That struck me as excellent advice, the kind my mother would have given me. “I will,” I agreed. And the pain of my grief lessened somewhat, becoming slightly more manageable.
Kasmar took me to the seals, and they welcomed me. They were not my kind, but it was a comfort to be with them. Whether it was because I was so young, or that they shared Kasmar’s outrage at what the humans did to their cousins, or some other reason I did not know. Maybe it was that Kasmar, as an elder seal, had influence to sway the others. But for now it sufficed.
Chapter Five
I played and hunted with the seal colony, enjoying the companionship of the young cubs and the protection of the mature members. I explored the ailing coral reef with them; there was still some good hunting there, though much of the coral was whitening and dying and the fish were leaving. We swam in the shallow waters of the great land that bordered the sea, digging out edible tidbits. I discovered that there were many tasty fish, not just mackerel, each type with its own habitat and ways. I learned the little tricks of hunting and foraging, and did not go hungry as might have been the case had I done it alone. Life with the seals was good enough.
I grew and filled out as time passed, becoming less a child than a young female. But several things prevented me from accepting, or being accepted, completely. I was not a seal, but a dolphin, a different species. I saw the males and females beginning to appreciate each other in new ways, but I could not relate in that manner. The seals could not swim at my pace, and I could not join them to bask on the beach. And though they feared and hated the human killers in their dreaded boats, they generally accepted that they could not do anything except avoid those boats. I, in contrast, was attracted to the boats, not from any pleasure; I wanted to discover how to sink them and wipe out their killer men. I was serious about my mission, and that determination grew as I matured, rather than fading.
Kasmar picked up on this as swiftly as I did. “You are not like us, Azael,” he said. “Even if you were a seal, you would not be the same. We hate the boats and men on general principle and caution; you hate them seriously, from your immediate experience. I don’t blame you; in fact I wish you success in abolishing them, if it is remotely possible. But you can’t hope to accomplish your purpose by associating with us. You must strike out on your own. Maybe there are others in the sea who are closer to your passion, like the whales who are being destroyed by the men, or the squid who get eaten by them. You must search them out, if there are any of your frame of mind. I fear there are not, but you must find out for yourself.”
His words confirmed my own thoughts. “Then I think I must leave you,” I said with regret. “To search out others of my emotional persuasion, if they exist.”
“I fear you must,” he agreed. “You are now a healthy dolphin and strong swimmer; you are ready to quest alone. But if you seek and fail, you will still be welcome to return and swim with us.”
I was not sure of that. “I think the others are growing tired of me.”
“Perhaps. But I am not. I thought to rescue you as an orphaned child, but you are my closest associate in terms of attitude, of intellect, of mission in life, and I enjoy your company. You have become my friend. I can’t even aspire to abolish the human kind; I am simply too old and weak. But you will be coming into your prime, and maybe you have a chance. I urge you to go for it, though I will be lonely without you.”
That support, again, uplifted me. “Oh Kasmar, I love you,” I said, and kissed him on the snout.
“Go, girl, before I become embarrassingly maudlin.”
I went, appreciating the sentiment, because it applied to me as well.
First I did what I should have before: I sought a pod of dolphins we knew were in the area. Maybe I could join them, and enlist them in my mission. They surely were suffering losses too, as the predatory boats and nets plied their dreadful trade. Only my joy of association with Kasmar had restrained me before.
It did not take long to locate them, for they were moving into the territory my original pod had occupied. I whistled a greeting.
And got a rude reaction. “Go away!” the elder member of the pod whistled in return.
“But I came in friendship, to—”
Two young males detached from the pod and swam toward me, whistling hostility. I did not know what they intended, but feared it would not be pleasant. I fled, swimming with my utmost velocity. The males were larger than I, and swam well, but they did not know this territory the way I did. I looped around the coral reef, ducked under an overhang, and shot through an odd current that would carry my scent trail in the wrong direction. So I lost them, and escaped.
Then I paused to consider, chagrined. What had just happened? I had approached the pod in friendship, but they had never given me a chance. They had driven me away without even trying to get to know me. How could that be?
How could my own kind be less welcoming than the seals? This was shocking and appalling. I had never even imagined such a reaction.
Slowly I realized that they were a foreign pod, moving into an unfamiliar place, and they distrusted all strangers. Maybe they had brushed with the humans, so were on edge because of the danger. They trusted only their own, and did not want to share. Probably the elders in my original pod had known of them, and known to stay clear. I, in my innocence, had not. But now I did.
Oh yes, I did.
Chapter Six
Disheartened by this betrayal, I swam immediately to my next prospect. There was a small whale foraging in the region, an orca. That species was distantly related to the dolphins, but we seldom associated. Even the smallest whales were far more massive than our kind was. I approached him cautiously.
“I have a mission,” I said.
He glanced at me. “If you were older and larger, I’d be interested.”
There it was again: the hint of something the two male dolphins had indicated, that I did not understand. “Interested in what?”
“In mating. What else?”
Mating! This was completely beyond my experience, so I ignored it. “I want to destroy the humans and their boats.”
“Don’t we all! But there’s no chance, so get out of my way and let me forage in peace.”
And that, it seemed, was that. The orca was not interested in my mission, and though I sensed he was not overtly hostile to me, neither did he respect me, and it seemed safer to stay clear of him. I retreated, and he did not pursue, to my relief.
What was I going to do? I knew I could not destroy the humans alone; I needed help. But help was proving hard to come by.
Disappointed and distressed, again, I dived down into the trench. This was a section of impossibly deep water where the pressure was intolerable. I could not stay there long; it was too uncomfortable. My dive was symbolic anyway: depressed spirits, descending body. I leveled off, ready to return to the surface.
“Azael!”
I whipped around, surprised. Who was calling me? This was too deep for the seals, and it wasn’t the orca. I didn’t know anyone down here. Yet I had plainly heard my name. “Who are you?” I whistled.
There was a kind of chuckle. “Here.” And a figure appeared where there seemed to have been none before, faintly glowing. “Levy.”
“You’re a squid!” I exclaimed, astonished. “Using your colors for camouflage so I didn’t see you.”
“True,” Levy agreed, waving three tentacles nonchalantly. “I sense you have a mission. Maybe you’re the one.”
“How can I talk to you?” I asked. “I don’t even know your language.”
“Yes, I think you are the one.”
“The one for what?” I asked warily. Squid were dangerous, and this was the largest one I had ever seen, a true monster of the deep. Was he trying to lure me to within range of his tentacles so he could catch and consume me? Certainly his interest was not of the type the dolphins and orca had evinced.
“No, my dear. Dolphins are not on my diet, and certainly not mating. It is that
I have a mission for you, if you choose to accept it.”
“If it involves destroying humans, then I’m interested.”
That set him back; I could feel it in his mind. “Not exactly.”
Feel it in his mind? That did not make sense. But I was curious. Curiosity had always been a bad habit of mine. “What, exactly?”
“First there are things to explain. Can you come lower? This elevation is painful for me. In fact I risk the bends.”
“The whats?”
“I am a creature of the deepest depths. Coming up to the lesser pressure of the heights stresses me. It’s a blood thing, I think too complicated to explain briefly. Please, descend a bit with me so we can converse.”
The heights? “This is already too much pressure for me,” I protested. “I need to get higher.”
He sighed. “Then we must converse here, briefly. You asked how we can talk, when we have no common language. We are not really talking; we are in telepathic contact.”
This utterly bewildered me. “In what?”
“Mind talk. My mind is reaching out to touch yours, sending my thoughts and receiving yours. Language is no barrier; this bypasses that. You hear it as your kind of speech, but it is really straight understanding.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“This.” Then suddenly I grasped the concept of telepathy, mind talk. He had sent it without the filter of language. The very fact that I now understood it confirmed its authenticity.
“What is it you want of me?” I asked. I was not being negative; I really wanted to know.
He told me, buttressing it by a broader background understanding fed directly to my mind. I absorbed it, amazed.
Alien visitors from another planet—suddenly I understood what “aliens” and “planet” were, along with other remarkable concepts—had settled in the deepest trench, where conditions mimicked their home environment. They had discovered that there was sapient life on Earth, but incredibly it was on hot dry land, not in the comfortable sea. They needed to make contact, but that was awkward because they could not go to land—they would explode, literally—and the land creatures could not come to the depths. So they needed to establish a chain of intermediaries to make the connection. Levy was the first, and Azael could be the second. She could contact the humans.
“Contact the humans!” she exclaimed. “I want to destroy them!”
“This is a problem,” Levy agreed. “I don’t much like them myself; they eat my cousins, and chop them up for bait. But this contact is necessary. Will you do it?”
“No! Never will I—” I paused as more thoughts packed in, impressing on me the vital importance of this mission. It truly was essential that the contact be established; I believed that completely. It wasn’t that my mind had been overridden; it was that there was a huge amount I hadn’t known before. “—decline such an opportunity,” I concluded.
“That’s good. You will need a communicator.” Levy extended a soft packet. “The aliens made it with their technology. It will operate as long as it remains in contact with your body. Swallow it.”
I swam close and took it from his tentacle with my mouth. I swallowed it as instructed. Now I had the power of telepathy, and would be able to converse with the humans. “I must go, before I suffocate.”
“Yes. I will sink to a more comfortable depth. When you return here, send me a mental signal and I will rise to meet you for a more intimate dialogue.” Then Levy jetted forward and down, his glow disappearing into the darkness below.
I was left with the communicator and the mind ability it provided me, and a new mission. I had to get in touch with the horrible humans. The ones I wanted to destroy. I still hated them, but now had a far broader perspective. This was bound to be a challenge, direct mental talk notwithstanding.
I launched my body toward the surface. There was a good deal more than air on my mind.
Chapter Seven
It was late and I was alone.
The water was calm and the sky above was clear. I floated idly on the gently rolling waves, rising and falling, and thinking of my mother, and of my friends in my pod, who were all gone now. I had watched many of them suffocate or bleed to death.
Above, a lone seagull circled, idly chattering to himself, his words just barely reaching me, “I’m circling, I’m circling, I’m circling.”
That I could understand the cries of a seagull was a wonder to me. That I heard even now the whispered, frenetic thoughts of the many hundreds of fish below me, was amazing as well.
Even now, I heard a school of tuna in the near distance chattering among themselves. “Turn right, right, left, left, right, left. Go up, now down, down, too far down, up, up, up.”
Yes, this alien technology was something to behold, and something to listen to. As I had learned at a young age, various sea creatures of the same general ilk can mostly communicate with each other, as I had done with the orca, although he wasn’t a dolphin. I shouldn’t have been able to understand the giant squid, nor the seagull or the tuna.
But I could, and, I have to admit, it was threatening to drive me crazy. The ocean sounds that I had once been used to were long gone, replaced now with mindless thoughts, idle chatter, and conversation I really didn’t want any part of.
Sardines were for eating. I really didn’t want to hear about their day, or nights, or of their own quest for food and safety. It made eating them that much harder.
But I had committed to this mission and for good reason. The deep-water aliens, it appeared, were here to thwart a looming global disaster. The image that had been impressed upon me by Levy was nothing short of horrific. All of life, including that in the deepest oceans, could face extinction.
I couldn’t have that. Although I missed my mother and my pod, and although I often felt lonely and sad, I could not pass up the chance to save the earth. To save my friends like Kasmar and even Levy.
Earlier in the evening, as the sun was setting on the far horizon, sending a streak of shimmering gold radiating across the ocean surface, another dolphin pod had come and gone, rejecting my request to join them. Once again, I had to dash off, just barely evading the aggressive males.
Had my own pod been so rude, so cold, so angry? So heartless to those in need?
I didn’t know. I had been too young to know the mechanics of the pod. My own mother had been so loving, nurturing, and others had been full of spirit and doing a great job. I couldn’t imagine my own mother turning away a young dolphin in need, as others had done to me. But my mother hadn’t been the pod leader, had she?
No, that had been Grayback, to date the biggest dolphin I had ever seen. Grayback was always very serious, even around the young dolphins. We soon learned to give a wide berth to our pod leader. Yes, I could definitely see Grayback running an eager, lost dolphin away.
But not my mother. She would have helped. I believed that with all my heart. And as I lay there on the ocean surface, swishing my tail and flukes, thinking of the mother I lost, I saw something amazing in the sky. It was a flash of light, moving rapidly and growing brighter before it flamed out of existence. As it did so, I heard a soft whisper from seemingly nearby. A whisper that sounded like my mother.
“Beneath you, Azael.”
“Mother?” I asked, but whatever I heard must surely have been my imagination. My mother was dead of course, and the shooting star had surely just been a natural phenomenon.
Yes, my imagination. I was missing her so much, I had imagined I heard her speak to me.
I was just about to close my eyes, to drift off to sleep on the rocking currents of the ocean, when I heard the whisperings rise up from below me. Three voices.
“Hunger, hunt, prey,” the voices said, seemingly in unison. “Hunger, hunt, prey,”
The voices were faint, and I might have missed them if not for the strange warning I’d received just moments earlier. The warning that sounded very much like my mother. I might have, in fact, slept through the harsh whispe
rings.
The whisperings of sharks. I was sure of it.
And they were directly below me.
Chapter Eight
What to do? If I suddenly swam away, they could tune in on the motion and pursue, and surely catch me. But if I didn’t, they would probably spy me anyway.
“Prey, above.”
They already had. I was in trouble. Already they were cruising smoothly higher, orienting on me.
Desperation gave me an idea. If it failed, I was lost.
“Flee north!” I thought loudly, as I fled south.
The sharks reacted as one, swerving north. And in moments I was out of their range. I had used my new telepathy to save my life. It had been a lie, but it seemed that what counted was not the truth, but the thought. That was a useful discovery.
But as my fear and excitement subsided, I realized that I could not afford to delay long. There were too many dangers. I had to contact the humans, because only they could act to avert the looming disaster. I hated them, and would have been glad to leave them to their fate, except that the creatures of the sea would suffer the same fate. The day was late, but I had better see what it might offer.
I swam toward the fishing village by the shore. There were always boats coming and going there, as they ranged out to slaughter more innocent fish. I detested this, but had to try to contact a human.
I saw a boat anchored off-shore. What was it doing here? Normally they remained tied up at their docks overnight, not parked on the sea.
As I came close I picked up the thoughts of the humans aboard. One was the usual kind of brute fisherman. He was mending his tackle, a tedious chore, his mind largely blank. The other—
The other was a young female, wearing an almost skintight sheath of cloth that covered her torso. A swimsuit. The man’s child. A girl, not yet of age to mate, with an outlook surprisingly similar to mine. She had prevailed on him to take her out fishing. Catching fish on a hook, rather than in a net. She was at the front—the prow, in their language, which I could now grasp—dangling a line into the water. It had a baited hook. She didn’t really care if she caught a fish; she just liked being out here on the sea.