Insistence of Vision (40 page)

She heard and felt the sled zoom past, spotting her two tormentors sprawled on the machine’s back, grinning as they swept by, dangerously close. Instinct made her want to turn away and flee, or else go below for as long as her lungs could hold out. But neither move would help, so she stayed put.

They’ll savor their victory for a little while
, she thought, hoping they were confident enough not to use the sled’s stunner on her. Anyway, at this short range, what could she do?

It was hard to believe they hadn’t picked up any signs of the behemoth by now. Stupid, single-minded males, they had concentrated all of their attention on the hunt for her.

Zhaki and Mopol circled around her twice, spiraling slowly closer, leering and chattering.

Peepoe felt exhausted, still sucking air for her laboring lungs. But she could afford to wait no longer. As they approached for the final time, she took one last, body-stretching gasp through her blowhole, arched her back, and flipped over to dive nose-first into the deep.

At the final instant, her tail flukes waved at the boys. A gesture that she hoped they would remember with galling regret.

Blackness consumed the light and she plunged, kicking hard to gain depth while her meager air supply lasted. Soon, darkness welcomed Peepoe. But on passing the boundary layer, she did not need illumination any more. Sound guided her, the throaty rumble of something huge, moving gracefully and complacently through a world where sunshine never fell.

Tkett

He had several reasons to desire a starship, even one that was unable to fly. It could offer a way to visit the Great Midden, for instance, and explore its wonders. A partly operational craft might also prove useful to the Six Races of Jijo, whose bloody war against Jophur aggressors was said to be going badly ashore.

Tkett also imagined using such a machine to find and rescue Peepoe.

No one held out much hope of finding the beautiful dolphin medic, one of Makanee’s assistants, kidnapped shortly before
Streaker
departed. The two dolphin felons – Mopol and Zhaki – had an immensity to conceal her in. But that gloomy calculation assumed searchers must travel by sled!

A
ship
on the other hand – even a wreck that had lain on an ocean floor garbage dump for half a million years – could cover a lot more territory and listen with big underwater sonaphones, combing for telltale sounds from Peepoe and her abductors. It might even be possible to sift the waters for Earthling DNA traces. Tkett had heard of such techniques available for a high price on Galactic markets. Who knew what wonders the fabled Buyur took for granted on their elegant starcraft?

Unfortunately, the trail kept going hot and cold. Sometimes he picked up murmurs that seemed incredibly close, channeled by watery layers that focused sound. Other times they vanished altogether.

Frustrated, Tkett was willing to try anything. So when Chissis started getting agitated, squealing in Primal that a great beast prowled to the southwest, he willingly turned the sled in the direction she indicated.

And soon he was rewarded. Indicators began flashing on the control panel and down his neural-link cable, connecting the sled to an implanted socket behind his left eye. In addition to a surge of noise, mass displacement anomalies suggested something of immense size was moving ponderously just ahead, and perhaps a hundred meters down.

“I guess we better go find out what it is,” he told his passenger, who clicked her agreement.

# go chase go chase go chase ORCAS! #

She let out squalls of laughter at her own cleverness. But minutes later, as they plunged deeper into the sea – both listening and peering down the shaft of the sled’s probing headlights – Chissis ceased chuckling and became silent as a tomb.

Great Dreamers!
Tkett stared in awe and surprise at the object before them. It was unlike any starship he had ever seen before. Sleek metallic sides seemed to go on and on forever as the titanic machine trudged onward across the sea floor, churning up mud with thousands of shimmering, crystalline legs!

As if sensing their arrival, a mammoth hatch began irising open – in benign welcome, he hoped.

No resurrected starship. Tkett began to suspect he had come upon something entirely different.

Peepoe

Her ribcage heaved.

Peepoe’s lungs filled with a throbbing ache as she forced herself to dive ever deeper, much lower than would have been wise, even if she weren’t fatigued to the very edge of consciousness.

The sea at this depth was black. Her eyes made out nothing. But that was not the important sense, underwater. Sonar clicks, emitted from her brow, grew more rapid as she scanned ahead, using her sensitive jaw as an antenna to sift reflections.

It’s big....
she thought when the first signs returned.

Echo outlines began coalescing and she shivered.

It doesn’t sound like metal. The shape... seems less artificial than something –

A thrill of terror coursed her spine as she realized that the thing ahead had outlines resembling a gigantic living creature! A huge mass of fins and trailing tentacles, resembling some monster from the stories dolphin children would tell each other at night, secure in their rookeries near one of Earth’s great port cities. What lay ahead of Peepoe, swimming along well above the canyon floor, seemed bigger and more intimidating than the giant squid who fought Physeter sperm whales, mightiest of all the cetaceans.

And yet, Peepoe kept arching her back, pushing hard with her flukes, straining ever downward. Curiosity compelled her. Anyway, she was closer to the creature than the sea surface, where Zhaki and Mopol waited.

I might as well find out what it is.

Curiosity was just about all she had left to live for.

When several tentacles began reaching for her, the only remaining question in her mind was about death.

I wonder who I’ll meet on the other side.

Makanee

The dolphins in the pod – her patients – all woke about the same time from their afternoon siesta, screaming.

Makanee and her nurses joined Brookida, who had been on watch, swimming rapid circles around the frightened reverts, preventing any of them from charging in panic across the wide sea. Slowly, they all calmed down from a shared nightmare.

It was a common enough experience back on Earth, when unconscious sonar clicks from two or more sleeping dolphins would sometimes overlap and interfere, creating false echoes. The ghost of something terrifying. It did not help that most cetaceans sleep with just one brain hemisphere at a time. In a way, that seemed only to make the dissonance more eerie, and the fallacious sound-images more credibly scary.

Most of the patients were inarticulate, emitting only a jabber of terrified Primal squeals. But there were borderline cases who might even recover their full faculties someday. One of these moaned nervously about Tkett and a city of spells.

Another one chittered nervously, repeating over and over, the name of Peepoe.

Tkett

Well, at least the machine has air inside
, he thought.
We can survive here and learn more.

In fact, the huge underwater edifice – bigger than all but the largest starships – seemed rather accommodating, pulling back metal walls as the little sled entered a spacious airlock. The floor sank in order to provide a pool for Tkett and Chissis to debark from their tight cockpits and swim around. It felt good to get out of the cramped confines, even though Tkett knew that coming inside might be a mistake.

Makanee’s orders had been to do an inspection from the outside, then hurry home. But that was when they expected to find one of the rusty little spacecraft that
Streaker’s
engineers had resurrected from some sea floor dross pile. As soon as Tkett saw this huge cylindrical thing, churning along the sea bottom on a myriad caterpillar legs that gleamed like crystal stalks, he knew that nothing on Jijo could stand in the way of his going aboard.

Another wall folded aside, revealing a smooth channel that stretched ahead – water below and air above – beckoning the two dolphins down a hallway that shimmered as it continued transforming before their eyes. Each panel changed color with the glimmering luminescence of octopus skin, seeming to convey meaning in each transient, flickering shade. Chissis thrashed her tail nervously as objects kept slipping through seams in the walls. Sometimes these featured a camera lens at the end of an articulated arm, peering at them as they swam past.

Not even the Buyur could afford to throw away something as wonderful as this,
Tkett thought, relishing a fantasy of taking this technology home to Earth. At the same time, the mechanical implements of his tool harness quivered, responding to nervous twitches that his brain sent down the neural tap. He had no weapons that would avail in the slightest, if the owners of this place proved to be hostile.

The corridor spilled at last into a wide chamber with walls and ceiling that were so corrugated that he could not estimate its true volume. Countless bulges and spires protruded inward, half of them submerged, and the rest hanging in midair. All were bridged by cables and webbing that glistened like spider webs lined with dew. Many of the branches carried shining spheres or cubes or dodecahedrons that dangled like geometric fruit, ranging from half a meter across to twice the length of a bottlenose dolphin.

Chissis let out a squall, colored with fear and awe.

# coral that bites! coral bites bites!

# See the critters, stabbed by coral! #

When he saw what she meant, Tkett gasped. The hanging “fruits” were mostly transparent. They contained things that moved... creatures who writhed or hopped or ran in place, churning their arms and legs within the confines of their narrow compartments.

Adaptive optics in his right eye whirred, magnifying and zooming toward one of the crystal-walled containers. Meanwhile, his brow cast forth a stream of nervous sonar clicks – useless in the air – as if trying to penetrate this mystery with yet another sense.

I don’t believe it!

He recognized the shaggy creature within a transparent cage.

Ifni! It’s a hoon. A miniature hoon!

Scanning quickly, he found individuals of other species... four-legged urs with their long necks whipping nervously, like muscular snakes... minuscule traeki that resembled their Jophur cousins, looking like tapered stacks of doughnuts, piled high... and tiny versions of wheeled g’Keks, spinning their hubs madly, as if they were actually going somewhere. In fact, every member of the Commons of Six Races of Jijo – fugitive clans that had settled this world illegally during the last two thousand years – could be seen here, represented in Lilliputian form.

Tkett’s spine shuddered when he made out several cells containing slim bipedal forms. Bantam-weight
human beings
, whose race had struggled against lonely ignorance on old Terra for so many centuries, nearly destroying the world until they finally matured enough to lead the way toward true sapiency for the rest of Earthclan.

Before Tkett’s astonished eye, these members of the patron race were now reduced to leaping and cavorting with the confines of dangling crystal spheres.

Peepoe

Death would not be so mundane... nor hurt in such familiar ways. When she began regaining consciousness, there was never any doubt which world this was. The old cosmos of life and pain.

Peepoe remembered the sea monster, an undulating behemoth of fins, tendrils and phosphorescent scales, more than a kilometer long and nearly as wide, flapping wings like a manta ray as it glided well above the sea floor. When it reached up for her, she never thought of fleeing toward the surface, where mere enslavement waited. Peepoe was too exhausted by that point, and too transfixed by the images – both sonic and luminous – of a true leviathan.

The tentacle was gentler than expected, in grabbing her unresisting body and drawing it toward a widening beaklike maw. As she was pulled between a pair of jagged-edged jaws, Peepoe had let blackness finally claim her, moments before the end. The last thought to pass through her head was a Trinary haiku.

* Arrogance is answered

* When each of us is reclaimed.

* Rejoin the food chain!
 *

Only there turned out to be more to her life, after all. Expecting to become pulped food for huge intestines, she wakened instead, surprised to find herself in another world.

A blurry world, at first. She lay in a small pool. That much was evident. But it took moments to restore focus. Meanwhile, out of the pattern of her bemused sonar clickings, a reflection seemed to mold itself, unbidden, surrounding Peepoe with Trinary philosophy.

* In the turning of life’s cycloid,

* Pulled by sun and moon insistence,

* Once a springtime storm may toss you,

* Over reefs that have no channel,

* Into some lagoon untraveled,

* Where strange fishes, spiny-poisoned,

* Taunt you, forlorn, isolated... *

It wasn’t an auspicious thought-poem, and Peepoe cut it off sharply, lest such stark sonic imagery trigger panic. The Trinary fog clung hard, though. It dissipated only with fierce effort, leaving a sense of dire warning in its wake.

Rising to the surface, Peepoe lifted her head and inspected the pool, lined by a riot of vegetation. Dense jungle stretched on all sides, brushing the rough-textured ceiling and cutting off her view beyond a few meters. Flickering movements and skittering sounds revealed the presence of small inhabitants, from flying insectoids to clambering things that peered at her shyly from behind sheltering leaves and shadows.

A habitat
, she realized. Things lived here, competed, preyed on each other, died, and were recycled in a familiar ongoing synergy. The largest starships often contained ecological life-support systems, replenishing both food and oxygen supplies in the natural way.