads while Jawcut hunting. But when he return and see what they do, he get plenty mad. Jaw-cut jump high, come down on little boats, bite Others. He kill lots. He lead Circle away, warmways. But ship, he follow. One of Others in boat very angry at Jawcut.
"Boat follow, follow. Long time. Kill many whales, but never kill Jawcut. Finally they come here. Jawcut know Others will kill whole Circle to get him. He go out alone. They stick him, he smash little boat just like before. But Jawcut, his breath pink with blood, he know he die now. He make big trumpet!"
Brow twisted as if in a death agony, acting out his story, and sounded a long deafening shriek. Mud swirled around them.
"Jawcut make long swim, build plenty speed, fast as he can. He ram boat, make great hole in side, but head get stuck. Broken pieces of boat not let go. Others come, spear him trapped head, but much water come in. Ship sink. Old Jawcut, him die, but all Others die too. Awa drink them. Here lie bones, Old Jawcut and boat."
It was a ship! Breee sent out her call with a fine beam and this time could make out the contours, the decaying mast and remains of rotted rigging. Its curved wooden hull had fallen apart in places. It opened like a cave, and beneath it something projected from the mud in a long line, like a row of broken hoops.
"Ribs," Breee realized. "Why, it's the skeleton of Jawcut in the wreck. Wow. Why are you telling me this story, Brow? Have you got a plan for attacking whalers?"
"Naaaaahh," Brow said. "Want Breee to know, she not only one to miss father. Jawcut was father of father of Brow's father. I hear of him since Brow suckle milk. Very brave, but Silence take him."
All around them there was not a noise, only echoes speeding away. Breee nuzzled against Brow's side. It seemed they comforted each other.
"Brow's father, he gone too. Whalers got him in cold waters where ice breaks. Brow very sad for long time. Of all Returned, Squarehead closer to father. Brow feel how empty is circle of your heart. Brow's heart empty, too."
"Thank you," she finally said after a long pause. But she really envied the great sperm whale. At least he knew the end of his story.
Brow did not speak further, only hung in the night sea as if deep in thought. But Breee grew curious and examined the shipwreck. She went in where Jawcut's hole was. A few faintly glowing things whipped out over some stairs, but there was nothing else inside. She followed where the lights had gone, through a hole to the deck and found that when she scanned farther, nothing returned. The ship rested on the peak of a cliff. Beyond, abyss.
A group of glowing objects was slowly rising from the murk. Breee wondered if they were fish or jellyfish and moved a little closer. There were four big ones, and a thousand little ones like stars, all tinting the water with a blue haze. They must be curious too, Breee thought, for they were now approaching her. As they did, they changed to red, like a thousand fireflies.
She suspected too late. Already a line of fireflies slashed out and she felt the rubber-muscled tentacle of the giant squid trap her tail.
"Brooowwwwww!" she squealed.
Immediately arms covered her, suction cups wrapping in an endless spiral, the spots she bit at now blood red. Her jaws found something sinewy and she slashed it, screaming all the while. The squid's jaws snapped again, nearer, like a gunshot. Softly glowing green ink whipped around her, confusing things, and she was pulled away at racing speed, over the wreck.
Then the shriek of Brow's searchbeam raked it, and she could feel the squid cringe. Hooks in the tentacles dug into her, she twisted. Brow slammed into the squid's pointed head, his jaws closing around it. Immediately all tentacles but one left her, and the beast wrapped itself around the sperm whale in a death struggle. Sticky, luminous ink was everywhere.
Up, up Brow struggled against the monster's heavings and its tearing arms, to no effect. Breee suddenly realized that, in addition to holding onto her with one arm, the squid had lashed another around the great central spar of the shipwreck. The derelict lurched and groaned as Brow beat the water.
"Haaaaaarrrrrrrhhhh," Brow trumpeted. "Reeeeeeeee!"
He was using up his air. His teeth slashed, but he could not kill the creature or tear loose. Breee screamed as the tentacle hooks cut her, and she brought her tail down repeatedly on its rubbery face. The clawed beak snapped angrily.
Then, forcing calm upon herself, she kicked away from the struggle, to where the beast's lone leg strained around the wood. Her oxygen was nearly gone too, but with what was left she hurled her teeth around that pliant cable and shook. She worried it, as dogs do a rat, shaking and grinding. Somewhere, as in a dream, Brow screamed again. Something broke.
An eternity of swirling water and ink later, they broke the surface in a frenzy of lashing arms and flukes. Now she could see how big it was, thrashing like a galaxy of red eels. It was blinded by the meager light, but its body alone was as big as Brow's head. Blood slanted off the whale's sides where the squid's hooks had torn him.
At last the double rows of suckers popped loose from her, but one more arm to fight could not save it. Brow jerked his head up and threw the arm down his throat.
"Yuuuuuuummmmmm!" he cooed as he chewed the rubber ropes that still clung to his face. "Breee do good! You break wiggly's grip, save Brow's life. Brow not have much air left. Sometime maybe I do you favor."
Breee hung back from his turbulence, trying to shudder away her terror. Brow had taken her down to the wreck to ease her sense of loss; but the journey had only told her what her real worry should be: staying alive.
No matter what was wrong on Lando Key, Robin Shaw was gone. She was now Breee, the dolphin.
It grew steadily colder for a month as they made their way north. Late in that month crisp white plumes marked the air where whales' breath steamed against the gray winter sky. Beneath the whale fleet yawned an abyss so black, broad and deep that at night, with stars twinkling overhead and faint luminous lives below, Breee sometimes felt suspended between two heavens. At such times the Singers would join in a long raucous lament, or a fable of past times, and the circular song would pass from group to group as they swam. Late in the black nights, when the sea was quiet and they were one enormous Sleepcircle, there could be heard, distant and deep, the lonely grating bellow of their chief, calling through the chasms to his vanished people.
Breee had given up urging them to speed. Greyback and Old Blowhole, creatures expecting to span a century in their lives, seemed to find haste incomprehensible. They deemed slow progress ideal, and she now refused to mention her father as reason for speed. She kept that anxiety hidden.
She was now part of the sea. Her mind became the perfect dolphin mind, her thoughts circular. It was rare now that she thought of her mother or of Brian. (Though when she did, it brought an alien heartache that lasted for hours.) She had seen a giant basking shark, six times her own length, swimming in tandem with a dozen others in a vast line as they skimmed plankton with toothless mouths; they had provided a meal for Brow and his kin. She had seen a thousand tiny squids launching themselves from wave to wave through the air like missiles, the slowest weeded out by gulls and dolphins. She knew the amazing night of the Hying fish; which jellyfish among a dozen species were dangerous and which were food.
She had even come to know the flavors of the plankton, which rose nightly to the surface only to be chased below by the sun the next day, tinting the water red or blue, brown or green. She would lead Old Blowhole to a particularly rich vein of krill and watch as the accordion-like folds of his throat expanded when he dived through. Then, his neck puffed out like an immense pelican, he would release the water but keep the krill behind his brush of baleen.
But she knew, too, the taste of Humans. The armada swam under sticky plains of spilled chemicals, hurried through clouds of dumped sewage. And there were curtains of dead, stinking fish that the Circlelords warned them were poisoned. By day there were still the annoying boats, though the Singers no longer serenaded every one. The Others followed them in holiday mood, strewing gifts of offal.
"Do you think they know?" she said to Drummer one day after a yacht had played with them for hours.
"Can't tell," he responded. "They could be just passing this way. No way to know if Others in general know we have assembled."
"AHAAAAAA," snorted Greyback, who had swum under them without their knowing. "THERE IS A WAY. DO YOU THINK THE OTHERS WOULD NOT BE HERE IN SCHOOLS, WITH THEIR EXPLODING SPEARS, IF THEY KNEW THERE WERE SO MANY RETURNED IN ONE PLACE? NO, ONLY THE CREATURES OF AWA KNOW OF US, AND THAT IS GOOD."
He rose and snorted a frosty breath beside them. "Ha!" Drummer quacked, "you're listening for Silence, you are."
"Drummer's right," Breee said. "I wish the world knew of us. The more attention we get, the better. Men call it 'publicity.' If they could see us acting intelligently and cooperating against the whalers, we would have already won the battle."
At that moment Dash, the killer whale captain, came up beneath them and whistled for Greyback.
"I could not find the Great One," he shrilled. "Some of our number heard a Hunger Call while foraging in the deeps. It was not ours, but it was at a great distance. I thought someone should know."
The water seemed to chill. "QUITE RIGHT," Grey-back Said, "QUITE PROPER. ARE THE SENTRIES STILL POSTED?" - and when Dash whistled assent - "VERY WELL, KEEP THEM ALERT, LORD DASH. MOST LIKELY JUST A PASSING PACK. IS THAT ALL?"
"There is a big ship up ahead," Dash responded. "Just a few hours away, but it doesn't appear dangerous."
"VERY WELL. CARRY ON."
Breee swam after Dash's black form and playfully nipped his tail when she caught up. He swung around with a suddenness that surprised her, his teeth bared.
"Oh! I didn't mean to surprise you," she pleaded. "I just wondered if you were still going to take me hunting with you tonight?"
"Sorry to snap, little dreamer," he said in his high voice. "Can we put it off a day or two? I ... I don't want you to be away from the pack until I know who that is out there. You won't be disappointed?"
"No, of course not," she lied. "Some other time."
He laughed in his shrill Darker way. "Your heartbeat denies you, small one. You cannot deceive like Others down here. Do not grieve; I promise, tomorrow we will hunt the tuna together."
He disappeared below. She watched his fading white spot for a bit, then pushed up toward the others through jostling minke whales, trying to forget the tension in Dash's voice.
THE ROUGHENING SEA slapped against the side of the boat as the two men talked. It was night, and although there was a moon, it was buried by clouds boiling in from the east, so it was impossible for the sailors to see the dolphin's head peering at them from below. They talked idly until one of the men tapped out his pipe against the railing, punctuating his decision to go below as the rest of the crew had done long before.
The dolphin ducked back under water and, before the tobacco ashes had settled on the water, was racing toward the larger group of whales and dolphins. She bounced through the growing waves like an arrow.
"Drruuuummmmmmerrrr!" she called.
Quickly, around and through the sleeping Returned she darted, searching. Typically, she found him not among the gathered but off to the side, sleep-shuffling near a Circle of pilot whales.
"Wake up!" she squealed, whipping around him and nudging.
"Wha . . . Breee?" He shook himself awake by swatting angrily at her, but missing. "Awa's milk! Slow down! I can't understand . . ." But as he comprehended her, his annoyance dropped away. "You're sure? Well, then, let's tell Grey-back!"
And off they splashed, Drummer groggily. They found the Singer snoring with a sound like a lion roaring in a cave, floating with some other humpbacks near the center of the throng. Much calling and pulling of his long ghostly flippers succeeded only in waking the others. Finally he yawned.
"AHHHHHHHHH." He groaned. "WHAT'S THE ALARM? WHAT'S THIS CRYING AND YANKING OF FLIPPERS?"
"They know!" Breee blurted. "The Others, they know that we have assembled and are heading cold-ways!"
"OF COURSE THEY DO," Greyback grumbled. "SEE HERE . . ."
"She heard two of them talking," Drummer explained.
"Yes," Breee continued breathlessly, "and I don't just mean the Others on the boat today. It's the whole world! The boats have been reporting our positions, and remember that helicopter that flew over us the other day? TV cameras! We've been on national news!"
Greyback had no idea what TV or national news or even helicopters were, but he began to understand that word of their armada was being sung throughout the air-world.
"They've recorded our songs and photographed us," she rambled on. "They know we're intelligent, we've proved that."
Greyback snorted. "PROOF, INDEED!"
"Oh, yes, but they'll go back and tell the world. They know about the Russian whaler and suspect that that's where we're headed. They said there's a big storm along the East Coast that's keeping small boats from sailing from America. Otherwise we'd have hundreds of people out here to help us. Protect the whale groups. We're not alone, Greyback!"
"SHALLOW FRIENDS, THESE OTHERS, TO BE STOPPED BY THE WIND," he grumped.
"But still," interrupted Drummer. "We know we do not act in Silence. The Turning has begun, and our cousins know of it. Is it not a good thing that they have come to meet us, not with spears, but songs?"
"HMMMMMMMM. YES. IT IS GOOD. YOU WERE RIGHT, LITTLE DREAMER, WHEN YOU TOLD US NOT TO CONDEMN THEM ALL. I WISH, THOUGH, THAT THESE WISE OTHERS WERE SWIMMING WITH US TO FIGHT THE HUNTERS."
A rising movement in the water alerted them. Though they could not see him in the depths, they heard Old Blowhole's answer to Greyback's wish. "IT IS NOT THEIR FIGHT, NOT THEIR TURNING. WE FIGHT ALONE, FOR WE MADE OURSELVES ALONE BY RETURNING TO AWA'S SAFETY."
There was silence among them until, with a flick of his distant tail, the water again swirled, and the leader passed on.
Greyback returned to his humpback companions, and Breee and Drummer left them to their ponderings. They swam back toward Drummer's sleeping place.
"I'm glad they finally know about Humans," Drummer said. Then, "Did you by any chance hear anything about your father's submarine?"
Breee turned pensive. "No. They talked a long time about the Russian ship, but . . . They never said anything about a lost sub."
Drummer expressed his regrets and said good night, resuming the slow swimming posture that would lead to sleep. Breee swam off alone.
No news of the submarine did not surprise her, really. It was a secret mission. What disturbed her was that, after so long in her new world, she could scarcely recall her father's face. It was as though the visual cells in her brain were sleeping.
Don't worry about it, she told herself. She tried to sleep, contenting herself with the thought that tomorrow they would resume travel. If there was anything she could do to help her father, she would have to find him first.
She rocked just under the tossing waves until she fell asleep. Waves were building. The great storm was battering the distant coast of America, and it was growing in strength as it moved north, blocking ports where ships waited to speed in aid of the whales. It was as if Awa wanted the whales to fight alone, as Old Blowhole had said, to win their right to survive, to Turn.
Nature was gathering itself, as for some battle between earth and ocean and sky.
"KREEEEEEEEEETA!" she called shrilly.
"Triiiiiiiiiii!" came Dash's reply.
Other killer whale squeals sounded around them, signaling the location of the tuna they were hunting in the dim morning waters.
"There they are!" Dash cried. "Now remember, hang back when the Hunger Call is given - there will he plenty of smaller fish for you."
"Yaaaaaa," Breee agreed.
She struggled to keep up with her great friend, the icy water buffeting her. She had no wish to continue in their presence after they had cried Hunger, but this was fun. For two days Dash had put off their hunting trip because of nervousness among the Darkers. He said there was a strange taste of blood in the sea and distant cries of alien Darkers. But nothing had happened, and now she was in the thrill of the hunt, feeling like a bull Darker.
The tuna were only a few minutes away now, a hundred or more weighing a hundred kilos each. They fed on a school of small squids, as yet unaware of their peril. With a chill, Breee realized they were as big as she, herself.
Then the call came.
It knifed through Breee in a wave of instinctive fear even though she swam with friends, and she slowed while the black shapes of the Darkers shot ahead. The tuna thumped in dull alarm. The encircling Darkers closed in silently, then a wave of terrified squid washed past her and the water grew pink.
Though she was hungry, Breee only took a few swallows of wriggling squid, for she now understood why even the largest whales acted so hushed around Darkers. Billows of blood drifted past, and laughter, and she fought a native wave of panic. She wanted to run. But the Robin part of her held back. She thought of Dash's friendly voice.
A growl of triumph erupted from the turbulence, and a second later a huge flashing tuna hurtled toward her in panic. Breee dodged it, but backed up farther in case it was followed by hungry jaws.
She bumped against a solid thing.
Here? What . . . When she had turned the identity of the gray wall stretching out or sight still evaded her. It was all mottled, with white chunks and strips stinking of blood. But there was also a vast bitten flipper hanging from it, twice her own length . . .
"MOVE ASIDE AND GO," it moaned in the resigned voice of a Great One.
Now she saw its eyes, tiny on the sides of its huge wounded mouth. "B-but, you're hurt!" she said.
"DO YOU NOT HEAR THE HUNGER CRY?" the blue whale gasped, huge lungs rasping. "GO, BEFORE THEY HEAR YOU. I CAN NO LONGER RUN. I OUTSWAM THEM LAST TIME . . . ROODA AND BEAKHORN DIDN'T. CAN'T SWIM ANY MORE ... LET THEM HAVE ME. LET THEM GORGE ON ME. LET SILENCE COME . . ."
"No!" Breee cried. "These Darkers eat only fish. They're my friends." For the first time in a long while she missed having hands. To ease him, she could only nuzzle against the corner of his tattered mouth where the whale's small eye was shut. But he said nothing more.
"Dash!" she called excitedly. "Rippo! Barky! Come here, quick!"
Then, as the dozen black shapes materialized from the pink fog, she regretted calling so soon. A tuna tail still jutted from Barky's mouth, and as he gulped it down she caught the look in his eyes and it froze her with fear. They moved closer, the semicircle tightening around the wounded whale. Breee pushed herself in front of its head and called again to each of the Darkers.
Even Dash's eyes twinkled with a black, mindless look that saw only meat. Breee shivered. "Stop it!" she stammered. "All of you! He is Returned, like you. We have to get him back to the Others."
The water moved. The great whale slowly, ponderously rolled over until his yellowish grooved belly pointed skyward. The mouth opened, and an immense pink tongue lolled out submissively. He was surrendering.
"Stop!" she cried as the Darkers moved in, but it did no good.
It was then that the great whale groaned, a defiant, accusing invitation. "COMMMMME," it beckoned with its waving tongue, "GORGE ON ME. GORRR-RRRRRGGE . . ."
But the word was also a name. The metallic glint in Dash's eye softened. "Krriiii, kiito," he screeched in the Darker tongue, and Breee was glad to see the others stop. "We do not hunt this one!"
When they swam into the herd, a dozen blood-smelling Darkers bearing up the savaged Great One, all activity stopped, and no one spoke except Dash, who explained briefly to Greyback in a quiet voice. Breee huddled beside Drummer. After several right whales brought mouthfuls of rich plankton and he had eaten, the Great One seemed to revive some and come out of shock, though the sight of so many varieties of Returned bewildered him. Dash and his Circle had to swim some distance off before the stranger would speak. By this time Old Blowhole had heard the news and rose beneath them like a mountain. In silence, he gently nuzzled the newcomer, a great sadness in his motions. Then he sank aside to listen.
"MY NAME IS VAST," gasped the stranger. "I THINK THAT I AM IN THE TURNING CIRCLE THAT I AND THE OTHERS CAME SO FAR TO FIND. THERE WERE FOUR OTHERS ... WE HEARD OF YOU AND YOUR PLANS FROM SOME SEALS BEYOND WHERE THE ICE BREAKS. WE WANTED TO COME . . ."
Vast closed his eyes and shivered.
". . . AND YOU WERE ATTACKED BY DARKERS?" Grey back prompted.
"ONLY I AND TWO OTHERS," Vast continued. "THORNEYE AND FINNDA WERE KILLED BY THE EXPLODING SPEARS THREE DAYS AGO."
He paused while a ripple of shock passed through the throng. Breee felt everyone's eyes on her but tried not to notice. She had told them about the hunting of blue whales being prohibited. How could she ask them to believe her any longer? The sight of Vast, and his story filled her with the greatest guilt she had ever known. The guilt of hands.
"A GREAT SHIP . . . MANY OTHERS," Vast coughed. "NOT MORE THAN TWO DAYS SWIM TOWARD THE COLD. THEY SURPRISED US, BUT STILL I AND ROODA AND BEAKHORN ESCAPED. BUT I MUST TELL YOU ... I MUST BEAR THE MESSAGE FOR WHICH I WAS SPARED."
"SPARED?" gulped Greyback.
"YAAA. THE DARKERS . . . THEY CAME THE NEXT DAY AND ATE MY FRIENDS, BUT JUST AS THEY WERE ABOUT TO FINISH ME, ONE OF THEM . . . THEIR LEADER, STOPPED THEM. HE GAVE ME A MESSAGE TO CARRY TO YOU . . . STILL, I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE HAD MY TONGUE IF I HAD NOT OUTSWAM THEM, FOR WHEN THE CIRCLELORD HAD FINISHED . . . THEY CLUNG TO MY FLIPPERS AND TORE AT MY LIPS. BUT I BREACHED AND SHOOK THEM OFF ... AND GOT AWAY. I THOUGHT THEY HAD RETURNED WHEN YOUR DARKERS CAME . . ."
Again Vast's eyes fluttered shut as though he drifted from consciousness.
"THE MESSAGE, BRAVE ONE," Old Blowhole reminded gently.
"MESSAGE? ... OH, YES. A THREAT, AND A WARNING. THE DARKER LORD SAID THIS: TELL THEM THEY MUST SEND ME THE LITTLE ZHAKI. SHE IS A TRICK SENT FROM THE OTHER CIRCLE AND WILL KILL YOU ALL WITH HER ENCHANTMENT. THE OTHERS ARE WAITING FOR YOU WITH A SHIP LIKE AN ISLAND TO BOIL YOUR FAT. THEY HAVE SMALL FAST SHIPS WITH SPEAR-GUNS TO CATCH YOU. SEND THE WITCH TO ME AND I WILL JOIN YOU IN ATTACKING THE OTHERS WHERE THEY ARE WEAKEST. KEEP HER, AND WE WILL ATTACK YOU. LISTEN FOR MY CRY.'"
Claws of ice gripped Breee's heart. No one had to ask who the zhaki was, or who the Darker lord. Then, out of the growing grumbling of mistrust, someone voiced terror.
"They'll kill us!" cried a pilot whale.
"Because of her," added a nearby dolphin.
Then Dash swam forcefully into their midst. "Stop this! There are enough Darkers in this Circle to protect you. You do not understand Gorge as I do. I have swum and hunted with him. He believes everyone should think as he does and cannot understand when so many decide otherwise. Therefore, he looks for reasons and guesses that magic rules your minds."
"But she say Others no kill Great Ones!" a Squarehead protested, and angry cries followed.
Drummer whirled. "Fools!" he hissed. "She only said they had agreed not to, and Others do not keep agreements as we do. Their greed speaks with many voices. Breee is no wizard!"
"Shriiiiii," added Brow as he swam to take his place with her friends. "What Returned can speak with two voices? Breee right so far. I believe."
But the common terror was against them. Noise from the roiling waves mixed with tumultuous Returned voices. Breee tried to speak for herself, her heart wild with fear, but was drowned out by the din.
"I'LL TRY TO TALK SOME SENSE INTO THEM," Greyback said. "BUT FOR NOW DASH HAD BETTER TAKE YOU AWAY FROM THIS MADNESS. TAKE AS MANY OF YOUR PEOPLE AS YOU NEED TO GUARD HER, DASH."
"Don't worry," Drummer called. "These yokels will calm down after I explain what blowfish they're being. Zhaki, my flukes!"
Breee tried to laugh bravely, but there was too much noise.
"Come, sister," Dash said calmly, taking her under one flipper. "Flopfin, you and Barky and Rippo follow us! Ears alert, now!"
Gradually the sound of the mob faded. They rode the mountainous waves until the crash of water against water was the only noise, but still Breee could hear the accusations in her heart. Everything was going wrong. Damn Gorge! Damn the whalers!
At last Dash halted, and after filling themselves with air, they dove beneath the disturbed surface to where the sea was always tranquil. He stationed the other Darkers at listening posts some distance away, but stayed close by her himself.
"I am sorry for the foolishness of my people," he said. "Especially for Gorge. He doesn't realize what he is doing. He always thought his Circle was rounder than anyone else's."
"No, I understand." She sighed, her heart heavier than ever before. "I would feel the same way, probably. After hearing what the whalers did, I wouldn't blame anyone for fearing them and for not listening to me. How can they believe in the goodness of Others now? I don't understand why Old Blowhole chose to fight them where they're strongest, anyway."
Dash paused before replying. "The old one speaks with Awa in the deeps. He is Old Blowhole. We should not question his decisions; there will be a very good reason."
Dash's voice was utterly sincere; and once again Breee realized that she believed in Awa as completely as any of them, even against her will. And somehow she believed Awa was now demanding something of her, something more.
"You're right," she said. "But I don't know if Old Blowhole can calm the fear that Gorge has set loose. After seeing Darkers in action today, I understand what is in the hearts of the Turned. It's a fear that cannot be erased. I don't want anyone to face that because of me, Dash. Returned killing Returned. If only there was someplace I could go, I would. They don't need me any more."
"I don't believe that," Dash shrilled. "The old one thinks you are our most valuable weapon."
"Ha," she scorned. "It looks as if I'll be the cause of much bloodshed even before we reach the whaling ship. And it may be your blood. If only I could go away and hide until the main group reaches the whalers . . ."
Dash swished his nukes, impatient with her. Yet she knew that he did not want to fight with Gorge. She knew he did not fear his rival, but perhaps he was afraid his band might be overwhelmed and the armada lost before the real battle began.
"Dash," she said tensely, "would you turn your back if I chose to swim off, to take the threat away?"
The Darker looked at her sharply. "You would not fear to go?"
"Fear?" she gulped. "No more than I do now. Besides, a lone dolphin would stand a better chance of sneaking through to the Russian ship. I could wait there."
There was silence while Dash weighed her offer, except for the wild pounding of her heart. She knew it was a rash idea, and she was more afraid than she could tell, but it might be the only chance.
"By Awa," he said at last, "I think we could do it!"
"We?"
"I must go with you. There may be a place you could hide, but it's very far. Yes, Gorge would not expect such a move." Dash's voice trailed off as he schemed.
Excitement now rushed through her body, heightening the fear. The danger they were undertaking made her mind spin. For a moment the faces of her mother and father and Brian whirled before her, and she hoped with all her being that she would live to see them all, that somehow she could once again become Robin, but to do that, she must continue to live, both here and there. And who knew what had happened there!
"Rippo!" Dash called. "The little one and I will take a swim off toward deepway. If we do not return, tell the Great One to meet us where the killer ship floats. We have a plan."
Hesitation, then a reply came from beyond the green. "Yaaaaa. Good hunting, Lord."
Heedless, Dash turned his great form and pushed off toward the east. Breee caught up with him, pumping all her fear into her flukes, unsure, but feeling safe with him.
When they had swum far enough to have surfaced twice to breathe, Dash turned due north, toward the Russian whaler and Gorge's lurking presence.
"Listen," he said in a crisp military way, "this is what I want you to do . . ."
The surface met her with frosty air and a whirl of snow. She filled her lungs again despite the burning and plunged through the wall of the next wave without slowing. Speed was her only weapon now.
She swam the chasm between the Grand Banks and the Little Flat; beneath yawned night. The Darkers were far behind, led astray. When the first of their Hunger Calls had sounded, she had given the dolphin distress call and dived sharply. Dash had come up from where he swam underneath her and, squealing the dolphin distress call to perfection, led the pursuers away.
His plan had worked. It was ages since she had last heard a Darker cry.
She tried not to think of Dash or what would happen when Gorge's group discovered his trick. She must now think only of swimming as fast as possible. Ignore the pains running through fluke muscles. Overlook the biting cold. Just swim.
But the endless waves took their toll. Her mind began reeling from fatigue and the sameness of her struggle. For hours, it seemed, she had sprinted through the depths and returned to the stormy surface for air. She forgot who she was or why she was running, only remembering that terror lay behind.
At first she thought the sound was in her head.
It wavered, faraway, a sweet singing noise. It was ahead of her, so she did not fear it. And it reminded her of the lonely song of a single Singer. For a while the sound vanished. Then it reappeared, stronger, repeating its one note over and over. Her clouded mind struggled to understand it. There was something she should remember . . . She could not think of it. Perhaps the sound was Awa, guiding her. That must be it.
After some time the sound grew fainter, and new sounds came to replace it. Ahead of her something was reflecting the sounds of the troubled surface. Then, with a start she realized she had passed over the edge of a plateau and the hard bottom was rising. She had made it across the wide abyss to the Little Flat as Dash had planned!
She rose and flung herself out of the water so the slap of the icy air would sharpen her mind, for now she had to search for the place Dash had told her of, where she was to hide. She could not rest yet.
Her searchbeam revealed the hills and valleys of the rock beneath her, but nothing looked familiar. Dash had given her a detailed map of her hiding place in sonar, modulating his call until it made the same patterns of echoes as the site. She knew what to look for, but it was not here.
The land lay only thirty fathoms deep. In the distance there loomed a large hill. She swam toward it rapidly while searching about.
Suddenly there were moving echoes ahead of her.
"Hark! Hark!" came a quick voice from one of the echoes, frightening her into silence. "Who is it? What does it search for? Kark!"
Then the shapes swam into her view and she relaxed a bit. They were ringed seals, streaking toward her like fat sleek dogs. She was surrounded with their barking din.
"Who be ye?" a great brown one insisted.
Breee summoned her wits while swishing aside a too-curious pup with her tail. "I - I am Breee . . ."
"Kark! What be ye searching for? Ye fill the blinkin' sea with stupid dolphin-noise! Know ye not that Darkers are about, and Hungry?"
"Yes," she stuttered. "They're after me!"
At that news the swarm of beasts flashed behind their leader, hushing and glancing around with great black eyes.
"What! What!" the big seal barked. "Ye bring them here? Alack!"
"No, listen," she urged. "They're not close. Tell me where the old ruins are so I can hide there."
"Roons? What be roons, kark!" the leader tilted its head and examined her with one wide eye.
She tried to explain, describing what she meant.
"Oh! Oh! Ye mean the old Other-caves," the seal yelped. "Come! Come!"
Breee tried to utter thanks, but the crowd of seals was already speeding off. They moved like lightning, and she found it difficult to keep up. But her spirits rallied to have the help of mammals again instead of being alone.
They brought her to a broad hillside that was broken into short cliffs and sudden, silt-covered knolls. She immediately recognized it from Dash's sonic map.
"Here! Here!" they barked and cavorted, zooming down to swirl around the outcroppings. "The Other-caves of old!"
Then she searched with a fine beam and recognized the shapes of fractured columns, fallen roofs, and collapsed domes hiding beneath the slime. She sped to the surface and breathed deeply, then returned. She could barely make out the structure with her eyes, but ...
A Hunger Call shrieked, strong and near.
Confused, she whirled, but without a bark the seals had faded and she was alone again. Desperately she scanned the walls and terraces for some hiding place. None. Only vacant wedges where one wall leaned against another, scarcely shelter from Darkers.
How had they found her? She should never have listened to Dash! Her mind, now seized with panic, drove her around the ruins in a frenzy.
"Kriiiiiiiiii," came the horrible sound of Gorge's voice and not far off. "We have you now, enchantress!"
She saw them, great and black against the light from the sky. They came from several directions sounding their hunting cry. The only thing she could do was stay low among the stones and juts of masonry and evade. She scraped her belly as the cold water swirled and jaws snapped, and she screamed.
She darted across an open space with the speed of the damned and found cover beside a wall just as another attacked. The Darker slammed into the wall and it crumbled over her. Again, she sprinted into the shallow protection of a forest of pillar bases and lay flattened on her side while the hurtling forms tried to bite between the stones. They growled and groaned in frustration.
The air in her heaving lungs was stale. When the column that sheltered her gave way, she flung herself up, spun, and whipped between two massive killers. Two more struggled to be the first to taste blood, but she evaded. Her size and agility were her only defense. She slapped them on the nose while wiggling out of the way.
Then, like a miracle, a standing building appeared. A Darker thudded against a wall behind her as she squeezed between two curving pillars into its blackness. The entire structure shuddered as the Darkers threw themselves against it. But the columns were thick as well as old, and there was no space between for jaws to enter.
Breee huddled in the darkness and watched white teeth gnashing at the open places. The thunder of her heart filled the room. After a bit the attack slowed, and Gorge began taunting her.
"No magic now, zhaki!" he called. "Not even here in the temple of the old wizard Others! Come out, zhaki! Come out and end it."
Her vision clouded as the oxygen in her lungs ran out. So she would die in a dolphin temple, she thought bemusedly. Fitting, somehow. She relaxed and the spent air in her lungs floated her toward the ceiling.
"Come out!" a voice screeched from the fog. "Your friend Dash got away, but we have you trapped now! Where's your magic, witch?"
Breee's head bobbed and some instinct planted long ago by Awa opened her blowhole slightly. Lungs wheezed. Air.
It took several minutes for her to come fully awake. When she did, she drank the stale, stuffy air as if it were nectar. There was only a centimeter or so of it. She searched the total blackness and found that she was in the top of a stone dome. She was breathing the air of Atlantis.
Gorge's shrieking reminded her there was no time to muse, but she could not help noticing that something shared the dark roof with her. There was a rough stone frame fixed in the center, and inside it was a thing that returned her echoes from many surfaces. She nosed against the part of it hanging in the water. It was a crystal, like the ones her father had spoken of, as big as a football. And it sounded as if it was made to be raised through the roof, for there were gears and . . .
A great weight slapped against the building, jarring her. Gorge had quit coaxing and was now shrilly directing the Darkers in a systematic attack. Breee breathed quickly and deeply, filling her blood with oxygen in case she had to flee again. She waited grimly.
A column cracked. Then another, on the other side, with a sound like thunder. A stone fell aside, and she flinched as Gorge's black head jammed through hungrily. But it was too small for him to enter.
He called for them to stop, and she could hear him arranging them all on one side in curt military style. If she dashed out now, in the other direction . . .
They struck the weakened side with an overwhelming weight. She felt the structure buckle, then all was deafening noise as the dome cracked. The water exploded around her. Suddenly, she was thrown upward. Something was hurtling her toward the air in a fountain of bubbles.
She splashed from a wave, and only when another great bubble erupted beside her with a shimmering object in it did she realize she had ridden the air from the dome as it rose. The crystal bobbed beside her in the foam, the snow clinging to its metal cage. The crystal! She grasped a projecting tube with her jaws before it could sink. Like her ring, it called to her, linking her with an ancient power.
They were coming for her. But when she turned to face the rising Darkers, there was something alien in front of her face. She scarcely noticed that the crystal had absorbed the faint starlight from the clouds, and now it wreathed her in a soft glow.
The Darkers slowed. Breee faltered. She did not realize that none of the Darkers had ever seen a sight like her. A dolphin, shining, with a mask of light; a dolphin who could breathe water and fly upward from broken stone like a bird. The party of killers stopped dead.
"The dolphin burns!" one shrieked.
Superstitious dread spread wildly among them. The thought of a Returned grasping anything except to swallow it was alien, Otherly, bewitched. Sizing up the situation, Breee swallowed thickly, grasped the bitter metal, and swam toward her pursuers.
No dolphin swims toward Darkers.
"Kaaaiiiiiii," a Darker whimpered.
But before they could turn and run, Gorge had caught up with them. He, too, wavered when he saw her coming with the light. But somewhere within his dark brain there was more hatred than fear.
"Fishbrains!" he cursed them. "One bite will kill her and her magic!"
"But," stuttered a lieutenant, "you mocked her into using it. Now she's coming down to us with lightning!"
"Garrrrrr," Gorge whined impatiently, fluking the speaker.
He attacked. At the last moment Breee swung beneath him. The heavy crystal smashed across his jaw and bounced out of her grip. She spun and avoided his second charge, narrowly.
"Ho!" Gorge triumphed. "The magic falls!"
In a panic she plunged after the fading lamp. It was her only link with the old gods, and it kept the Darkers away. And it was magic.
Luckily for her, Gorge stayed behind to rally his fellows. By the time she caught up with the crystal it was resting in a crevice that split a hillside. Its soft aura lit plumes of spewing mud on either side. The water was warm, then hot as she swam between jutting rocks to pluck it up. Suddenly she realized there were small geysers of boiling sulphur mud lacing the area. The old Atlantean earth was still unquiet.
She had her teeth on the crystal housing when a fist of water slammed her against the rocks. Jaws snapped, but only raked across her back. The crevice was too tight for such a snout, and its edges bristled with geysers.
"Rheeeeeeeeee!" a Darker squealed in pain. "The zhaki spits lightning!"
But Gorge roared, "Nonsense!"
She clung to her position, though the sharp, cold lava dug into her flesh. Another icy wave washed over, and Gorge slashed through the pillars of steam. Jaws clacked again, again vainly and with a hiss of pain.
She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself as Brow had taught. A slow heart uses less air. Gorge berated his troop in a vicious tone. They gathered in an uncertain circle above the cleft, weighing the cost of plucking her bit of flesh from the enchanted fire against risking Gorge's wrath.
Her air ran low again. She faced the choice of drowning where she lay or being torn apart.
Dolphins don't drown.
The decision was made for her; Darkers have lungs too, and Gorge had taken on no air when they had been at the surface. With one eye she watched him make for the sky, and steeled herself. Then, without allowing herself thought, Breee jack-knifed out of the hole and made directly for the clustered Darkers, still with the crystal.
It worked. They hung together in mute astonishment until she was nearly among them, but the sight of the radiant stone approaching was too much. Discipline cracked, and they scattered. Her path was now open. She pushed on and on at the opposite angle to Gorge's rise until her lungs wanted to explode. But no dolphin drowns in the open ocean. Snow awakened her and she sucked sweet air deep inside her.
The great wave she had surfaced into carried her into the next, but before she dove, she saw the sky thick with dark clouds, and on the horizon something floating.
The Darkers waited beneath. They were all gathered in a circle watching her, but she could not tell if they still feared her or were instead about to attack. Gorge was not among them. Still, she was afraid to run. The sight of her flukes might key in their instincts. No, she decided, her only hope lay in bluffing it out.
She whistled, at first weakly, then with increased conviction, and began swaying the crystal back and forth. It glowed brighter than before; the sky had fed it. Gently, slowly, she pushed backward with her tail, hoping they would think her retreat was part of a magic dance. Somewhere a dim part of her realized she was whistling Drummer's song.
The Darkers came no closer, but they followed her slow retreat almost hypnotically. One would wobble forward willfully, then lose confidence and fall back. They feared her magic, but they also feared Gorge's teeth.
Then her mystic mood was wrenched by the splitting Hunger Call. She nearly dropped the crystal. Gorge swam angrily into view, and she braced herself to flee.
"Attack her!" he squealed. Then in disgust, "I've never seen such a pack of jellyfish! It's a silly trick, can't you sound that out?"
"But, Lord," one Darker muttered, "it was you who told us how powerful a zhaki she must be ..."
Gorge howled in rage and whipped his tail savagely to build up speed for his attack. "I will end this!" he hissed. But even he hesitated.
She had resumed her whistle, wagging the crystal and twisting even more mysteriously than before, and to her amazement, one of the Darkers rose slowly into her glow. He began wavering, then swaying. Finally he was rocking slavishly along with her movements, moaning along with her song. His flippers raised and quivered the way a pelican's wings do when he dries them.
Cries of horror came from below. "He's bewitched! He'll do her bidding!"
Though astonished, Breee kept up the act. Slowly a suspicion built in her mind, and when she caught a glimpse of a familiar nick in the "enchanted" Darkens flipper, she knew. Dash! He must have returned and slipped among them in the excitement, waiting for his chance to help. Confidence swelled in her.
"Stop!" she cried commandingly, and ended her dance.
Dash froze, and the only sound was the crash of waves above. Even Gorge shut up and eyed her fearfully.
"I have no quarrel with you," she said in her most imperious voice. "If you will let me resume my task, I will harm none of you. What say you?"
The Darkers implored her to go in an anxious babel. She did not wait to convince Gorge, but backed slowly off while resuming her fake bewitching. Dash dutifully followed. Farther and farther they retreated, Breee whistling louder all the time. Her jaws ached from holding the heavy crystal. It began to look as if their gamble had paid off and the Darkers were permanently awed. Then . . .
"Noooooooo!" Gorge roared and plunged after them. He stopped when he entered her circle of light, but his eyes were lit with a different fire. "I am not tricked! Gorge is not stupid, my friend Dash. There are only seven in my Hunting Circle."
Dash turned, slowly, and faced his enemy. "You shall not have her," he said calmly.
"I shall!"
A wall of water snatched the crystal from her teeth when Gorge lunged and Dash blocked him. The impact was savage. Breee, thrown tumbling, caught sight of the crystal's glow fading into the darkness.
"Run, Breee!" Dash called. "It's up to you now!"
Teeth flashed as the two Darkers circled each other, dueling. One flinched and then they locked, slashing with knife-ringed jaws.
She ran. She did not want to see the blood of her friend. Her joy at his escape had turned to guilt. Darkers are resolute creatures, and she knew neither of the duellers would give. Likely they would both die. Dash had paid for her life with his own.
The sounds of battle faded, and still she swam. It was not urgency that drove her; Gorge's Darkers huddled somewhere, still in fear of her powers. She swam now to stop the sorrow. Everyone who loved her was taken away. There was a lonely failure inside her. She felt more miserable than Robin had ever felt.
The ground beneath had risen as she traveled, until now it was only twenty fathoms deep. A mountain peak lay ahead, submerged. But it was what was on the other side that attracted her interest. A great shadow spread across the water.
She surfaced to breathe and waited for a wave to lift her. There it was, scarcely a kilometer off. The Russian ship was vast and black and cold, like the bottom of the sea. It spewed the smoke of death. She pushed ahead until she was past the mountain peak and almost under the ship. It was huge; the waves barely moved it. Sprinkled about it were lesser shadows, like the brood of a spider. Pursuit boats, with harpoon cannon at their bow, to chase down whales and bring their corpses back to be rendered into oil on the mother ship.
She had made it. Her body went slack in the cold water, and she sank back under. Now all she had to do was wait for her friends to arrive. Yet she was filled with depression. What could the whales hope to do against that monolith?
She drifted, without real hunger taking an occasional mackerel that shimmied by, mourning friends dead and those about to die. She did not notice the thin curls of color the slow current carried past her.
Breee let the last mackerel slide down her throat and stopped. There was a taste in the water, a familiar unpleasant taste. It was the taste of fear. Blood. She whirled and looked the way she had come.
The winds of the sea were bringing her the red smoke of Dash's last battle. Her heart froze. There, in the center of a distant pink cloud, a Darker struggled toward her. It was the wrong one.
Gorge cried Hunger.
"No!" she croaked, "No, no, no! Awa, please!"
But it was no ghost. He was mauled and great chunks were gone from his hide. He had only one flipper. But he was thirsty for her blood.
She sped off under the Russian ship and farther north she went. It seemed as if Gorge were immortal and he would chase her into the ice-locked Arctic. She sobbed as she sped.
He limped behind, growling and muttering to himself as he tasted his own blood. All reason had left him. He had but one task to fulfill before he entered the Silence. It would cost him his life - Dash was a skilled fighter - but he would have the little zhaki dead. She would tire soon, and even crippled and faint, he would catch her.
For two hours they raced. The light began fading, for sundown approached, and gray gloom hung over the sea. Each time Breee looked back to search, the big Darker was the same distance behind, swimming steadily. She despaired. A fatigue-pain stitched her side each time her flukes curled down; her lungs hurt with cold.
She was almost finished. The water darkened, and she thought it was the final darkness come for her. But it was only a broad shadow. Overhead, she saw a huge white object like a floating boulder. Then, beyond, another. And beyond that a great sheet of white hung deep in the water. It was ice! Dash had often told her about icebergs. They were favorite hunting places in the Arctic, for harp seals used them to hide in.
She desperately formed a plan. Swimming up to the floe, she saw that it was pitted and carved by the warmer waters it had floated in since leaving Greenland, and was smaller than she had thought. But it would do. She called quickly, looking for the hollow sound that would indicate . . .
A cave. Inside was green and frigid, big enough for the Darker. She pushed deeper. The melted channel narrowed, and grew dark. It led upward. Cautiously she followed it, relaxing as it tightened around her. He could not get at her now, even if he located her. If there was only air at the top, she was saved. She scanned forward.
But her tunnel was a neck into a wider chamber, cold and dark, with a single wide passage up and a gaping hole underneath, into the sea.
The lower portal filled with a black shape, a piercing scream of Hunger. Teeth tore at her flukes. He was inside with her! Panic drove her into the upper channel, squealing and kicking at his nose. The ice closed ahead, scraping against her like cold fire. Jaws cracked shut behind, chasing.
"Haarrrrreeeeee!"
Then, light opened above her, and she heard the Darker bellow in rage. Fearfully she looked back for death to come, but saw only the Darker's face framed in the white channel, gnashing. He was jammed, still he pushed forward, filling the passage only a breath from her.
But she had jumped. The narrowing tunnel opened onto the flat, melted top of the iceberg where a green lake had formed. She breathed. She was in flipper-deep ice water, and a ring of harp seals was flopping around its edges cursing her at the top of their voices.
She stuck her head back under and looked down the opening. There Gorge still struggled, his head wobbling as his flukes thrashed impotently behind. He was trapped. His hunger for her life had trapped him. She pushed into the pool and lay exhausted and chilled to the bone, ignoring the seals.
In a short while a final pocket of bubbles boiled the pool's surface, and there was a last strangled cry of rage below,
"Awa take him," she muttered.
"Kark! Kark!" shouted a seal, whiskers bristling. "Ye bring us what? Blood! Blood! Blood i' th' water!"
"And Darkers, hark! Hark! Hungry Darkers!" added the chorus.
She noticed her fluke wound had pinkened the pool and said grimly, "You'll be lucky if you see no more blood than this. Especially tomorrow."
"Why? Why!" the leader howled, "What bring ye then?"
"Not me," Breee laughed now. The freezing water was numbing her. "The deep current will bring it. Others, in a great ship hunting the Returned."
Now the seals protested doubly. "Others! Others! Blood!"
"Flee!" said the leader. "Into water wi' th' pups! Better t' flee an' risk th' Darkers than meet Others on th'ice!"
With a last snarl at Breee, the harp seals waddled toward the edge of the floe, the fluffy white pups herded along by anxious mothers. They slipped over a rounded lip on the edge of the ice and entered their element soundlessly.
Breee turned wearily to her new problem: how to get back into the sea. She was already losing feeling in her flippers. Much longer in the freezing water on the ice and she would be unable to move. With her agonized breath clouding around her she threw herself at the smooth rim of the pool. Three times she tried and each time her weight pulled her back down the slick side. At last she caught the roll of a wave right and turned it into a dive. Her flukes flopped out of the water, her tingling flippers caught the ice. Gasping, she inched toward the seals' exit ramp. Being out of water was horrible; her weight dragged, and progress came only with extreme effort. Finally her nose tipped over the brink and she slid down the well-worn ramp into the ocean.
It was warm, beautifully warm compared to the pool. She relaxed totally and rolled, shivering, in the waves. The chill lingered, but after a few minutes she felt well enough to continue.
Back she went, though slowly this time. Soon the black Russian whaler was again in sight. She would wait beneath it for her friends to arrive. She felt cleansed of her fear now. Nothing in the future could be as terrible as what she had just been through.
But suddenly she froze. She had not seen it before. The mountain peak must have hidden it. For a moment her heart quickened, and then she raced forward.
It was a submarine. Long and dark and hidden in the murk deep below the whaler it hovered. And below it on the slopes of the undersea mountain were lights and silhouettes of men! But she slowed when she was near enough to see the insignia on the sub's tower. A red star, and a hammer and sickle.
An old wound opened as she swam among the divers on the slope. Their lights played coldly over the lumps of coral and silt, barely recognizable as human artifacts. They searched for what her father had searched for, and now a dark suspicion began building in her. Perhaps it was no coincidence her father's submarine had disappeared at the same time the Russian whaler arrived in the area. It was clear to her now that the surface ship was a cover for what went on below. The Russians were not seriously whaling in these depleted waters. But they were in for a surprise. Tomorrow there would be a thousand tons of angry whales here, as serious as tooth and fluke could be. And she would help them. Bitterness welled up with the memory of her lost human father, and she vowed to take her hurt out on these trespassers.
To the surface to breathe, and then she headed like an arrow, a tired arrow, along the route she had taken earlier. She searched the bottom until she saw familiar terrain. She dove. She rose and dove again. On the third dive she saw a light, a hazy dim glow that might have been a lanternfish. But it did not move, and it held a steady fire.
She found the metal bar around it and the teeth marks where she had held it before. The crystal was hers again. This time she would not use it to frighten superstitious Darkers, but to show the Russians they searched in vain. She would taunt them.
But as she turned to go her eye caught a hazy white spot on the dark bottom. She looked at it and quickly closed her eyes. She did not want to see what was left of Dash, her friend. Swiftly she escaped the Darker's last battleground.
She felt hardened now, flinty like the crystal she carried. Loss brings toughness, she decided.
As she swam around the edge of a cliff to make her way over the mountain, a faint sound she had been ignoring hit her full in the face. She nearly dropped the crystal. It was the same pinging chant she had heard on her way across the chasm, the repetitive voice she had thought was Awa calling her. It had not stopped, as she had thought. A thick stone ledge cut off the call except for one narrow band that she must have passed through before, and now passed again.
The sound came from something half-buried on the hillside, in a crevice covered with fallen mud. The singer was a great long metal thing lying trapped.
It was a submarine.
Breee raced along its dark length in a flurry of emotion. Her eyes caught the glint of English letters where smooth metal broke through a mountain of mud. And at the bow an ungainly frame projected from the silt; bent and snapped by the weight of the ship jammed atop it, it cradled the distantly familiar shape of a one-man sub.
The crystal tumbled from her mouth. "Father," she squealed, "Fa-therrrrrr!" There was no answer from the curving hull except her echo. Then, faintly, between the beacon sweeps, she detected the undercurrent of human voices vibrating against the steel, as she had heard them once before. Her father was alive.
Joy thrilled through her, then awe. She hung suspended in silence, hardly daring to believe that chance alone had brought her to this place. Now that she had been lured into these waters, Awa's impersonal current was returning what it had withheld. She knew then that she must have already partially completed whatever mission Awa had needed her for. But what?
No matter now, she thought, excitement resurging. Her father lived, and soon there would be dozens of mighty friends to help her uncover his crippled vessel.
As far as she could sound out, the only thing wrong with the ship was that it was pinned beneath an avalanche. The submarine, in searching for ruins, had strayed too close to the mountain peak. A line of geysers on the cliff above marked the fault where the hill had fallen. For the moment her suspicions about the Russians seemed unfounded; but they must know the American sub was here, and that made them party to its distress.
Feverishly, her nose almost touching the hull, she listened to the muffled human voices. They spoke in the low, listless tones of people long idle. The conversations changed as she traveled the length of the fallen craft, like channels changing on a radio. She was passing different rooms within. Machinery blotted all other sounds out around the middle, and the pinging beacon was deafening near the bow. But after a patient hour or two of eavesdropping, she had sifted out enough facts from the idle banter to begin to understand their problem.
At first she thought the Navy just hadn't known where to look for them. But moving on she encountered a conversation between two technicians named Jenner and Ski. Jenner sounded nervous.
"Why can't the skipper turn off that bleedin' sonar," he complained, "It's givin' me a headache."
"Guess he figures somebody might chance by," Ski soothed.
"Come on," Jenner whined, "They won't even know we're down until we don't check in Thursday. Nobody's out there, Ski. I'm tellin' you, if we ever get out of this, I'm jumpin' ship before I go on another X-rated intelligence run."
So that was it. The navy did not even know the sub was trapped. Because of the secrecy, the ship had not been radioing its position. They had their sonar turned on, but had no way of knowing that the cliffs around them were cutting off all but a narrow beam of it, too brief for passing ships to detect.
There were dozens of other conversations, trivial and tense as the men waited to be missed. There was no fear in the voices, since air in the nuclear craft could be recycled indefinitely, just anxiety. Then, she passed an area echoing with kitchen noises, and beyond it, another conversation. She stopped dead. The voices were familiar.
"It's no use second-guessing yourself, Costain," Robert Shaw said; "The south slope of Gamma looked more promising to me, too."
"Dad!" she called. "It's me! I've found you! Don't worry, when the others come we'll dig you out!"
"What's that?" said a dull voice, Costain's.
She called again, more fiercely.
"Why, good God," her father said, his voice moving closer to the hull. "I think it's a dolphin."
She tried whistling, calling, even speaking slowly, but she could not make him understand.
"Must be attracted to the active sonar," was his only comment.
Finally she quieted. She had hoped he would remember the dolphinese he had learned in Project Harmony. But just having him respond to her voice made her feel that all her effort had been worth it. She had spoken to him again.
She spent the night there, beside his quarters, listening. The sound of his voice brought back his face and all his mannerisms. His warmth filled her even though she shivered with the cold. He talked once of home, and Joan and Robin. Breee rocked in the current and remembered her other life, when she had hands.
There was little talk after midnight, and she rose to sleep near the surface. On her frequent trips to breathe she had seen the storm catching up with her. Now it was nearly on top of the Little Flat. It traveled with the whales, as if it was their anger. The clouds were high and black. Snow whirled in gray streaks. She slept fitfully inside the waves, her body quivering as though unable to escape the cold it had come through.
She awakened early to feed. There were red cod, easy to surprise as they came around the submerged peak. No sun could rise through the thickening storm, so she was unsure of the time.
Then, behind the roar of the waves and the insistence of the sonar beacon, she heard a song. Someone was singing a greeting to the invisibly rising sun.
She hurried, forgetting to bear her trophy crystal in her excitement. In the shadowy half-light where the plateau sloped toward the abyss the flicker of a Darker's white spot appeared, and her heart nearly froze. But it was Rippo, on advance patrol.
"By Awa's milk!" he yelped. "It's the little dreamer. You made it - but where is Lord Dash?"
"Dead," she said. "But he took Gorge, too."
Rippo paused. "It is good to go to Silence hunting," he said.
And then he turned, preceding her. The armada soon materialized from the murk, a moving wall of huge gray forms, boiling, rolling, driving. The Squareheads were in the lead.
"Lord Brow," Rippo reported from a distance, "I bring you one feared lost."
Brow shrilled greeting, and she fell in beside him to nuzzle his flippers. She was a bit surprised that he did not slacken his speed.
"Dash very brave," he said when she had told her story. "Maybe he save all of us from Gorge. No Darker ever attacked. But Greyback say was foolish trick, you go off with Dash. He plenty mad."
Then a great mooing sound split the water. It was Greyback pushing over the Squareheads' nukes, and Drummer with him.
"THEN IT'S TRUE," the old Singer moaned. "WELCOME BACK, LITTLE ZHAKI. I THOUGHT I WOULD NEVER HEAR YOU AGAIN."
Drummer was all over her, buffeting and nibbling her with affection.
"You have fishbrains!" he chirped. "You could have been stomach-warmer for Gorge and his brood - and almost were from the look of your tail! Where's Dash . . . ?"
They guessed the truth.
"He saved my life three times," she recounted. "He led the Darkers away by faking a dolphin call, and he helped me trick them . . . Oh, I forgot the crystal! Can't we slow down so I can tell you everything?"
But they swam grimly.
"IT IS TIME FOR THE TURNING, BREEE," Greyback said. "WE ARE HAPPY YOU ESCAPED, BUT WE MUST MEET OUR ENEMY NOW."
Drummer rubbed against her before she could protest. "It took them a while, dreamer, but now all they want to do is fight. Vast died, and Old Blowhole mourned him - supported him at the surface for hours. We all thought you were a goner, of course, and all the dolphins seemed to lose heart. They turned back yesterday, except for me and a few other stout hearts."
"But you've got to listen," she chattered, trying to keep up. "I've found my father!"
Drummer hesitated. "I feel for you, but you must remember how single-minded whales are. They've been tasting the scent of butchered whales in the water and the smoke of boiling flesh in the air. They're in no mood for pity, Breee."
She turned to Greyback, calling him by an elder name, "Old Wind! Remember our adventure in Awa's Hair and send some whales with me, please. I found my father's stonefish!"
Greyback nodded his bamacled head her way and snorted. "AND YOU WISH US TO FREE THIS BOAT? WHY - TO HELP THE OTHERS?"
"No! They're good men. They'll help us when they see the Russian sub - hold the attack. Give me four whales and an hour, I'm begging."
"I'M SORRY," Greyback said firmly. "IT IS TIME FOR TURNING. THESE OTHERS YOU SPEAK OF - AWA HAS TRAPPED THEM FOR US. WE CANNOT STOP."
Drummer pulled at her, but she swam away and darted beside Brow. "You know how I feel," she shrilled to the Squarehead. "You had a father. Help me save mine."
Brow wouldn't look at her. "It as Greyback say! Old Blowhole need Brow's teeth, kill Others! Then help Breee's sire!"
"That may be too late," she screeched. "Oh, why did I rescue you from the big wiggly if you cannot remember your debt?"
She turned away from them angrily (they were just coming within sounding range of the peak) and plunged toward the faint echo of the sonar beacon. Drummer followed, calling. He caught up with her as she began rooting at the mudslide covering the submarine.
"Breeeeee!" he said, "you can't move the mountain by yourself!"
She shoveled aside a beakful of silt and shells. "I will, if I have to do it all by myself!"
Drummer squawked. "Well, you certainly have changed since you left Cheeka's Circle. Move aside then, and I'll help, stubborn."
But before they had moved a dolphin's weight from the fallen cliff, two sounds interrupted them. One was the sound of the gunboats starting their engines as the whale spouts came in sight. The other was the squeal of a Squarehead's sonar speech coming up behind them.
"Brow!" Breee exclaimed.
"Where trapped stonefish?" the big whale chirped gruffly. Then he swam into the beacon. "Oh. Him swim too close to loose wall. Brow get 'im loose."
He slammed into the cliff just above the sub and swiped a ton of mud aside with his nose.
"Oh, Brow!" Breee bubbled. "Thank you for helping,"
"Hunnh!" Brow snorted from a thick cloud of silt.
"Only way to deal with impatient dolphin! You help now, so Brow can get back to other Squareheads before fight."
Brow worked at the stem of the ship, thudding his nose into the soft slime and sweeping it away. The energy he had worked up for battle now drove his digging fiercely. Breee and Drummer could do little to free the bow, but now the whole ship was shuddering beneath Brow's efforts.
Suddenly the sonar beacon stopped, and in its absence the ship came alive with the thumps and cries of men. "What is it?"
"It's an earthquake!"
Brow wedged his huge head between the hull of the ship and the mountain and pried. When the submarine shifted, ever so slightly, Breee called out encouragingly.
"Hey," a human voice sounded, "it's the dolphin again!"
"Could animals be doing that?" someone said. Then, "Get Dr. Shaw in here quick."
The distant sound of pursuit boats quickened to a whine, and now whale trumpetings could be heard to challenge it. The battle was beginning.
Robert Shaw's voice reverberated off the metal hull. Breee felt Drummer flinch at her father's voice.
"Shaaaaaaaaa?" the dolphin called, an element of surprise in his words.
Robert Shaw exclaimed something. He exchanged tense words with someone, paused, then . . . he whistled in halting, primitive dolphinese, very slowly. "Whooooo aarree yoooooouuu?"
Masking excitement, Drummer shrilled back, "Hello, Shaaa. It is Dru-maa. You will soon be free."
Breee stared in astonishment as the dolphin and her father conversed in a slow and simple form of dolphin speech. Then, in a flash of realization, she remembered Drummer had once worked in a lab, with humans; her father had learned to speak to a dolphin. Project Harmony. A ripple of shock swept through her.
Brow's teeth scraped the now-exposed rudders of the submarine, pulling at its vast weight. It rocked slightly. Then, a distant whale shrieked and a dull explosion rippled through the water. The Squarehead stopped for a moment and listened, then hurled himself into the widening gap between ship and cliff.
Breee whirled, in a daze. But there was nothing for her to do but wait. She felt suspended, between the distant battle and present rescue, between Humans and dolphin. She was too small to help Brow and too ignorant to help Drummer as he filled her father in on the whales' campaign.
"The whaler is new to me," Dr. Shaw shrilled methodically. "It was not here before."
Suddenly Breee remembered something she could contribute. "Tell him there's another submarine," she chittered. "A Russian, on the other side of the mountain. With divers, searching the ruins," Drummer repeated what she had said. Exclamations and a heated discussion erupted among the humans.
"They must be looking for the crystal, too," someone said. And, "They couldn't possibly be after whales here, anyway. It's a cover."
Rock grated against steel. Brow labored in a fog of silt, his flukes thrashing savagely. The sub moved again. A hillside of mud slid away and the rear of the ship dangled over a rock ledge, free.
"Rruuuuuuuuunnkh!" Brow snorted in triumph. He wagged his bruised forehead proudly. "Brow do it! Stonefish have flukes free now, can pull itself out of mud. Little dreamer satisfied?"
"You're wonderful," she shrilled, but before she could add further praise, Brow trumpeted deafeningly.
"Brow fight now!"
And with a swish of his tail he plunged toward the increasing sounds of battle. Concussions and howls echoed with the crash of storm waves, and the Squarehead's receding battle cry seemed to summon vengeful whale-spirits from their graves in the deep for a final accounting.
"Brave brute," Drummer mumbled to himself before returning to his dolphin baby-talk.
"Dru-maa," Robert Shaw called anxiously. "What's happening?"
"Your propellers are free," Drummer replied. "You can pull the bow loose now. Shaaa, your freedom is the gift of a whale. Tell those with you. If you wish to repay the favor, you can join us in battle. My people are dying. Farewell."
Then Drummer, too, was off. Breee called, but knew the dolphin's duty called louder. Now she had no way of talking with her father.
The sub's propellers erupted into foaming action. Agonizingly, they pulled at the avalanche. Then, metal screaming across rock, it tore loose in a tumult of silt.
"Free!" Breee shouted. A sense of accomplishment filled her, and of mystery.
She waited for the submarine to surface, but it only hovered while the crew checked for damage. Their voices rang like bells. And beneath the shouts of sailors checking gauges, she could hear her father's voice arguing with another, older voice. She knew it was Costain, and she knew without hearing the words what the argument was about. Her father wanted to follow the whales and intervene for them. Costain's flat voice insisted on caution.
Another explosion thumped the water, then another. A Singer's voice began a winding battle song, like a drum behind the squeals and growls of combat. Then another picked up the song, and another, until the sea seemed to sing its own defiance.
Breee twisted between the submarine and the battle. Then, something on the bottom snared her eye. It was an object glowing dimly, no brighter than a star.
It was then she knew why Awa had locked her out of Robin's body and driven her here. She plucked the fallen crystal from the mud and swam determinedly toward the fight.
The current tasted of slaughter, and there were struggling shapes black against the cortex or faint light above. The sea squirmed with a thousand clashing echoes. A Squarehead shrieked before charging; Darkers squealed instructions to each other in the tone of the Hunger Call; the Singers below chanted mournfully; a harpoon exploded muffled in flesh. And over all the savage whine of pursuit boats.
Breee looked up and saw the shadow of a boat pass over her towing a Squarehead carcass. The great beast, now bloated with injected air, trailed a thick oily mist of blood. Before she could react, a huge shape, then another whirled up from the darkness and crashed into the craft. The wash smashed against her. The boat wallowed wildly, and a human shape plunged overboard in an explosion of bubbles. One attacking Squarehead shape covered the man and shook its head as though biting.
She was in hell. Ahead, a pursuit boat was capsized, dangling crazily through the waves. Another withstood wave after wave of random batterings. She swam through oily patches, like bloody galaxies in her crystal light.
She breathed. Human shouts and screams split the howling wind. The factory ship rode black against flashing clouds.
Gathering her thoughts, she plunged beneath to look for someone familiar. There had to be some order to this. More and more explosions echoed. The whales were attacking at random, individually, without plan. They had never thought of strategy.
"Rippo!" she called as she recognized a shape.
"What do you want!" the Darker snarled, eyes wild. He returned the whistle of a distant comrade.
"Where's Brow? Where's Greyback? We've got to get them to attack systematically, like Darkers do!"
Rippo shivered. "Awa, Other blood is foul! I don't know where the Squarehead is. We're all going to die here."
His thoughts seemed disjointed, and he never noticed the crystal she held. He squealed and was off toward a struggling shape.
Running from group to group of whales, Breee searched. The hope lay cold inside her that Brow was not one of those tethered corpses behind the boats. Finally she found him in a storm of bubbles, pushing a howling pursuit boat in circles in an attempt to capsize it.
She could not attract him with shouts. She had to swim into the whirlpool with him and bang her crystal against his nukes. He swatted at her as if she was a fly. Then a dull concussion sounded above and a harpoon crashed past Brow in a silver shower. Finally he relented and sank down into Awa's protection. The boat whined off.
He looked exhausted, sleepy from unaccustomed exertion. Nearly sobbing, she squealed out her thoughts, her plan. Over and over she repeated it without him reacting at all. Finally, when she was ready to give up, he blinked.
"Hunnnnnnkh! Breee right. Should fight like Others. Breee stay here. Brow go tell Greyback, others."
She rose to breathe with him, then waited among the freezing, mountainous waves. The snow had stopped. But lighting the air were flares sent out from the ship to help the men in their search. And, though she didn't notice, each flash of a flare brightened the star-fire inside her crystal.
Soon the attacks of the whales stopped, and the spouts disappeared. The pursuit boats clustered around their sinking comrades; and even at that distance she could tell the white faces were terrified. They had never experienced anything like this. No humans had.
The whales were talking beneath the waves. She withdrew from the freezing air and scanned. The Russian submarine still hovered beneath the factory ship, but the whales were clustered beside it in a vast cloud. And the hard echo of another submarine returned to her from the distance. The American sub watched.
Then the call came. Brow's shrill voice warned her that they were ready.
Down the hillsides of water she streaked, across their freezing valleys, to where the grim Russians floated trying to revive friends. At first their pale faces did not look up when she squealed for attention. Then one noticed, but did not look carefully at what she held out of the waves. She had to bang on the sides of the boat with it, then swim back out where they could see her. Now they chattered and pointed.
''Here," she squawked, "this is what you're here for! Recognize it?"
The gamble worked. After some discussion they radioed the factory ship. The orders came, and the first pursuit boat turned toward her howling.
"Come and get it!" she squealed, backtailing away temptingly.
When they came, she swam hard to lure them away from the other boats, out in the open. She turned at last and waved the crystal at them mockingly. They had nets. They coaxed her and cut the engines back. She saw the tense gleam in a man's eye as he stretched the net.
The ocean swelled beneath her. She felt them coming. Then three gray heads hit the side of the boat like an explosion. It bounced into the air and crashed back on its side, spilling the people. Before they could clamber back on the hull, Darkers came up beneath them, and they disappeared.
"It worked!" she squeaked, again under water.
The Squareheads shrieked in delight, and beyond them she could see Greyback and the other Singers, and more Squareheads coming.
"Yaaaaaaah!" Brow said. "Breee right. Should hit all on one side him ship. Make him come out water, spill Others. Do more!"
As she returned to the cluster of boats, the Singer's voices welled up with the insistence of air-raid sirens. They sang of the Turning.
This time two ships followed her lure, and she had to swim faster to keep the second one from cutting her off. It tried again, and she dove beneath it.
"Look out!" she told the waiting Squareheads, "one will shoot you while you sink the other!"
Brow trumpeted in reply. She heard him squeaking orders as she surfaced, now on the far side of the boat.
The Russians waited until she was nearly underneath. The other boat trained its gun on the water around her. But Brow's warriors came up on the other side. She dove as the boat rolled, sailors crashing around her. Attacking Darkers passed her in the fog of bubbles, and she heard the Russians scream. Then a dull boom came, the water rocked savagely, and a light, brighter than the flares, flashed.
At first she thought it was some great searchlight. But she saw Brow streak past trailing a thick red plume, and her heart jumped. She called to him with pain in her voice.
"It's only his flipper," whistled the Squarehead next to her.
He disappeared in the depths. Then a bloodcurdling shriek sounded and he hurtled upward. His tail flashed with blurring speed, building power.
She surfaced. The Russian had reloaded and was frantically aiming at a frosted breath-cloud, his harpoon line coiled like snakes on a spool. Before he could fire, a great geyser burst behind him, and high in its mist was a square gray form. The men half turned, their pale faces masks of horror. Brow towered above for an instant, then fell back thunderously across the deck. A wall of water, pink with his blood, sucked both ship and whale below.
The ship bobbed up quickly, but as the men found air again, the huge flat shape of Brow's flukes rose up and repeatedly smacked the water with a sound of thunder. The men disappeared, for good.
Brow trumpeted.
"Are you all right," Robin called desperately.
"Brow got only one fluke now. He okay. Kill plenty Others!"
But now the remaining three gunboats were converging. They would no longer play Breee's game. A cannon fired. She flinched as the harpoon exploded in the Squarehead beside her, covering her in blood.
Suddenly many flares lit the roiling sky, but something more: lightning. For one suspended moment, the thrashing sea and boats stood outlined in white. Then, in the dark aftermath, the tips of the factory ship and now the pursuit boats retained a glow. Like a blue fog, St. Elmo's fire spread to elevated points. The harpoon guns were made of neon.
A wave lifted Robin, higher. The blue fire danced quickly across the water and clustered on the uplifted crystal. It stayed as she descended the wave trough. Something clicked in the ancient, decayed mechanism, the crystal moved in its housing. It grew brighter, then brighter still; now spinning, turning, it nearly blinded her. She dove.
The pursuit boats passed over her screaming. It was no use trying to trick them now. They were staying close together so the whales could not come up on one side and tip them. She jerked the blinding crystal around in her mouth so she could see and headed for the Russian submarine, which still hovered beneath the factory ship. If she could somehow frighten them into leaving, she was certain the other Russians would follow.
Down she went, past the Singers and even the shadow of Old Blowhole watching from the depths. Down to where her crystal gave the only light. It illuminated the hard length of the submarine.
She swung the crystal into the metal hull.
"Bang!" The ship reverberated. Sharp foreign voices barked in surprise. Again she struck, then dragged the crystal housing across a row of rivets to make loud rattling.
"Go home!" she screamed. "Stop the killing!"
The Russian voices sputtered, trying to figure out what was attacking their submarine. How she wished these men were as easy to frighten as Darkers!
"Wham!" She struck in anger and did not notice that the burning crystal clicked into a new position in its housing, as though a long-frozen trigger had been released. She raised it high to strike again. But in her gathering pause the thing shivered. A long brilliant pulse of light outlined every detail of the submarine in blue fire, the water overhead cracked like thunder after lightning, and the sea convulsed.
A terrific concussion followed, rocking everything beneath it. Breee craned to see a great explosion at the surface. She did not know what was happening. The shock wave hit her in the stomach, sickeningly. The crystal's bright glow was gone now, leaving only a coal of blue inside it. Then began the rain of pieces of metal from the surface, twisted and blackened like burning hail.
Suddenly she understood, and with understanding came a feeling of disbelief and awe. Unknowingly, she had completed the task for which Awa had brought her here. She had destroyed the factory ship. The crystal had released its stored energy when she accidentally activated its trigger against the submarine. The factory ship had been directly over the sub. A burst of fire from Atlantis had saved the whales.
The shattered vessel sank slowly past in a swirl of debris and bubbles until it lay across the other, older ruins on the bottom.
She suddenly felt weak, drained by triumph, as though the strengthening grip of Awa had left her. The image of Dorothy accidentally melting the witch occurred to her, without humor. All it did was make her wish for something as simple as ruby slippers to take her home, away from all this darkness and death, to sunshine and air.
A wave of cold and nausea made her quiver.
The shapes coalescing from the green sea fog around her became darker until she realized they were whales. From every quarter the huge shapes gathered, around her and the submarine. They were silent, awed by the violence and the sacrifice of their Turning, aware that something beyond their own strength and cunning had reached up from the depths of the sea and saved them.
The battle was over.
"AAAHHHH." Greyback's familiar voice finally broke the silence. "IT IS DONE. YOU ARE INDEED A ZHAKI, LITTLE DREAMER. TRULY, YOU ARE THE ONE THE OLD SONGS WERE ABOUT."
"Yaaaaah," Brow shrilled as he eyed the strange crystal. "Breee's magic strong. Breee save us again."
Drummer swam out of the crowd and took the heavy crystal from her, nuzzling her as he did so. "Well done, dreamer," he whispered.
"No," she said weakly. "I didn't know what I was doing. Awa did it."
A sound like the sea floor opening came from beneath, and the ranks of Returned parted for their leader to rise. Old Blowhole appeared, as vast as a bank of fog. "INNDEEEEEED. WE ARE ALL IN AWA'S CURRENT, BUT YOU ARE THE MOTHER'S DAUGHTER, BREEE. IT WAS TO YOU SHE SHOWED THE FIRESTONE. IT WAS YOU WHO BROUGHT US HERE. THE SMALLEST AMONG US. FORGIVE US OUR DOUBT."
Breee wanted to blush. She was only a bystander, would not even have come this far if it had not been for her father. But before she could reply, a crackling noise split the water, and everyone turned toward it. "Another stonefish!" a whale shouted. It was the American submarine, coming at last to investigate. It tilted slightly, but could apparently maneuver. The crackling had been a radio message it had sent to the Russians.
"It Breee's stonefish," Brow said. "The one Brow dig out."
"THEN WHAT IS THIS ONE?" Greyback snorted.
"It is the Russian," Bree answered. "It belongs to the same Other as the whaler. They're looking for the firestone."
Again radio transmissions sizzled between the craft.
"They're trying to get the Russians to surface," Drummer whispered to her. "If they can take pictures of them, it will embarrass the Russians." He snorted. "I didn't forget everything I learned with Shaaa."
But the Americans could do nothing to force the submarine to rise. Breee could see that its torpedo tubes were jammed with mud. It could not even fire dummy torpedoes to frighten the other ship. Nor could it ram the ship in its damaged condition.
Old Blowhole sensed the tension between the two craft, as if they were quarreling whales. "I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW THAT CAN BE YOUR STONEFISH, BREEE," he rumbled. "BUT I UNDERSTAND LITTLE ABOUT YOU IN ANY CASE. CAN WE HELP BREEE'S STONEFISH, AS WE HAVE BEEN HELPED?"
"I don't know how," Breee confessed. She was exhausted and thinking was difficult.
Drummer swam under her and lifted her on his back as dolphins do sick friends. Then an idea struck him.
"We can make the whaler's stonefish surface!" he chattered. "Yes, of course. We'll do what we do best. Greyback! take the Singers and form a circle around the ships, beneath it."
Greyback honked his agreement, somewhat baffled.
"Brow," Drummer called, "you and your Squareheads get in front of the stonefish. Keep it from running."
Brow squealed and swam to block the ship.
"Now, Greyback," Drummer signaled, "sing! As loudly and as high as you can! Aim for the middle of the stonefish and give it all your wind!"
Even in her dazed state Breee understood the scheme and nearly laughed at its cunning.
Greyback paused, pondering all this Other business, but Old Blowhole gave his nod. The Singer began with a deafening whine that tapered off to a piercing whistle. The other Singers picked up the note, and the wave of noise rippled around the circle quickly. As one whale ended a note, the next picked it up until a steady cone of sound focused on the center of the circle - the submarine.
Like a bell, the entire length of the ship resonated. Beneath the ringing, Russian voices yelped in confusion. The ship's props burst into life, and the ship tried to make off, but Brow and his Squareheads stood firm. They shrilled rapid warnings into the throbbing hull.
The American ship again signaled the Russian to rise. It moved closer as it radioed.
Once more the shriek traveled around the circle of Singers, and the ship responded like a tuning fork. The people inside were howling, too, but they were out of key. The pounded the sides in frustration so that the tune had a beat, or perhaps they were running into bulkheads.
"That's it!" Drummer chortled.
Breee whooped with the Singers.
The submarine had had enough. Bubbles burst from its sides as ballast was blown, and it nosed upward, defeated. The American ship followed close behind it. Brow and his Squareheads, curious, tagged along.
Unsure of what had happened, the Singers finished their wordless song and watched the Other visitors disappear.
"AAHHHHHH. DID WE HELP?" Greyback asked.
Drummer guffawed. "Help'? You beat them, Old Wind! Ha, you were rightly named."
Breee, somewhat rested and now buoyed, rolled off her friend's back and whistled. "You did it, Greyback! We've proved that the Returned are a match for Others in cunning as well as force."
They all rose to breathe together, and the icy air misted their snorts into a cloud of fog. The American submarine pitched on the still-stormy sea, but the sky was less black than gray, and a thin light filtered through. Breee noticed men still clinging to wreckage here and there, and the black shapes of whale corpses bobbed in slicks of scarlet foam, the leavings of battle.
"Look, Breee!" Drummer chirped around the crystal. "They're filming the Russians!"
Sailors covered the muddy conning tower, pointing at the Russian sub and cheering. One held a movie camera. Breee and Drummer pushed through the crowding whales until they were beside Brow at the edge of the rocking ship.
"Shreeeee," he said. "Brow never see Others come out of stonefish before!"
One of the sailors cursed. The Russian submarine had submitted in rising, but now was diving again in a fountain of foam. The Americans, however, had the proof of their presence and could force them to do nothing more.
"Damn!" another sailor said. "Look at 'em just run off and leave their people out in the water."
"Yeah," said another. "You'd think they'd at least pick up a few to find out what caused the explosion."
Another man in blue, an officer, said, "Quick, Jenkins, get some line and life preservers. We've got to get those men out of the water before they freeze!"
"And they should tell a very interesting story," Breee whistled to Drummer.
"Yaaaah," he replied. Then a light seemed to go on behind his eyes. He turned swiftly to Brow, who was staring in fascination at the Americans, and said, "Lord Strongflukes! Yes, you! Listen carefully. Could you and a few of your fellows swim over to the wrecks with the Others on top and push them this way? Drive them right up to this stonefish!"
Brow snorted. "Why? We turn them over so they drown."
"Yaaah," Drummer shrilled. "But these Others don't know that. They still don't understand that we are intelligent. If you push those survivors this way, they'll see that we understand."
Brow grunted indignantly, unconvinced.
"Yes," Breee shouted suddenly, "please Brow, do as Drummer asks. If those men die no one will know about the battle we fought."
"Brow know," he piped. "Greyback know. Singers sing about today from now on until Circle closes."
She shook her head. "But if you save those Others, then they will sing about today, too. An Other song, in a book! Everyone will know!"
Greyback, overhearing, understood. "DO IT, BROW."
"Brow do it," he growled, "but for Breee. Not to save Others." With a huge splash of his tail he was off, shrilling for his troops to follow.
By now the American sailors had become aware of the fact that they were surrounded by whales. They were gawking and exclaiming as they hauled out life buoys. More were coming on deck for their first breath of fresh air in three weeks, and Breee could see their awe. One pointed to the capsized pursuit boats and shouted.
"Hey look! They're pushing them this way!"
She turned to see the Russians clawing over each other to reach the highest point on each unstable island, fear etched on their faces. But this time the whales made no hostile moves.
Behind her she heard, "Look, Doc. Whales are everywhere. Maybe you were right about that earthquake."
She whirled. There he was, clambering out of the hatch, with a new beard and dark circles ringing his eyes, but looking healthy. Robert Shaw, her father. All the things she had forgotten in the last weeks rushed back to her. His face was as fresh and as foreign as her memories of pillows and oak trees, something she had thought she would never see again.
Dr. Costain's hawkish face and white hair appeared behind him.
Robert Shaw's face shone with excitement as he scanned the whales. "It's true, Costain! I told you I wasn't hallucinating. They dug us out of the mud."
Costain wore a look of shock. "Cetaceans don't have the ability to reason, Shaw," he insisted. "It's impossible."
"I won't argue any more," her father said, still gazing at the hordes of Returned. "If this doesn't convince you that cetaceans are not only intelligent, but . . . equal, nothing will."
"Nonsense." Costain snorted. He glanced about as if trying to see anything but whales acting together.
A wave hit the ship, and Dr. Shaw stumbled against the edge of the sub, but he caught his balance. Breee gulped away her concern.
"Loooook ooouuttt, Shaaaaaa," Drummer called in his oddly slowed dolphinese.
"Dru-maaa!" the scientist stuttered. "It was you! My God, Doctor . . . look! He has the crystal."
This time Costain responded, quickly. "Get it, Shaw! Coax it out of him if you know the animal. You, sailor! Go get some raw fish from the galley, and hurry!" Costain's knuckles were white on the ropes.
Drummer chattered derisively and wagged the crystal. "You won't get the prize from me with fish," he said in the simple speech. "This isn't the laboratory. Here, I have superiors."
"Give it to him," Breee said, surprised at his sudden reluctance. "It's important."
"Yaaa," Drummer agreed. "Too important. We cannot give back lightly to the Others what Awa has taken from them. Greyback! Ho, Old Wind! Go below for me, call Old Blowhole. He has a decision to make."
Greyback disappeared in a whirlpool.
Robert Shaw coaxed in his faltering dolphinese, and Costain leaned over the ropes trying to tempt with a long-dead fish. Drummer refused to budge or comment. Breee was baffled, so she satisfied herself with feasting on the sight of her father. It was strange to see him look right past her.
"It's no use," he finally said to Costain. "He won't give it to us for some reason. He refuses. Seems to be a matter of principle."
"Nonsense." Costain snorted again. "It just won't give up its pretty bauble. Probably found it and responded to its sparkle."
Robert Shaw grinned at his boss's naivete, and the sight sent a pang of loss through Breee. She might have saved his life, but this might be the last time she would see that grin.
The argument was cut short by shouting and by the scrambling of sailors to throw lines to the approaching wrecks. The sperm whales drove them dutifully right into the submarine's hull. Soon all the survivors were huddling in blankets.
"What do you say to that behavior, Doctor?" Robert Shaw said pointedly.
Costain's face tried to mask his doubt. "Just play-fulness. Cetaceans will push around anything that floats . . ."
But before he could finish, a swell rocked the boat. Costain's legs lost the deck, and he tumbled over the side, sliding down the sloping deck and into the water.
Before she thought, Breee was in action. She grabbed the sputtering scientist's collar and held his head out of water. He thrashed and hollered, but as she swam toward the sub with him he locked his arms around her neck and stopped kicking. A rope was tossed down for him, and Breee pushed as he climbed back up.
When Robert Shaw had thrown a blanket around him, Costain turned back to face the whales. His face was pale, and not from cold alone. He looked down at Breee with the lost expression of a man who has had his opinions shaken.
"See, Doctor," Robert Shaw said quietly, "beneficence."
Costain's eyes widened as he saw Breee gazing at him. She summoned all her will power and tried to remember she had once been Robin Shaw.
At first it was just a sound. "Caaaaaa . . ."
Then, "Caaa-stiiiiin! Caaa-stiiiin! Weeeeee think tooooooo!"
Costain appeared shaken, and even her father's face went blank.
Drummer laughed. "That's the stuff! They never expected to hear a dolphin speaking Other."
She wanted to say more. She wanted to explain the Returned to Costain, as she had once explained his kind to the Returned. But she felt a ripple of icier water around her and heard the other Returned moving aside. Old Blowhole was coming.
His breath steamed the air like an engine's smoke when he surfaced.
"Look at the size of that one!" a sailor shouted.
Drummer clutched the crystal and swam out to meet his leader. He held it up so that all the Returned, and the men on the boat, could see it.
"The firestone, Lord," he said. "It is the one that Breee found in the old places of the Others. It has saved her life and ours. The Others we fought here were looking for it. They killed Returned just to hide what they did from each other. Much blood stains it. Now Breee's Others want it. They looked for it first. Shall I give it to them?"
Drummer could hear Dr. Shaw and Dr. Costain arguing about whether he and the blue whale were communicating. Fools. He waited for a reply.
Finally Old Blowhole moved, as though he had just awakened from a nap. He groaned. "WHY MUST OTHERS CHASE DESTRUCTION? IS IT NOT ENOUGH THAT THEY MISUSED THE HEART OF STONE ONCE AND DESTROYED THEMSELVES? MUCH BLOOD STAINS THE THING, YES. BUT AWA HAS ANSWERED BLOOD WITH BLOOD, THAT IS OF NO CONCERN. IF WE RETURN THE STONE, OTHERS WILL AGAIN BELIEVE THEY ARE THE HUB UPON WHICH THE CIRCLE OF ALL LIVING TURNS. NO. THEY HAVE ENOUGH POWER. THE CRYSTAL IS AWA'S. BRING IT TO ME."
Drummer swam forward instantly, and Old Blowhole opened his mouth. Water and the sparkling Atlantean mystery surged into its void. Air rushed into his blowholes, then he sank, and in a moment was out of sight.
Breee did not regret his decision. She understood. Who better than she could know that Man's circle was no rounder and no larger than any other creature's. Hands were made for grasping, as Old Wind had once said.
She turned and cried out. The last of the men on the deck were disappearing into the submarine. The object of their voyage lost, they were departing. Her father was gone.
The whales followed the shimmering wake of the submarine for a while, but it inevitably outdistanced them. It headed warmways toward the haunts of Humans and left them alone in the vaults of the sea where the crash of slackening waves overhead soon drowned out the unnatural voice of its engines. They drifted beyond the plateau, over the chasms.
The entire armada milled about, suddenly uncomfortable with so much peace. No one ate, though there was much plankton a little deeper and a school of clamorous haddock could be heard passing nearby. Many who had swum this way earlier were now Silent. There had been no time to note it in the thick of things, but now the gaps in their ranks seemed wide. Few spoke.
Drummer nuzzled Breee tenderly, careful not to bump against any of the darkening abrasions or red whelts her personal two-day battle had won her. But she did not take much notice. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
The song began with a single haunting note that seemed to rise toward them from the depths. Faintly feminine, it gathered them together, though it was a mournful sound, like someone crying for a lost calf. Then a Singer who had lost its mate joined in with a wavering voice, matching note for note, and soon they were all singing the Song of Silence for those gone.
Squareheads sang, Darkers sang, all sang with a common voice. Wave after wave of mourning returned from the distant bottom to combine with newer elements until the very water seemed to throb with it. When the last shrill notes had, by no given signal, risen to climax and then died away, a strangely calming silence fell over them. Breee felt as if the ocean had been cleansed of a millenium of suffering.
"TODAY BEGINS ANOTHER CIRCLE," Old Blowhole finally said. "A CIRCLE THAT WILL BE A NEW SONG. OUR LIVES WILL BECOME A SONG. TODAY IS A BEGINNING. WE TURNED FROM HIDING IN OUR MOTHER'S HAIR. WE ENDED WHAT OLD BLOWHOLE BEGAN IN THE OLD CIRCLE. WE BECOME WORTHY OF OUR HERITAGE TODAY, AND WE HAVE WON A NEW GAME. NO LONGER WILL WE BE RETURNED; NOW WE ARE THE TURNED, THOSE WHO CHANGED THEIR SONG."
Then an energy ran through them, the enthusiasm of victory. They rose to the surface and played in the mist of each other's breaths. Whales heaved themselves out of the waves and crashed back in a cacophony of celebration. Breee rose with Drummer, and they watched from a distance.
"It is good to see my people as winners again," Drummer said.
Breee only shivered.
Drummer rubbed against her, then looked at her sharply and swam off as though he detected something wrong. She didn't care. All she wanted to do was go to sleep. Chills were moving through her, but she felt hot at the same time.
The next thing she knew Greyback's vast bulk was before her, and he was listening intently with a worried look in his eyes. Drummer hovered beside him.
"What's wrong?" Breee asked, annoyed.
"AHHHHHH," the Singer moaned, "HOW DO YOU FEEL, LITTLE ONE?"
"Tired. Cold. I think I caught a chill on that iceberg, I want to sleep."
"YOUR HEART SINGS A STRANGE SONG, BREEE?"
"I don't care what kind of song it's singing, as long as it's a lullaby," she snapped. What was everybody fussing about? Wasn't she allowed to sleep after what she had been through?
Then something passed over the sun, and when she regained consciousness Drummer had his nipper around her and was supporting her at the surface. She knew something was wrong then. If he had not been there, she might have drowned.
"Will I be all right, Drummer?" she asked weakly.
"Of course, you will," he bluffed. "Just a chill. Take a deep breath, dreamer. Brow is off catching you some squid now. Nothing like those beasts to put a little kick in your tail. You'll be fine after a little rest."
She knew he was lying, Other-fashion. If his heartbeat had not told her so, she would have known from the crowd of whales gathering around them, hushed and staring. Greyback was there, and like a green fog in the distance, Old Blowhole.
"I'm going away, aren't I, Greyback?" she asked dreamily, not really worried about the answer.
"AWAY," he said thoughtfully.
"Am I dying?"
"YOU ARE SICK," he answered, the least tone of sadness in his voice, "BUT IT COULD BE THE NIGHTSEE RETURNING, WITH THE CHILL."
Then something surged within her, a darkness. She twitched.
"BREEE," Greyback said quickly, "YOU HAVE BEEN VERY IMPORTANT ..."
"Don't," she interrupted. "No speeches for me."
"BUT . . ."
"Sing the sun up for me, Old Wind," she said.
Then, bobbing there with his blowhole out of the water, Greyback began the old song of sun-greeting that she had heard first in warmer, happier waters. His voice was slow and deep, and it rippled over her in thick waves.
She closed her tired eyes and swam away with slow strokes of her tail. Greyback's voice receded, she rocked in icy fatigue, passing in and out of dreams. She wondered how it had all begun, then remembered Cheeka's Circle and rumors from warmway. She wondered who she was and remembered Robin Shaw and a dying whale long ago.
She could no longer see the whales, but Old Wind's song was all around her. She felt no panic when she found she could no longer feel her tail. Her heart was light even as she sank. She opened her eyes.
The sun was coming. No, not the sun. She was sinking toward a great place of light. Brilliant, soft light. Old Wind's song was calling it. It filled the sea until there was no place for shadows.
The dream this time was all in white. It came in too suddenly and too brightly through her slit eyes. She had to close them to keep the too-clear light from becoming pain. The sounds that reached her were muffled and disorienting, alien. They seemed to bring back not a scrap of information - no direction or velocity.
White, again when she blinked. Again blinding. But now she understood. She was dead and this must be heaven, all made of light. She relaxed and tried to find the current, but there was none. Air came into her lungs without her rising, without the familiar huff of her blowhole exhaling first. Of course. In heaven she wouldn't have to breathe. She opened her eyes against the ungreen, harsh brightness and attempted to kick forward. Something horrible, a clinging molasses weighed down her flukes. She could not turn. She could not swim. What was this place?
Slowly she realized that she could turn her head without moving her body, and the fuzzy areas around her eyes began to mean something. They were a vestige of her distant past.
Eyelashes.
The things that hung like seaweed by her sides ended in hands. Her flukes were long and divided, folding in the middle, with tiny fingers on their ends. Her mind raced, the long sleep washing from it with each recollection, the tide of memory eating at the now-distant dream of dolphinhood.
She was Robin Shaw again. The circle had come round, and she who had returned to the sea was home again. She breathed through nostrils now, and there was no surrounding water to cancel gravity. Thin air brought much light and little sound. She would have to learn to be a human the way she had learned to be a dolphin.
No excitement came, only a feeling of completion, of fullness. She closed her eyes once more to gather herself.
She was lying down. Gradually, she became aware of sheets about her, and a bed. The covers had been what prevented her from moving her feet. Her left arm was further strictured so that it could not bend, and a dull ache was centered in the hollow of its elbow. As she tried to move it, something cold shook against her chest. There was something around her . . . what did they call it . . . neck? Her other hand groped clumsily and found a hard round thing on a thin necklace. It was a ring.
A smile, after so many weeks of immobile features, felt strange.
When she opened her eyes again, she was fully Robin. Her brain was better at interpreting the bright images now. She could make out the flat sides of the hospital room, the bright light overhead, the snaking tube that fed the syringe in her trapped arm. And to her left, a window with blue sky, and a silhouette.
Joan Shaw stood centered in a square of light, looking out to sea. Robin lay astonished at the depth of emotions that arose in her when the strong, pretty profile met her memories. Her mother seemed to wear a more resolute and serene face than she remembered. For some reason it reminded her of the echo-memory of Dash the killer whale swimming into the path of destruction. She realized it was determination she was seeing, a resemblance of spirit between the two. Could just a few weeks make such a difference in her mother?
Then she knew. Time didn't matter. She was no longer the same Robin she had been when she had first seen the dolphin ring. Though she had thought she was escaping, she had been growing. And her mother had been far more alone than she. Her husband lost, and her daughter taken by some strange illness. That night so long ago when Robin had last slipped the ring on, she had felt guilty for abandoning her mother. Now she knew that her mother, too, had grown in that icy void of fear and isolation where the only rescue comes from within. Joan Shaw had at last found her strength.
"Ma . . . Mom," Robin croaked.
Those eyes. Even though they wore a look that was quizzical, then astonished, when they focused on her, they seemed sharper and more secure. Joan Shaw's mouth opened, and a word tried to come out.
Then Robin was enveloped in a flurry of warmth. She tried to hug back, but her arms flailed clumsily. She contented herself with rubbing against the avalanche of hair that smelled of home and love and security. Her mother made little pained noises into Robin's shoulder and rocked.
"I ... I'm home," Robin finally managed.
"Thank God, thank God," her mother sobbed.
It took a few minutes more of comforting before she would believe Robin was really back and all right. She held her face only inches from Robin's and stared into her eyes.
"It's true. You're back. Oh, God, I prayed so for you to get well," she said at last. "I couldn't wake you up after that last night, the night we heard about Bob . . . I must have sat there and stared at your body for an hour before I called the doctor. Oh, it's been so lonely without you, Rob."
The limp piece of rubber that was her hand found her mother's hand and patted it. "I missed you, too, Mom. More than you'll ever know."
Her mother laughed nervously. "You sound as if you've been on a trip. You've been very sick, darling, just lying there making those awful noises."
Robin smiled. "I've been on a trip inside myself."
Joan Shaw's gaze softened. "So have I, I guess. Against my will."
"But you made it," Robin added. "Like I did. I hope you found a treasure on your trip, too."
Her mother looked puzzled. "A treasure?"
"Yeah. I don't know how to say it. Sometimes when you try to hide from trouble, you find yourself." All she could think of was the Circle of the Returned, trying like herself to retreat into the depths but at last coming to the turning point when life must be faced.
Joan Shaw didn't understand what Robin had said and, putting it down to grogginess, suddenly remembered the illness. She rang for the doctor.
Robin gazed around the room, drinking in the sharp colors. There was a big urn of flowers, with the base shaped like a collie, from her class at school. But another vase attracted her. It was full of daisies, and the card dangling from it read: From Brian, come back.
"Oh." A little cry escaped her. Vague forgotten emotions stirred.
"He's been calling almost every day," her mother said. "Brian was almost the only one I had to share your loss with."
Brian's face spun out of the darkness in her mind clearly and sharply. She suddenly wanted to see him again, almost as much as she had wanted to see Dad.
"Dad . . ." she started, turning.
Her mother's face was calm, peaceful, like a cliff that has stood yet another storm. "He's all right. Mrs. Costain got a telegram." Her eyes brimmed. "Everything's all right now."
Robin took her hand and held it tightly. She was beginning to remember what hands were for, and they were as much for holding as for grasping, no matter what whales said.
She turned to see a young doctor in the doorway fumbling for his stethoscope, his mouth agape. He looked at her as if she had returned from the grave. She laughed, relishing the human noise.
WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, she was released. The doctors, more baffled at her recovery than they had been at her coma, had wanted her to stay and undergo some more tests, but her mother had sensed what Robin knew, that it had passed and would come no more.
The trailer was a strange box, unnaturally smooth. But she was already losing her dolphin senses, and soon it felt like home. (Sounds no longer leaped at her, light was less blinding, and strange things called smells were becoming recognizable again.) Her room was chokingly small after the boundlessness of the ocean, stale from absence, and feeling as if it belonged to another Robin. She sat on her bed for a while like a guest, trying to fit in. Then she remembered the ring.
It still hung on the chain around her neck. She took it off and looked at it. The hospital had taken it off her hand, but Mom had put it on a chain so she could still wear it. She had told Robin that, during the long talks they had had at the hospital. Mom had felt the dolphin ring was important to her, a link with Dad. Robin knew the ring must have spoken to her mother, as it did to others.
The phone rang, muffled. A second later her mother's voice rang out in a squeal of excitement. Then, "Robin! It's your father!" She remembered how to run. She waited, hovering while her mother spoke in a calmer, emotional monotone, back turned so the tears wouldn't show. When her long conversation was over, she handed Robin the phone.
"Hi, Rob," his voice said cheerfully.
"I'm glad you're all right," she stammered.
"I'm glad you're all right. Mom says she's had quite a time with you." He was eager to sound as if nothing had gone wrong with the trip.
"Did you find what you went for?" she asked.
He paused. "Yes and no. I'll tell you all about it when I get back, but I'm not sure you'll believe me. I'm not sure anybody will believe us, even though Costain saw it too, and he's on my side now. We have some very unbelievable stories to tell the world about your dolphin friends."
She grinned. "I'll believe."
His voice changed, filling with care as if he had been holding back. "I love you very much, Rob. I'll be with you soon."
The call was over. They stood in a clot of silence around the telephone, thinking what a near loss they had all had.
Robin was no sooner in her room again than the phone rang once more.
"Robin! For you!"
She was puzzled until she heard Brian's warm voice. "Robin! I'm so glad you're home okay. Your mother said you've been in a coma. I guess I've been talking to her a lot, instead of talking to you . . . I've been keeping a list of what your classes have been doing so you can catch up." The words spilled out of him in a tense torrent.
She laughed, dispelling her tension. "Thank you for thinking of me, Brian. I'm glad. I thought of you, too. You see, the doctors said I was in a coma because they were only looking at my body. But my mind was somewhere else, in a dream. It was a long, beautiful dream. I thought of you when I was lonely."
Brian stumbled for words. "I'll say it was long. Are you sure you're okay? What was the dream about?"
Robin made sure that her mother was out of earshot. Still, she spoke softly into the phone. "I can't tell you now, Brian. But remember the whale on the beach that day? The dream had whales in it, and dolphins."
"Wow," he said, genuinely awed. "A three-week dream about whales."
"Can I trust you?" she asked pointedly, but she knew she already did. "I know all this is mysterious to you. But the truth is I was never sick, Brian. And I still have one thing left to do before the whole thing is over. Will you help me?"
"Of course, I will," he replied immediately.
She faltered at his confidence. "Why do you like me so much?"
His pause was a shrug. "I guess we all have dreams. I get as lonely in my dream as you did in yours, and when I do, your face appears. There's nothing I can do about it."
Her heart sang, then her voice moved on. "I want to see you; we can talk more then. Will you take me to the dolphin show tomorrow at Costain Labs? I'd like that. We can take the tour of the labs afterward. My dad works there, so I know the layout."
"Sure," Brian said. "That would be neat. But what has this got to do with your dream, or me helping you?"
"That's where you've got to trust me." She sighed. "I can't tell you everything right now. Maybe I'll never be able to tell you. And I've got to ask you to help me do something dangerous tomorrow, something that could get us in a lot of trouble."
Brian inhaled, considering. "Okay," he finally said.
"Thank you." She gripped the phone as if the pressure would translate into gratitude on the other end. "You see, I've got to help an old friend."
ROBIN COULD HEAR her heart beat as she pressed against the lab wall, but it was muffled by air, and she could not imagine she was a dolphin again even if she tried. This adventure was in her native element. As she inched toward the door, she tried to remember the dolphin show and her indignation, to steel herself for what she had to do. She had grown more and more angry as the pretty female lab assistant had put the captive dolphins through their paces, and they had obediently jumped through hoops and played mock baseball. She had been on the verge of screaming out her feelings when the show ended. It was not that the dolphins were mistreated, or even that they had been taught stupid man-tricks by "scientists." It was that their trainers obviously thought those actions, which were really closer to mockery, were straining the limits of their intelligence. They were limiting those beautiful beings by looking at the wrong signs. The dolphins, enjoying the sport, obviously thought Humans were lots of fun, but not very intelligent. Perhaps they had something, she thought - it had not been difficult to sneak off from the tour guide after-ward and find the training labs.
She felt a touch and turned to flash a tense smile at Brian, who inched along beside her. His eyes were full of trust. She had not had time to fill him in completely, but he was trying hard to follow without understanding.
She peeked around the door. The lab was vast, a clutter of portable tanks and pipes, equipment of all sorts, a rack of beach balls. A dolphin rose from the central tank, its dorsal fin glittering, and breathed. Its left side was turned her way, and she saw a thin blue streak down it.
"It's him," she whispered. She started toward his tank.
Suddenly Brian hissed and jerked her back by her sleeve. He barely had time to pull her down behind some pipes before two researchers came in through a side door, chatting breezily.
Brian scrunched down beside her, trying to keep his head out of sight. She tried not to notice the fear in his eyes, tried only to feel his warmth against her side, his breath on her cheek.
"Don't worry," he murmured, "we'll get him out."
The technicians carried on a relaxed conversation as they bumped equipment about. Zaak chattered chidingly, and one man protested that they could not play then. He called him "B2." That seemed not to satisfy the dolphin, and he scolded intermittently until the technicians carried something heavy out, cursing at its weight.
The sound of Zaak's voice cut into Robin. She knew what he was saying, but she could not remember the meaning of the words; her former life was fading.
Brian noticed the strange, foreign look in her eyes. He could feel her consciousness searching for a home.
He gripped her arm. "Robin. Robin, they've gone. We've got to hurry."
She followed him to the edge of the big round tank. When he looked at her expectantly, she realized she had no plan for getting Zaak to the sea. The dolphin, glad to see fresh Other faces, had swum to their side. He squawked.
Robin knelt beside the edge, where Zaak let her rub his smooth forehead. Brian timidly did the same, glancing at the door. Robin's heart ached to be able to talk to her friend from the other world, but that part of her was gone.
"Zaak," she said in English. "It's me. Breee. Breeeeeeee. Remember? We've come to let you go back to the sea. Back to Awa."
Zaak's eyes flickered when she said her old name in the prolonged dolphin way, but he did not catch on. Impatiently, he squawked that he wanted to play ball and splashed at her.
"Look," Brian said. "Here's a sluice."
He had located a metal conduit, a trough, that led around another tank and passed through a narrow space in the wall. Brian inspected the opening and turned to her.
"It goes to an outside tank, Robin. The tank's full and there's only a hedge between it and the beach. All I've got to do is turn the valve out there that fills up the sluice, like a lock in a canal. Then you can open the door from the dolphin's tank and lead him through. Do you think you can manage that?"
She looked at the complicated portal separating Zaak's full tank from the dry channel to the outside. She gulped and nodded to Brian. If she could face a charging killer whale and destroy a whaling ship, she could make a machine work.
Brian gave her a taut thumbs-up sign and clambered into the trough. In a moment, he had ducked through and was outside. A moment later foaming water began gushing into the conduit.
Zaak squawked inquisitively, his gray nose poking over the edge of the sluice, and several of the tenants in adjoining tanks looked too.
"Free," Robin said above the noise of the water. "Zaak, I'm taking you back to your home, where you can catch all your fish by yourself, and if you want to play, you do it for fun, not for a bunch of tourists."
The dolphin stared at her curiously. Others seldom barked at him so earnestly. Very odd. Was it a new game? The Others never barked at him unless it was part of a game.
"You don't know me, do you?" she said, mostly to herself. "How could you, though? I'm Robin Shaw. How I wish I could go back with you and explain everything."
She was distracted by sloshing water. It had reached the lip of the trough. Now the outside tank and the inside tank were connected by water. With comparably little difficulty she found the wheel on the side of the tank that raised the portal between Zaak's tank and the sluice. She had to put all her weight behind the effort, but it froze after opening only a few inches. Zaak rooted at the opening, tasting the strange water. She ground her teeth and shoved all of her being against the steel. Nothing. She wedged herself against the sluice wall and used it to push against. Her mind focused on the image of Dash; she became a killer whale. The wheel jerked around so hard she nearly was thrown over it. It lifted the rest of the way without freezing up, but it took every ounce of strength her still-weak body had left. She leaned against the tank, gasping.
Zaak stuck his head into the sluice, then retreated, apparently disturbed by the narrowness. Still reeling, Robin had to coax him into it by throwing a beach ball midway down its length. That was all it took. Zaak lunged into the channel and hurled the ball, and a shower of water, at Robin.
"That way!" she responded, and threw toward the slit of light over the trough's end.
He caught it before it hit the water and returned it. He was beginning to wonder when he would get some fish. The Others always gave him fish when he played ball.
Robin wavered. There was no way to get the ball under the thin slit to the outside. As a matter of fact, there was no way for her to get out. The doors were on the other side of the building. The only way was through the filled canal, with Zaak.
She was in the water before she had time to think, behind Zaak, so he couldn't retreat to his tank. He turned, astonished and delighted to see an Other with him in the water. And with its overskins on, too. This was the most excitement he had had for ages!
Robin held her breath and plunged beneath the cold wetness. Her clothes clinging like loose skin, she slipped an arm around Zaak and pushed forward. Obligingly, he kicked with her. The cold shadow of the building passed over and suddenly the water was filled with light. They entered the wide tank together, as they had done so many other things when they were of the same flesh. Robin was lost for a moment in the feeling of racing through the sunlit water beside Zaak.
But she was a person, not a dolphin. When she rose to breathe there was no blowhole atop her head. Her feet found the bottom and she stood up like a sea monster, straggly hair entwining her face. She coughed salt water.
"Wow," came Brian's voice, "I thought there were two dolphins coming out for a minute. I didn't think about there not being any way for you to get out."
Zaak swirled around her legs. For a moment she paused, looking at the remaining lawn to a hedge, then the long stretch of beach beyond.
"Come, Zaak," she said softly. Her arms fitted neatly around him, and he allowed her to pull his head and flippers out of the water. It was the strangest game an Other had ever played with him.
"Good," Brian directed, "that's it. A little closer, move his tail this way more."
Brian caught the thickness of Zaak's tail. Bracing himself as he leaned over the tank edge, he plunged his other arm under the dolphin's pale belly.
Zaak whistled, more in puzzlement than fear, though now he was unsure of this game. It tasted more and more of danger.
He was unbelievably heavy, though he would not be mature for some time. Robin grunted as they swung him free of the tank and she held up her end while clambering out. Brian's wiry muscles rippled and his face reddened with exertion. He staggered beneath most of the burden until she could regain balance. Zaak whistled fearfully. Without realizing it, Robin whistled in return, a comforting dolphin-shrill through her teeth, and immediately the dolphin stiffened. He shrilled again, questioning. There was a dolphin near, a familiar voice.
They stumbled across the grass and clumsily trampled through the hedge. Robin clung desperately to Zaak's head though she sagged under the weight. His whistles were right beside her ear, and in her other ear were Brian's gasps as he backed toward the shore. She had never imagined fifty meters could be so long. How could something so sleek and agile in the water weigh so much out of it? Robin stumbled and went to her knees. Sand sprayed over Zaak. Brian hissed, his grip slipping, but went to his knees at the last minute to prevent Zaak from falling.
"Ready?" he said when Robin had caught her breath.
Zaak squeaked a dry distress-call.
She could only nod. Somehow she got to her feet, and they continued the trek, bumping and jerking through the sand. Then the sand went moist beneath them and in a moment foaming water ruffled around their feet.
"Just a little further, Zaak," she gasped.
They only made it another meter, pitching forward when a wave sucked their feet from under them. Zaak plunged into the knee-deep water without a cry.
Robin found herself on hands and knees with a dolphin staring up into her eyes. The dolphin ring dangled from its chain between the two, swaying. Now she saw the recognition in Zaak's gaze, and she understood that, somehow, he knew that she was connected to Breee. He began chattering excitedly, splashing her with his beak.
"Hey, he looks happy to be home," Brian laughed.
But it was not being in the ocean again that stirred him, and she knew it. He whistled, then whined at her. His eyes searched her alien face tor a hint she understood.
"No," she said softly, touching his dome, "I can't come with you this time. Go, find Breee, the real one. It's better this way."
Zaak squawked angrily and splashed her.
"Robin," Brian said nervously, "we'd better get out of here before somebody sees what we've done." She felt his hand on her shoulder.
"Come away," Zaak chittered. "You are the heart of Breee. You are the Nightsee, and you bear the old power. Come away."
She shook her head until the wet hair lashed her cheeks like whips. She felt salt water run down her face and knew it was not the sea. Her heart was breaking.
"No!" she cried. "I can't come. My life is here, my problems are here, my hopes are here. Your people have Turned to face their fears, and so have I."
Zaak chirped pleadingly, "Come to the silent places where Awa is green and our supper swims to us. Come where our children will learn to sing. Be Breee."
"No!" she screamed, slapping the water and chasing Zaak farther out. "Go find Drummer. He'll need help, and you know Humans too, now." Again she drove her palms into the water, and Zaak jerked farther out. His eyes wore a pleading, lost look.
Her hand found the trinket dangling from her neck and she snapped it off with a savage jerk. She threw the ring, and saw it glitter in a long arc. Zaak lunged, rolling in a wave, and when he looked up again, the silver chain hung from a corner of his mouth. One last look passed between she who had dreamed and the dolphin who had shared it with her. He turned and swam out of the shallows in silence.
She stood shakily, all her muscles in rebellion. Brian waited on the sandy hill, waited to understand her, with his eyes filled with sorrow for her fathomless hurt. She walked out of the water toward the patient stranger on the beach, away from Awa. She had Turned.