Startide Rising (31 page)

Fear at last gave him the will to open his eyes. Moist mucus ran over his eyeballs as he labored to separate the lids. They were recessed to their deepest, and it took moments to make them switch to air-focus.

At first all he saw was a hospital suspension tank, small and confined. He was alone.

But sound told him he was in the open sea, and a leviathan rode next to him! He could feel its great power!

He blinked, and suddenly his vision shifted. Sight adopted the frame of reference of sound. The room vanished, and he saw It!

The thing beside him could never have lived in any of the oceans he had known. Creideiki almost choked in dread.

It moved with the power of tsunamis, the irresistibility of the tides.

It was a thing of darkness and depths.

It was a god.

* K-K-Kph-kree !!

It was a name Creideiki hadn’t been aware he had known. It welled up from somewhere, like the dragons of a nightmare.

One dark eye regarded Creideiki with a look that seared him. He wanted to turn away—to hide or die.

Then it spoke to him.

It spurned Trinary, as he knew it would. It cast aside Primal, disdaining it a tongue for clever animals. It sang a song that brushed against him with physical force, enveloped him and filled him with a terrible understanding.

:You Swam Away From Us Creideiki : You Were Starting To Learn : Then Your Mind Swam Away: But We Have Not Finished : Yet :

:We Have Waited Long For One Such As You : Now You Need Us As Much As We Need You : There Is No Going Back :

:As You Are : You Would Be A Hulk : Dead Meat : Emptiness Without A Song : Never Again A Dreamer or A Fire User :

:Useless Creideiki : Neither Captain : Nor Cetacean : Useless Meat :

:There Is One Path For You : Through The Belly Of The Whale Dream : There You May Find A Way : A Hard Way : But A Way To Do Your Duty : There You May Find A Way To Save Your Life … :

Creideiki moaned. He thrashed feebly and called out for Nukapai. But then he remembered. She was one of them. She waited, down below, with his other tormentors, some of them old gods he had heard of in the sagas, and some he had never heard mentioned even by the humpback whales …

K-K-Kph-kree had come to bring him back.

Though Anglic was lost to him, he conveyed a plea in a language he had not known he knew.

:I am damaged! : I am a hulk! I should be dead meat! : I have lost speech! I have lost words! : Let me die!

It answered with a sonorous rumble that seemed born beneath the earth. Beneath the ooze.

:Through The Whale Dream You Go : Where Your Cousins Have Never Been : Even When They Played Like Animals And Barely Knew Men : Deeper Than The Humpbacks Go : In Their Idle Meditation : Deeper Than Physeter : In His Devil Hunt : Deeper Than The Darkness Itself… :

:There You May Decide To Die, If Truth Cannot Be Borne… :

The walls of the small chamber faded away as his tormentor began to take on a new reality. It had the great brow and bright teeth of a sperm whale, but Its eyes shone like beacons, and Its flanks were streaked with sparkling silver. All around It shimmered an aura like … like the glimmering fields around a starship …

The room disappeared entirely. Suddenly, all around him was a great, open sea of weightlessness. The old god began to swim forward with powerful fluke strokes. Creideiki, wailing a soft fluting cry, was powerless to prevent being swept along in the behemoth’s pulling slipstream. They accelerated, faster …faster …

In spite of the absence of direction, he knew, somehow, they were going DOWN.

“Did you hear that-t-t?”

Makanee’s assistant looked up at the tank in which the captain lay suspended. A dim spotlight within the gravity tank shone on the suture scars of repeated surgery. Every few seconds, recessed nozzles cast a fine mist over the unconscious dolphin.

Makanee followed the medic’s gaze.

“Perhapsss. I thought I heard something a little while ago, like a sigh. What did you hear?”

The assistant shook her head from side to side. “I’m not sure. I thought it sounded like he was talking to somebody—only not in Anglic. It seemed like there was a snatch of Trinary, then … then something else. It sounded weird!”

The assistant shivered. “Do you think maybe he’s dreaming?”

Makanee looked up at Creideiki and sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if, in his condition, dreaming is something to wish for him, or to pray devoutly he doesn’t do.”

A
chilly sea breeze swept over him out of the west. A bout of shivering shook him—awake in the middle of the night. His eyes opened in the dark, staring into emptiness.

He couldn’t remember where he was.

Give it a moment, he thought. It’ll come.

He had been dreaming of the planet Garth, where the seas were small and the rivers many. There he had lived for a time among the human and chimp colonists, a mixed colony as rich and surprising as Calafia, where man and dolphin dwelt together.

Garth was a friendly world, though isolated far from other Earthling settlements.

In his dream, Garth was invaded. Giant warships hovered over her cities and spewed clouds of gas across her fertile valleys, sending colonists fleeing in panic. The sky had been filled with flashing lights.

He had trouble separating the trailing edges of the dream from reality. Tom stared at the crystal dome of Kithrup’s night. His body was locked—legs pulled in, hands clutching opposite shoulders—as much from a rigor of exhaustion as from the cold. Slowly, he got the muscles to loosen. Tendons popped and joints groaned as he learned all over again how to move.

The volcano to the north had died down to only a feeble red glow. There were long, ragged openings in the clouds overhead. Tom watched the pinpoints of light in the sky.

He thought about stars. Astronomy was his mental focus.

Red means cool, he thought. That red one there might be a small, nearby ancient—or a distant giant already in its death throes. And that bright one over there could be a blue supergiant. Very rare. Was there one in this area of space?

He ought to remember.

Tom blinked. The blue “star” was moving.

He watched it drift across the starfield, until it intercepted another bright pinpoint, this one a brilliant green. There was a flash as the two tiny lights met. When the blue spark moved on, the green was gone.

Now what were the chances I’d witness that? How likely was it that I’d be looking at just the right place at the right time? The battle must still be pretty hot and heavy up there. It isn’t over yet.

Tom tried to rise, but his body sagged back against the bed of vines.

Okay, try again.

He rolled over onto one elbow, paused to marshal his strength, then pushed upright.

Kithrup’s small, dim moons were absent, but there was enough starlight to make out the eerie weedscape. Water sluiced through the shifting morass. There were croaking and slithering sounds. Once he heard a tiny scream that choked off—some small prey suddenly dying, he supposed.

He was thankful for the obstinacy that had brought him to this modest height. Even two meters made a difference. He couldn’t have survived a night down in that loathsome mess.

He turned stiffly and began groping through his meager supplies on the crude sledge. First priority was to get warm. He pulled the top piece of his wetsuit from the jumbled pile, and gingerly slid into it.

Tom knew he should give some attention to his wounds, but they could wait just a little longer. So could a full meal—he had salvaged enough stores for a few of those.

Munching on a foodbar and taking sparing sips from a canteen, Tom appraised his small pile of equipment. At the moment what mattered were his three psi-bombs.

He looked up at the sky. Except for a faint purple haze near one bright star, there were no more signs of the battle. Yet that one glimpse had been enough. Tom already knew which bomb to set off.

Gillian had spent a few hours with the Niss machine before leaving Streaker to meet him at Toshio’s island. She had connected the Tymbrimi device to the Thennanin micro branch Library he had salvaged. Then she and the Niss had worked out the proper signals to load into the bombs.

The most important was the Thennanin distress call. Ifni’s fickle luck permitting, it would let Tom perform the crucial experiment, to find out if the Plan would work.

All of the work Suessi and Tsh’t and the others had put into the “Trojan Seahorse” would come to naught if Thennanin were not amongst those left in the war. What use would it be for Streaker to slip inside a hollowed-out Thennanin hulk, to rise into space in disguise, if all the combatants would shoot anyway at a remnant of a faction which had already lost?

Tom picked up one psi-bomb. It was spherical, and rested in his hand like an orb. At the top was a safety switch and timer. Gillian had carefully labeled each bomb on a strip of tape. On this one she had added a flowing signature and a small heart with an arrow through it.

Tom smiled and brought the bomb to his lips.

He had felt guilty of machismo, insisting on being the one to come here while she remained behind. Now he knew he had been right. Tough and competent as Gillian was, she wasn’t as good a pilot as he, and probably would have died in the crash. She certainly wouldn’t have had the physical strength to haul the sledge this far.

Hell, he thought. I’m glad because she’s safe with friends who’ll protect her. That’s reason enough. She may be able to lick ten Blenchuq cave lizards with one hand tied, but she’s my lady, and I’ll not let harm come near her if I can help it.

Tom washed down the last of the protein bar. He hefted the bomb and considered strategy. His original plan had been to land near the volcano, wait until the glider had recharged for launching, then plant the bomb and take flight before it went off. He could have ridden thermals from the volcano to a good altitude and found another island from which to watch the results of his experiment.

Lacking another island, he still could have gone far enough, landed in the ocean, and used his telescope to watch from there.

It was a nice plan, foiled by a raging storm and an unexpected jungle of mad vines. His telescope had joined the metal detritus at the bottom of Kithrup’s world-sea, along with most of the wreckage of his solar plane.

Tom rose carefully to his feet. Food and warmth made it merely an exercise in controlled agony.

Rummaging through his few belongings, he tore a long, narrow strip of cloth from the tattered ruins of his sleeping bag. The swatch of tough insu-silk seemed adequate.

The psi-bomb felt heavy and substantial in his hand. It was hard to imagine that the globe was stuffed with powerful illusions—a super-potent counterfeit, ready to burst free on command.

He set the timer for two hours and thumbed the safety release, arming the thing.

He laid it carefully into his makeshift sling. Tom knew he was being dramatic. Distance wouldn’t help him much. Sensors all over the Kithrup system would light up when it went off. He might as well set it off at his feet.

Still, one never knew. He’d toss it as far away as he could.

He let the sling sway a few times to get the feel of it, then he began swinging it. Slowly, at first, he built up momentum, while a strange feeling of well-being spread outward from his chest into his arms and legs. Fatigue seemed to fall away. He started to sing.

Oh, Daddy was a caveman,

He played ball in skins, with shirts.

He dreamed of lights up in the sky,

While scratching in the dirt.

You ETs and your stars …

Oh, Daddy was a fighter,

He killed his cousins, fourth and third.

He dreamed of peace eternally,

And died speared to the earth.

You ETs and your stars …

Oh, Daddy was a lover,

And yet he beat his wife.

He dreamed, longing for sanity

Regretting all his life.

You ETs and your stars …

Oh, Daddy was a leader,

He dreamed, yet still told lies.

He got the frightened masses,

To put missiles in the skies.

You ETs and your stars …

Oh, Daddy was unlearned,

But ever on he tried.

He hated his damned ignorance,

And struggled with his pride …

He stepped up on a bootstrap, then

And, up on nothing, cried.

That tragic orphan willed to me,

A mind and heart, then died.

So scorn me as a wolfling,

Sneer at my orphan’s scars!

But tell me, boys, “WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?”

You ETs, and your stars?

You Eatees and your stars!

Tom’s shoulders flexed as he took a step. His arm snapped straight, and he released the sling. The bomb sailed high into the night, whirling like a top. The spinning sphere shone briefly, still climbing, sparkling until it disappeared from sight. He listened, but never heard it land.

Tom stood still for a while, breathing deeply.

Well, he thought at last. That built an appetite. I have two hours in which to eat, tend my wounds, and prepare a shelter. Any time I get after that, O Lord, will be accepted with humble gratitude.

He laid the ragged strip of cloth over his shoulder and turned to prepare himself a meal by starlight.

“
In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear … they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time
…”

I
t was evening, and the Kiqui were leaving for their hunting grounds. Sah’ot heard them squeaking excitedly as they gathered in a clearing west of the toppled drill-tree. The hunters passed not far from the pool on their way to a rock chimney on the southern slope of the island, chittering and puffing their lung sacks in pomp.