Startide Rising

by David Brin

  It was difficult to assess the damage yet. Down here the illumination from the surface was blue-tinged and dim. The fen wouldn't turn on the arc lights they had strung up until Tsh't said it was safe. Fortunately, the wreck was in water shallow enough to visit, yet deep enough to shield them from spy eyes overhead.

  A pink-bellied bottlenose dolphin swam up next to the sled. She worked her foodmouth in a thoughtful circular motion.

  "It's really amazing, isn't it, Tom?" she asked. "It should be in a jillion piecesss."

  This deep, there was an odd clarity to the fin's voice. Bursts of air from her blowmouth and sonar clicks joined in a complex manner to make speech an intricate juggling of bodily functions. To a landlubber human, a neo-dolphin speaking underwater sounded more like an avant-garde orchestra tuning up, than someone speaking a derivative of the English language.

  "Do you think we can make any use of it-t?" The dolphin officer asked.

  Orley looked again at the ship. There was a good chance that in the confusion of battle none of those contending over Kithrup had bothered to note where this sparrow had fallen. He already had a few tentative ideas, one or two of which might just be bold and unexpected -- and idiotic-enough to work.

  "Let's give it a look," he nodded. "I suggest we split into three teams. Team one heads for any center of emissions, particularly probability, psi, or neutrino radiation, and disables the source. They should also watch out for survivors, though that seems a bit unlikely."

  Suessi snorted as he looked at the pounded wreck. Orley went on.

  "Team two concentrates on harvesting. Hannes should lead that one, along with Ti-tcha. They'll look for monopoles and refined metals that Streaker might be able to use. With luck, they might find some replacements for those coils we need.

  "With your permission, Tsh't, I'll take team three. I want to look over the structural integrity of that ship, and survey the topography of the surrounding area."

  Tsh't did a jaw clap of agreement. "Your logic is good, Tom. That is what we'll do. I'll leave Lucky Kaa with the other sled, on alert. The ressst shall join their teams at once."

  Orley grabbed Tsh't's dorsal fin as she was about to whistle the command. "Oh, we'd better go with breathers all around, hadn't we? Trinary may not be efficient, but I'd rather put off complex conversations in Anglic than have to risk everybody shuttling back and forth for air, and maybe someone getting hurt."

  Tsh't grimaced, but gave the command. The party was composed of disciplined fen -- the pick of Streaker's crew -- so the gathering at the sled was occasion merely for low-pitched grousing and indignant bubbles as each dolphin was fitted with his wraparound hose of air.

  Tom had heard of prototype breathers that would give a fin a streamlined air supply without hindering his speechmouth. If ever he found the time, he might try to rig some up himself. Speaking Trinary posed no real difficulty for him, but he knew from experience that the fen would have problems conveying technical information in anything but Anglic.

  Old Hannes was already grumbling. He helped pass out the breathers with ill-disguised reluctance. The chief artificer was conversant in Trinary, of course, but he found the threelevel logic difficult. To cap things off he was a lousy poet. He obviously didn't look forward to trying to discuss technical matters in whistle rhyme.

  They had their work cut out for them. Several of the picked petty officers and crew that had accompanied them on the rescue effort had gone back to the ship, escorting Toshio and Hikahi and the other victims of the stranding waves. Only a short score of fen remained in the party. Should anything dangerous come up they would have to take care of it themselves. No help from Streaker could arrive in time to do any good.

  It would have been nice to have Gillian here, Tom mused. Not that inspecting alien cruisers was her area of expertise, but she knew fins, and could handle herself if things got sticky.

  But she had work of her own aboard Streaker, trying to solve the puzzle of a billion-year-old mummy that should never have existed in the first place. And in an emergency she was the only other person aboard Streaker, barring, possibly Creideiki himself, who knew about the Niss machine, or its potential value if given access to the right data.

  Tom smiled as he caught himself rationalizing again.

  Okay, so there are good and logical reasons why the two of us can't be together right now. Take it for what it's worth. Do a good job here, and maybe you can be back to her in a few days.

  There had never been any question, from the moment they had met as adolescents, that he and she would make a pair. He sometimes wondered if their planners had known in advance, in choosing gametes from selected married couples, that two of the growing zygotes would later fit together so perfectly -- -down to the simple telempathy they sometimes shared.

  Probably it was a happy accident. Human genetic planning was very limited, by law and custom. Accident or no, Tom was grateful. In his missions for the Terragens Council he had learned that the universe was dangerous and filled with disillusionment. Too few sophonts -- even those equipped for it -- ever got enough love.

  As soon as the breathers had been distributed Tom used the sled's speaker to amplify his voice. "Now remember, everybody; though all Galactic technologies are based on the Library, that collection of wisdom is so huge that almost any type of machine might be inside that hull. Treat everything like it's booby-trapped until you've identified it and rendered it harmless.

  "The first goal of Team One, after silencing the wreck, is to find the main battle computers. There may be a record of the initial stages of the fight above. That information might be invaluable to the captain.

  "And would you all keep an eye out for the Library glyph? If you find that symbol anywhere, please note its location and pass word to me. I'd like to see what kind of micro-branch they were carrying."

  He nodded to Tsh't. "Is that all right with you, Lieutenant?"

  Streaker's fourth officer clapped jaw and nodded. Orley's politeness was appreciated, but she was likelier to bite off her own tail than overrule any suggestion he made. Streaker was the first large expedition ever commanded and operated by dolphins. It had been clear from the beginning that certain humans were along whose advice bore the patina of patronomy.

  She called out in Trinary.

  * Team One, with me --

  To diffract above, listening

  * Team Two, with Suessi --

  To taste for treasure

  * Team Three, with Orley --

  To aid him scheming

  * Drop nothing of Earth here --

  To betray our visit

  * Clean it up after --

  If you must shit

  * Think before acting --

  In tropic-clear logic

  * Now Streakers, with stillness --

  Away! *

  In precise order three formations peeled off, one group embellishing with a synchronized barrel roll as they passed Orley's sled. In obedience to Tsh't's orders, the only sound was the rapid clicking of cetacean sonar.

  Orley rode the sled until he was within forty meters of the hulk. Then he patted Hannes on the back and rolled off to the side.

  What a beautiful find the ship was! Orley used a hot-torch spectrograph to get a quick analysis of the metal at the edges of a gaping tear in the vessel's side. When he determined the ratios of various beta-decay products he whistled, causing the fen nearby to turn and look at him curiously. He had to make assumptions about the original alloy and the rate of exposure to neutrinos since the metal was forged, but reasonable guesses indicated that the ship had been fabricated at least thirty million years ago!

  Tom shook his head. A fact like that made one realize how far Mankind had to go to catch up with the Galactics.

  We like to think of the races using the Library as being in a rut, uncreative and unadaptable, Orley thought.

  That appeared to be largely true. Very often the Galactic races seemed stodgy and unimaginative. But ...

  He look
ed at the dark, hulking battleship, and wondered.

  Legend had it that the Progenitors had called for a perpetual search for knowledge before they departed for parts unknown, aeons ago. But, in practice, most species looked to the Library and only the Library for knowledge. Its store grew only slowly.

  What was the point of researching what must have been discovered a thousand times over by those who came before?

  It was simple, for instance, to choose advanced spaceship designs from Library archives and follow them blindly, understanding only a small fraction of what was built. Earth had a few such ships, and they were marvels.

  The Terragens Council, which handled relations between the races of Earth and the Galactic community, once almost succumbed to that tempting logic. Many humans urged co-opting of Galactic models that older races had themselves co-opted from ancient designs. They cited the example of Japan, which in the nineteenth century had faced a similar problem -- how to survive amongst nations immeasurably more powerful than itself. Meiji Japan had concentrated all its energy on learning to imitate its neighbors, and succeeded in becoming just like them, in the end.

  The majority on the Terragens Council, including nearly all of the cetacean members, disagreed. They considered the Library a honey pot -- tempting, and possibly nourishing, but also a terrible trap.

  They feared the "Golden Age" syndrome ... the temptation to "look backward" -- to find wisdom in the oldest, dustiest texts, instead of the latest journal.

  Except for a few races, such as the Kanten and Tymbrimi, the Galactic community as a whole seemed stuck in that kind of a mentality. The Library was their first and last recourse for every problem. The fact that the ancient records almost always contained something useful didn't make that approach any less repugnant to many of the wolflings of Earth, including Tom, Gillian, and their mentor, old Jacob Demwa.

  Coming out of a tradition of bootstrap technology, Earth's leaders were convinced there were things to be gained from innovation, even this late in Galactic history. At least it felt better to believe that. To a wolfling race, pride was an important thing.

  Orphans often have little else.

  But here was evidence of the power of the Golden Age approach. Everything about this ship spoke silkily of refinement. Even in wreckage, it was beautifully simple in its construction, while indulgent and ornate in its embellishments. The eye saw no welds. Bracings and struts were always integral to some other purpose. Here one supported a stasis flange, while apparently also serving as a baffled radiator for excess probability. Orley thought he could detect other overlaps, subtleties that could only have come with aeons of slow improvement on an ancient design.

  He was struck by a decadence in the pattern, an ostentation that he found arrogant and bizarre beyond mere alienness.

  One of Tom's main assignments aboard Streaker had been evaluation of alien devices -- particularly the military variety. This wasn't the best the Galactics had, yet it made him feel like an ancient New Guinea headhunter, proud of his new muzzle-loading musket, but painfully aware of the fact of machine guns.

  He looked up. His team was gathering. He chinned his hydrophone switch.

  "Everybody about done? All right, then. Subteam two, head off and see if that canyon goes all the way through the ridge. It'd cut twenty klicks of the route from here to Streaker."

  He heard a whistle of assent from Karacha Jeff, leader of subteam two. Good. That fin was reliable.

  "Be careful," he added as they swam off. Then he motioned for the others to follow him into the wreck through the seared, curled rent in its hull.

  They entered darkened corridors of eerily familiar design. Everywhere were signs of the commonality of Galactic culture, superimposed with the idiosyncrasies of a peculiar alien race. The lighting panels were identical to those on ships of a hundred species but the spaces in between were garishly decorated with Thennanin hieroglyphs.

  Orley eidetically examined it all. But always he looked out for one thing, a symbol that could be found everywhere in the Five Linked Galaxies -- a rayed spiral.

  They'll tell me when they find it, he reminded himself. The fins know I'm interested.

  I do hope, though, they don't suspect just how badly I want to see that glyph.

  18 ::: Gillian

  "Aw, why should I? Huh? You aren't being very cooperative with me! All I want is to talk to Brookida for just a minute. It's not as if I was asking a lot!"

  Gillian Baskin felt tired and irritable. The holo image of the chimpanzee planetologist Charles Dart glared out at her. It would be easy to become scathing and force Charlie to retreat. But then he would probably complain to Ignacio Metz, and Metz would lecture her about "bullying people just because they are clients."

  Crap. Gillian wouldn't take from a human being what she had put up with from this self-important little neo-chimp!

  She brushed aside a strand of dark blonde hair that had fallen over her eyes. "Charlie, for the last time, Brookida is sleeping. He has received your message, and will call you when Makanee says he's had enough rest. In the meantime, all I want from you is a listing of isotope abundances for the trans-ferric elements here on Kithrup. We've just finished more than four hours surgery on Satima, and we need that data to design a chelating sequence for her. I want to get every microgram of heavy metal out of her body as soon as possible.

  "Now, if that's too much to ask, if you're too overworked studying little geological puzzles, I'll just call the captain or Takkata-Jim, and ask them to assign somebody to go down and help you!"

  The chimp scientist grimaced. His lips curled back to display an array of large, yellowed, buck teeth. At the moment, in spite of the enlarged globe of his cranium, his outthrust jaw, and his opposable thumbs, he looked more like an angry ape than a sapient scientist.

  "Oh, all right!" His hands fluttered and emotion made him stammer. "B-But this is important! Understand? I think Kithrup was inhabited by technological sophonts as recently as thirty thousand years ago! Yet the Galactic Migration Institutes had this planet posted as fallow and untouchable for the last hundred million!"

  Gillian suppressed an urge to say, "So what?" There had been more defunct and forgotten species in the history of the Five Galaxies than even the Library could count.

  Charlie must have read her expression. "It's illegal!" he shouted. His coarse voice cracked. "If it's true, the Institute of M-migration should be told! They might even be grateful enough to help get those crazy religious n-n-nuts overhead to let us alone!"

  Gillian lifted an eyebrow in surprise. What was this? Charles Dart pondering implications beyond his own work? Even he, then, must think from time to time about survival. His argument about the laws of migration were naive, considering how often the codes were twisted and perverted by the more powerful clans. But he deserved some credit.

  "OK. That's a good point Charlie," she nodded. "I'm having dinner with the captain later. I'll mention it to him then. I'll also ask Makanee if she'll let Brookida out a little early. Good enough?"

  Charlie looked at her with suspicion. Then, unable to maintain so subtle and intermediate an expression for long, he let a broad grin spread.

  "Good enough!" he rumbled. "And you'll have that fax in your hands within four minutes! I leave you in good health."

  "Health," Gillian replied softly, as the holo faded.

  She spent a long moment staring at the blank comm screen. With her elbows on the desk, her face settled down upon the palms of her hands.

  Ifni! I should have been able to handle an angry chimp better than that. What's the matter with me?

  Gillian gently rubbed her eyes. Well, I've been up for twenty-six hours, for one thing.

  A long and unproductive argument about semantics with Tom's damned, sarcastic Niss machine hadn't helped at all, when all she had wanted from the thing was its assistance on a few obscure Library references. It knew she needed help to crack the mystery of Herbie, the ancient cadaver that lay under glass in her priv
ate lab. But it kept changing the subject, asking her opinion on various irrelevant issues such as human sexual mores. By the time the session was through, Gillian was ready to disassemble the nasty thing with her bare hands.

  But Tom would probably disapprove, so she deferred.

  She had been about to go to bed when the emergency call came from the outlock. Soon she was busy helping Makanee and the autodocs treat the survivors of the survey party. Worry about Hikahi and Satima drove all thought of sleep from her mind until that was done.

  Now that they seemed to be out of danger, Gillian could no longer use adrenalin reaction to hold of that empty feeling that seeped in around the edges of a very rough day.

  It's not a time to enjoy being alone, she thought. She lifted her head and looked at her own reflection in the blank comm screen. Her eyes were reddened. From overwork, certainly, but also from worry.

  Gillian knew well enough how to cope, but coping was a sterile solution. Instinct demanded warmth, someone to hold close and satisfy that physical longing.

  She wondered if Tom felt the same way at this moment. Oh, of course he did; with the crude telempathic link they sometimes shared, Gillian felt she knew him pretty well. They were of a type, the two of them.

  Only sometimes it seemed to Gillian that the planners had been more successful with him than they had been with her. Everyone seemed to think of her as superbly competent, but they were all just a little bit in awe of Thomas Orley.

  And at times like the present, when eidetic recall seemed more a curse than a blessing, Gillian wondered if she really was as neurosis-free as the manufacturer's warranty promised.

  The fax printer on her desk extruded a hardcopy message. It was the isotope distribution profile promised by Charlie -- a minute ahead of schedule, she noted. Gillian scanned the columns. Good. There was little variation from the millennia- old Library report on Kithrup. Not that she had expected any, but one always checked.