A Ring of Endless Light

by Madeleine L'engle

  "It's not outside the realm of possibility." Adam was looking into the tank, studying the starfish. "Human beings and starfish are both chordates and come from the same phylum."

  I wasn't sure what that meant. "You mean they're sort of our distant ancestors, way back on the family tree?"

  "Yah." Adam moved on to the next tank, and I followed. At the end of the lab, John was sitting on a high stool, writing on a clipboard. Dr. Zand had gone. Adam bent over the tank. "So what we learn about starfish and how they regenerate could someday apply to human beings. You're quite right, it would revolutionize medicine."

  "Isn't it more what things ought to be, rather than knives and stuff?"

  "Probab ly."

  "How much do we know about it?"

  "The central nerve disc is vital. We've been able to make some isolated arms regenerate by implanting them with part of the central nerve disc, which seems to provide the electric energy for regeneration. But we haven't made that much progress. Starfish have fascinated people for centuries. The first formal paper on regeneration was written by an Italian, Lazzaro Spallanzani, way back in 1768. We know a little more than he did, but not as much as you might expect."

  I stared down at a starfish with all five arms, the fifth not quite complete, still in the process of growing itself back. "We've been spending more time on machines and bombs and industry than we have on things like starfish, haven't we? Has anybody tried anything with people? I mean, do we have an equivalent of the central nerve disc?"

  He gave me an oblique look. "We don't know all that much about it yet. Electrical charges have been used in stimulating broken bones to heal. But in the wrong hands it could be disastrous, producing malignancies and all kinds of horrors. Come along and I'll show you the dolphin pens. Got your bathing suit?"

  I indicated the rolled-up towel.

  We paused as we passed John, who pointed at a lizard in the tank; regeneration was just barely visible in a severed foreleg.

  "Terrif," Adam said. "We're off to Una and Nini. See you later."

  I assumed Una and Nini had to be dolphins. We left the lab building and walked downhill toward the water. One of the loveliest things about Seven Bay Island is that each of the seven bays has several coves, some quite large and open, some small and protected, like Grandfather's cove. The path down to the beach from the lab hairpinned and zigzagged instead of descending precipitously like the one to Grandfather's cove, so it was easier walking. Even so, the sun beat down on us and I could feel sweat trickling down the small of my back. We headed for a long and narrow cove in which several pens had been built. We paused at the first pen, where two pale-grey dolphins were leaping up into the air, shedding sparkles of water, while a middle-aged man with a balding head tossed them fish from a bucket. I thought he was the man who had cried at Commander Rodney's funeral. His baldness was sort of like a monk's tonsure, a dark fringe all around his head, with a pink circle of skin at the crown. He had brown spaniel eyes and I liked him.

  He saw us, gave me a quick look, and called out, "Hey, kids, want to take over?"

  "Sure, Jeb. This is John Austin's sister Vicky with me today. Vicky, this is Dr. Nutteley, my boss."

  We shook hands, and his eyes met mine in a brief smile, and then Dr. Nutteley took off at a jog trot for the next pen.

  Adam reached into the bucket and took out a silver wriggling fish and tossed it high into the air. "Get it, Una!" One of the dolphins leapt completely out of the water and caught the fish in mid-air. Adam threw another fish across the pen. "Get it, Nini!" The other dolphin dove down and in less time than I would have thought possible, even knowing how swift dolphins are supposed to be, she surfaced with the fish in her mouth.

  "You've probably heard," Adam said, "that according to the laws of aerodynamics it's impossible for a bumblebee to fly."

  I nodded. "But it flies. I like that."

  "Okay, and according to the laws of hydronomics, it's impossible for a dolphin to swim as swiftly as it does. Nobody's figured out why the bumblebee can fly, but we think that with dolphins it's something to do with their delicate skin, which ripples with the movement of the water, and also sheds, far more swiftly than we human beings shed our skin. Una and Nini, I think I told you last night, are bottle-noses. The absolutely fascinating thing"--as he was talking, his light was really turned on, bright as the sun--"is that dolphins were once land animals, mammals like other land creatures."

  "Aren't they still mammals?" I watched, fascinated, as Una and Nini bobbed up and down in front of us, half their sleek bodies out of water, as they chirruped at us for more fish.

  "Yah, they're mammals. They aren't fish. They're small whales who left the land somewhere in prehistory, and returned to the sea. Here, Vicky, you toss them a fish."

  I didn't want him to think I was chicken. Those fish wriggling in that bucket of water were still alive. I'd never been fishing, and never had I touched a live fish. I was afraid they'd be slippery, afraid they'd slide out of my fingers before I could throw them. To mask my fear, as much from myself as from Adam, I said, "Didn't someone call the sea the primordial womb from which all life came?" And while I was speaking I reached into the bucket and grabbed a fish and threw it. "Get it, Una!" And another. "Get it, Nini!"

  I don't think Adam realized how nervous I was. He said, "All life started in those early oceans as far as we know, and then when weather and land masses more or less stabilized, some of the ocean creatures ventured ashore and became land creatures." He reached into the bucket and pulled out a small fish, but he didn't throw it. Instead, he leaned so far over I thought he might lose his balance and fall in. "Nini!" he called. Then he held the tail of the fish in his teeth, and Nini jumped up and took it from his mouth, delicately, gently.

  Delicate and gentle or not, I hoped he wouldn't ask me to do that.

  "Dolphins don't chew their food," he said. "They swallow the fish whole."

  I had seen Nini's open mouth. "They appear to have very formidable teeth."

  "They use their teeth to grasp the fish. They don't have fingers, after all." He tossed a fish to Una. "As far as I know, whales and others of their kind, like these dolphins, are the only land creatures who left the land and returned to the sea."

  "Mermaids," I said, without stopping to think how unscientific I was going to sound.

  But, instead of putting me down, Adam said, "Some people think mermaids came from porpoises, and their singing sounds like dolphins chirruping. Dolphins have always fascinated human beings. It's amazing, for instance, how so much that Aristotle wrote about dolphins is true. How could he have known all that he knew, way back then?" He tossed the dolphins a few more fish, looked into the nearly empty bucket, and turned to me. "Give Una and Nini the rest of the fish."

  I didn't exactly like it, but I did it, and without flinching, because I did like Una and Nini. In a funny way, they reminded me of Rochester, not in looks, of course, but in essence.

  When the fish were gone, we moved on to the next pen, where Dr. Nutteley was studying three dolphins.

  "Next week Ynid"--Adam pointed to one of them--"is going to give birth. The other two you might call her midwives. Dolphins can't deliver alone. They're communal creatures."

  "Like us."

  "In that way."

  I looked at him, and his eyes had that deep inward look. "You mean," I ventured, "we hear about man's inhumanity to man, but never dolphin's inhumanity to dolphin?"

  He nodded, without speaking.

  "What about John's Nature is red in tooth and claw?"

  "It doesn't seem to apply to dolphins."

  "They do eat live fish," I pointed out regretfully.

  "Yah, but I can't see that it's any worse than if they were dead and cooked. One way or another, they're eaten. And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of other life." He stared at the three dolphins for a long moment. "Porpoises are warm-blooded, like us, not cold-blooded, like fish. And if you look carefully at the
ir flippers you can see that they're really made-over paws; they're not fish's fins. They have the bone structure of forelimbs." He moved along, waving goodbye to Dr. Nutteley, and I followed, clutching my towel, which had got quite damp from splashes while we were feeding Una and Nini. I didn't know where he was taking me now, but I didn't ask; I just followed.

  "What really gets me"--he paused on the sandy path which led in a rambly way across the dunes--"is that when the dolphin returned to the sea, he had to give up what once may well have been hands." He held his hands toward me and I looked at him as he stood at the crest of a dune, silhouetted against the incredible blue brightness of sky, so it was difficult to see his expression. "The hand with its opposable thumb--can you imagine what it would be like not to be able to pick anything up, not to be able to hold anything and look at it?"

  I, too, held out my hand, putting thumb and forefinger together. "Yesterday when I was swimming with Leo we saw a dolphin leaping, and it looked so free and--and joyous. Do you suppose way back millions of years ago the dolphin had to choose to give up its hands in order to have that kind of freedom?"

  "I don't know." Adam started toward the ocean, so that the dolphin pens were hidden by an arm of dune. We were in a larger cove, a wide, gentle curve of sand. "I don't even know if I think it would be worth it, at that price." He stretched out his fingers again. "Without writing, writing down words on stone or papyrus or parchment or paper or microfilm so they can be kept, we wouldn't have any history. And without history there isn't any future."

  "Word of mouth?" I suggested. "Oral tradition?"

  "It gets changed, like in the whispering game we played at kids' birthday parties."

  "Someone whispers a sentence, and you pass it along, and in the end it comes out all garbled?"

  He looked at me over his shoulder. "Yah, that's what happens to oral tradition unless someone comes along and sets it down."

  "Oh, wow," I exclaimed. "I guess that's why Grandfather thought it was so important to write down the stories and traditions of the tribe he was living with. I never thought about it that way before."

  "I didn't either, not till I began my project this summer. We take an awful lot for granted. Without hands, we wouldn't have any painting, or sculpture, or poetry."

  I thought of Grandfather reading to me the day before: I saw Eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light. And then I thought of the dolphins returning to the sea, and losing fingers and thumb and the ability to grasp, and Una and Nini and their loving smiles, and they seemed to me to be bathed in a deep but dazzling darkness.

  Adam stood at the water's edge. "We wouldn't have any music, any symphonies or operas or even the songs we sang last night to your mother's guitar." We left the shallow cove and turned into a deeper half-moon of beach. "Jeb is making tape after tape of Una and Nini, to see whether or not their Donald Duck gabblings and their underwater whistlings are part of a real language, with a complex vocabulary, or whether it's all--I mean, do they think, or is it all instinct, the way it is with ants?"

  I looked across the blinding glare of ocean disappearing into the horizon. "Ants never seem to me to be particularly happy."

  "Yah, you have a point there. Dolphins undeniably have a great sense of fun. And humor is a sign of intelligence. You're quite a girl, Vicky. Before I--" He stopped and looked at me, probingly, and I waited for him to say something, and when he did, it wasn't at all what I had expected. "This Leo: are you his girlfriend?"

  Why did Zachary and now Adam care about Leo and me? Me, Leo's girlfriend? Day before yesterday, I'd have been outraged.

  "Are you?" Adam prodded.

  "He's my friend," I said carefully. "But not my boyfriend. I don't know him that well."

  "Don't you? Last night he surely looked at you the way someone looks at his girlfriend."

  "Adam, I never even really talked to Leo till yesterday. We see the Rodneys when we come to visit Grandfather, the way we see lots of other people on the Island. Leo and I never had a conversation till he talked about his father dying, when we walked on the beach yesterday. I think maybe we can really be friends. But I'm not anybody's girlfriend."

  "And what about Zachary?" Adam bent down and started unlacing his sneakers. His hair fell across his eyes.

  "Zachary--I guess what I think I have to do with Zachary is give him a chance, the way we said last night." About Zachary, I wasn't ready to say anything more than that.

  Adam looked up at me and grinned as he unlaced his other sneaker. "Friends. Friends are what make the world go round for me." He stood up, tying his already knotted laces together and hanging his sneakers about his neck. "John says you're a pretty good swimmer."

  "I won't win any races, but I'm good at long distance. I mean, I can swim on and on forever as long as there isn't any rush."

  "Long distance is what I want from you, not speed. When I asked you to come to the lab this morning, I wasn't sure how much I was--but now I think you--" And then he stopped.

  He stopped for so long, and stood there on the beach, sneakers dangling about his neck, hands dropped by his sides, not moving, that finally I spoke to break the silence. "Another thing about dolphins not having hands--they can't take a gun or a harpoon and kill."

  "Yah." A brief silence. "And here's another mystery: the dolphin's brain is forty percent larger than ours and just as complex."

  I figured we were going to go swimming, so I kicked off my sandals. "How much of the brain does the dolphin use? We use only a tiny portion of ours."

  "Vicky."

  I waited.

  "Would you like to meet a dolphin?"

  "You mean like Una and Nini?"

  "I mean out at sea. Like the one you saw yesterday."

  "Well--sure."

  "You wouldn't be afraid?" He was looking at me, hard.

  "I don't know." I couldn't pretend with him. "I don't think so--but--well, meeting a dolphin except in a pen never occurred to me."

  "Will you swim out with me and try? If you're afraid, you can swim back. And he may not come, anyhow. I mean, this is something entirely new in my experiment with Basil."

  "Basil?"

  Suddenly his voice was brisk and business-like. He pointed to a large rock behind us, bigger than my rock in Grandfather's cove. "Basil's the dolphin who's my chief project this summer. There's your dressing room. Go behind the rock and put on your bathing suit. Then swim out and join me, but stay a few yards behind. I'm going to call Basil. He's a little bigger than Una and Nini, but don't let that worry you." He started to run toward the surf, then turned and called back, "The tide's coming in now and, anyhow, this is the safest bay on the Island." Then he splashed into the water.

  It didn't take me long to change. I stood for a moment behind the shelter of the rock, feeling the fierce strength of the sun, and at the same time feeling cold because of what Adam had told me we were going to do. To calm myself I turned around slowly, looking, smelling, hearing. There was no steep cliff behind this cove, but a series of white rolling dunes, shadowed by pale beach grasses and the dark green of sea grapes. Above me sea gulls were whirling and mewling against the blue. The wind moved in the grasses and echoed the sound of waves moving gently into shore. I could see Adam swimming out, but there was no dark body leaping joyfully on the horizon, such as I had seen the day before with Leo. Adam had said it--Basil--might not come.

  Did I want it to?

  I walked slowly toward the water's edge. Adam's shorts and shirt and sneakers lay in a little clump on the sand. I moved past them and splashed through the shallow waves.

  It was one thing to toss fish to Una and Nini, smiling at me from their pen--and I hadn't been exactly comfortable about that--and another to meet a dolphin face to face in the open sea.

  I dove through an approaching wave and started to swim. I had managed to pick up a fish from the bucket in my bare hands and toss it to a dolphin. I could manage to look at a dolphin in the ocean just as well as I could look at Un
a and Nini in the pen, couldn't I? Adam had said to stay several yards behind him. I needn't get close.

  I swam. As I neared Adam I could hear him making funny blowing sounds, something like air going slowly out of a balloon, and it was something like the sound I'd heard from Una and Nini. He was treading water, and I began to tread water, too, staying well behind him. He kept on making balloon sounds, and then he began a strange whistle. There was something magnetic about it. His face had its illuminated look, and I was so busy paying attention to him that I was taken completely by surprise when a great grey body rose in a swift arc just a few yards behind him, showing the pale pink of its belly, and disappeared into the sea. Then it surfaced, and there was a dolphin half out of the water, beaming at Adam, who swam swiftly toward it. The creature exuded friendliness. But I stayed where I was, a good distance away, treading water, while my heart thumped with excitement and fear. What would I do if that great animal stopped smiling and came at me?

  Basil, I reassured myself. Adam said his name was Basil, and just the fact that he had a name made him less frightening. He was swimming around Adam in swift circles, and the long, sleek body seemed to be quivering with delight, much as Mr. Rochester's entire bulk trembles with joy when we come home after leaving him alone for an hour or so. My heart was still banging, but I was less afraid.

  Adam put his arm around Basil with the same affectionate fearlessness with which Rob put his arm around the big Great Dane, and Basil rubbed close against Adam. I would like to have somebody, animal or human, feel about me like that. Not in the least subservient, but total.

  For a few moments Adam and Basil swam together. Then the dolphin leapt above the surface, throwing spume in every direction so that I got showered, dove down and surfaced again, not far from me. I trod water furiously. I had not expected Basil to come so close. I had thought that I would be an observer only.

  "He's curious about you," Adam said in a calm, quiet voice. "Don't be afraid of him, Vicky. He won't hurt you."

  --How do you know? I wanted to ask.--He's still a wild creature. Suppose I frighten him? Suppose I don't have the right smell?

  "Don't be afraid," Adam said again. "Touch him. Gently but firmly. Dolphins have extremely delicate skin, but once he realizes you won't hurt him, he'll make friends."