4 ::: Creideiki

It had been his first really restful sleep in weeks. Naturally, it had to be interrupted.

Creideiki was used to taking his rest in zero gee, suspended in moist air. But as long as they were in hiding, anti-gravity beds were banned, and sleeping in liquid was the only other way for a dolphin.

He had tried for a week to breathe oxywater all through his rest period. The results had been nightmares and exhausting dreams of suffocation.

The ship’s surgeon, Makanee, had suggested he try sleeping in the old-fashioned way, drifting at the surface of a pool of water.

Creideiki decided to try Makanee’s alternative. He made sure that there was a big air-gap at the top of his state-room. Then he verified three times that the redundant oxygen alarms were all in perfect order. Finally, he shrugged out of his harness, turned off the lights, rose to the surface and expelled the oxywater in his gill-lung.

That part was a relief. Still, at first he just lay at the air-gap near the overhead, his mind racing and his skin itching for the touch of his tool harness. It was an irrational itch, he knew. Pre-spaceflight humans, in their primitive, neurotic societies, must have felt the same way about nudity.

Poor Homo sapiens! Mankind’s histories showed such suffering during those awkward millennia of adolescence before Contact, when they were ignorant and cut off from Galactic society.

Meanwhile, Creideiki thought, dolphins had been in almost a state of grace, drifting in their corner of the Whale Dream. When men finally achieved a type of adulthood, and started lifting the higher creatures of Earth to join them, dolphins of the amicus strain moved fairly easily from one honorable condition to another.

We have our own problems, he reminded himself. He badly wanted to scratch the base of his amplifier socket, but there was no way to reach it without his harness.

He floated at the surface, in the dark, awaiting sleep. It was sort of restful, tiny wavelets lapping against the smooth skin above his eyes. And real air was definitely more relaxing to breathe than oxywater.

But he couldn’t escape a vague unease over sinking ... as if it would harm him any to sink in oxywater ... as if millions of other dolphins hadn’t slept this way all their lives.

Disconcerting was his spacer’s habit of looking up. The ceiling bulkhead was inches away from the tip of his dorsal fin. Even when he closed his eyes, sonar told him of the nearness of enclosure. He could no more sleep without sending out echolocation clicks than a chimp could nap without scratching himself.

Creideiki snorted. Beach himself if he’d let a shipboard requirement give him insomnia! He blew emphatically and began to count sonar clicks. He started with a tenor rhythm, then slowly built a fugue as he added deeper elements to the sleep-song.

Echoes spread from his brow and diffracted about the small chamber. The notes drifted over one another, overlapping softly in faint whines and basso growls. They created a sonic structure, a template of otherness. The right combinations, he knew, would make the walls themselves seem to disappear.

Deliberately, he peeled away the duty-rigor of Keneenk—welcoming a small, trusted portion of the Whale Dream.

When the patterns—

In the cycloid

Call in whispers—

Soft remembered

Murmuring of—

Songs of dawning

And of the Moon—

The sea-tide’s darling

Then the patterns—

In the cycloid

Call in whispers—

Soft remembered ... *

The desk, the cabinets, the walls, were covered under false sonic shadows. His chant began to open on its own accord a rich and very physical poetry of crafted reflections.

Floating things seemed to drift past, tiny tail-flicks of schools of dream creatures. The echoes opened up space around him, as if the waters went on forever.

And the Dream Sea,

Everlasting

Calls in whispers

Soft remembered ... *

Soon he felt a presence nearby, congealing gradually out of reflections of sound.

She formed slowly next to him as his engineer’s consciousness let go ... the shadow of a goddess. Then Nukapai floated beside him ... a ghost of ripples, ribbed by motes of sound. The black sleekness of her body passed back into the darkness, unhindered by a bulkhead that seemed no longer there.

Vision faded. The waters darkened all around Creideiki, and Nukapai became more than just a shadow, a passive recipient of his song. Her needle teeth shone, and she sang his own sounds back to him.

With the closeness—

Of the waters

In an endless—

Layer of Dreaming

As the humpback—

Older sibling

Sings songs to the—

Serious fishes

Here you find me—

Wandering brother

Even in this—

Human rhythm

Where the humans

And other walkers

Give mirth to ---

The stars themselves ... *

A type of bliss settled over him as his heartbeat slowed. Creideiki slept next to the gentle dream-goddess. She chided him only teasingly for being an engineer, and for dreaming her in the rigid, focused verse of Trinary rather than the chaotic Primal of his ancestors.

She welcomed him to the Threshold Sea, where Trinary sufficed, where he felt only faintly the raging of the Whale Dream and the ancient gods who dwelt there. It was as much of that ocean as an engineer’s mind could accept.

How rigid the Trinary verse sometimes seemed! The patterns of overlapping tones and symbols were almost human precise ... almost human-narrow.

He had been brought up to think those terms compliments. Parts of his own brain had been gene-designed along human lines. But now and then chaotic sound-images slipped in, teasing him with a hint of ancient singing.

Nukapai clicked sympathetically. She smiled ...

No! She did no such land-ape thing! Of cetaceans, only the neo-dolphin “smiled” with their mouths.

Nukapai did something else. She stroked against his side, gentlest of goddesses, and told him,

Be now at peace *

It is That is ... *

And engineers *

Far from the ocean *

Can hear it still *

The tension of several weeks at last broke, and he slept. Creideiki’s breath gathered in glistening condensation on the ceiling bulkhead. The breeze from a nearby air duct brushed the droplets, which shuddered, then fell on the water like gentle rain.

When the image of Ignacio Metz formed a meter to his right, Creideiki was slow to become aware of it.

“Captain ...” the image said. “I’m calling from the bridge. I am afraid the Galactics have found us here sooner than we expected ...”

Creideiki ignored the little voice that tried to call him back to deeds and battles. He lingered in a waving forest of kelp fronds, listening to long night sounds. Finally, it was Nukapai herself who nudged him from his dream. Fading beside him, she gently reminded,

# Duty, duty—honor is, is—

Honor, Creideiki—alertly

# Shared, is—Honor #

Nukapai alone could speak Primal to Creideiki with impunity. He could no more ignore the dream-goddess than his own conscience. One eye at last focused on the hologram of the insistent human, and the words penetrated.

“Thank you, Doctor Metz,” he sighed. “Tell Takkata-Jim I’ll be right-t there. And please page Tom Orley. I’d like to see him on the bridge. Creideiki out.”

He inhaled deeply for a few moments, letting the room come back into shape around him. Then he twisted and dove to retrieve his harness.