"Are you going to join me or just sit there staring?" asked Siri. She had slipped off her caftan as we came out onto the lowest deck. Our small ship was still tied to the dock. Above us, the island's treesails were beginning to open to the morning breeze. For the past several days, Siri had insisted on wearing swimstrips when we went into the water. She wore none now. Her nipples rose in the cool air.
"Won't we be left behind?" I asked, squinting up at the flapping treesails. On previous days we had waited for the doldrums in the middle of the day when the isle was still in the water, the sea a glazed mirror. Now the jibvines were beginning to pull taut as the thick leaves filled with wind.
"Don't be silly," said Siri. "We could always catch a keelroot and follow it back. That or a feeding tendril. Come on." She tossed an osmosis mask at me and donned her own. The transparent film made her face look slick with oil. From the pocket of her caftan she lifted a thick medallion and set it in place around her neck. The metal looked dark and ominous against her skin.
"What's that?" I asked.
Siri did not lift the osmosis mask to answer. She set the comthreads in place against her neck and handed me the hearplugs. Her voice was tinny. "Translation disk," she said. "Thought you knew all about gadgets, Merin. Last one in's a seaslug." She held the disk in place between her breasts with one hand and stepped off the isle. I could see the pale globes of her buttocks as she pirouetted and kicked for depth. In seconds she was only a white blur deep in the water. I slipped my own mask on, pressed the comthreads tight, and stepped into the sea.
The bottom of the isle was a dark stain on a ceiling of crystalline light. I was wary of the thick feeding tendrils even though Siri had amply demonstrated that they were interested in devouring nothing larger than the tiny zoo-plankton that even now caught the sunlight like dust in an abandoned ballroom. Keelroots descended like gnarled stalactites for hundreds of meters into the purple depths.
The isle was moving. I could see the faint fibrilation of the tendrils as they trailed along. A wake caught the light ten meters above me. For a second I was choking, the gel of the mask smothering me as surely as the surrounding water would, and then I relaxed and the air flowed freely into my lungs.
"Deeper, Merin," came Siri's voice. I blinked a slow motion blink as the mask readjusted itself over my eyes and caught sight of Siri twenty meters lower, grasping a keelroot and trailing effortlessly above the colder, deeper currents where the light did not reach. I thought of the thousands of meters of water under me, of the things which might lurk there, unknown, unsought-out by the human colonists. I thought of the dark and the depths and my scrotum tightened involuntarily.
"Come on down." Siri's voice was an insect buzz in my ears. I rotated and kicked. The buoyancy here was not so great as in Old Earth's seas, but it still took energy to dive so deep. The mask compensated for depth and nitrogen but I could feel the pressure against my skin and ears. Finally I quit kicking, grabbed a keelroot, and roughly hauled myself down to Siri's level.
We floated side by side in the dim light. Siri was a spectral figure here, her long hair swirling in a wine-dark nimbus, the pale strips of her body glowing in the blue-green light. The surface seemed impossibly distant. The widening V of the wake and the drift of the scores of tendrils showed that the isle was moving more quickly now, moving mindlessly to other feeding grounds, distant waters.
"Where are the…" I began to subvocalize.
"Shhh," said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. I could hear them then; the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat purrs and echoing cries. The depths were suddenly filled with strange music.
"Jesus," I said and because Siri had tuned our comthreads to the translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless whistle and toot.
"Hello!" she called and the translated greeting echoed from the transmitter; a high-speed bird's call sliding into the ultrasonic. "Hello!" she called again.
Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate. They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong enough to convince me of the animal's power.
"Hello," called Siri but the swift form faded into distant haze and there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the translator. "Do you want to talk to them?" she asked.
"Sure." I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea-mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth's two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had written that speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party would come away the more knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator disk back on. "Hello," I said.
There was a final minute of silence and then our earphones were buzzing while the sea echoed shrill ululations.
distance/no-fluke/hello-tone?/current pulse/circle me/ funny?
"What the hell?" I asked Siri and the translator trilled out my question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.
I tried again. "Hello! Greetings from… uh… the surface. How are you?"
The large male… I assumed it to be a male… curved in toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the water ten times faster than I could have swum even if I had remembered to don flippers that morning. For a second I thought he was going to ram us and I raised my knees and clung tightly to the keelroot. Then he was past us, climbing for air, while Siri and I reeled from his turbulent wake and the high tones of his shout.
no-fluke/no-feed/no-swim/no-play/no-fun.
Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She lightly grasped my shoulders while I held onto the keelroot with my right hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through the warm water. A school of tiny, crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled further out.
"Had enough?" she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.
"One more try," I said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to life. The current pushed us together again. She slid her arm around me.
"Why do you herd the islands?" I asked the bottle-nosed shapes circling in the dappled light. "How does it benefit you to stay with the isles?"
sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/ no-Shark/old songs/new songs.
Siri's body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm tightened around me. "Great Voices were the whales," she whispered. Her hair fanned out in streamers. Her right hand moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.
"Do you miss the Great Voices?" I asked the shadows. There was no response. Siri slid her legs around my hips. The surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.
"What do you miss most of Old Earth's oceans?" I asked. With my left arm I pulled Siri closer, slid my hand down along the curve of her back to where her buttocks rose to meet my palm, and held her tight. To the circling dolphins we must have appeared a single creature. Siri lifted herself against me and we became a single creature.
The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over Siri's shoulder. I reached to shut it off but paused as the answer to my question buzzed urgently in our ears.
miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/Sharks Shark/Shark