Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  Something that even the puissant Buyur might not have thought of.

  PEEPOE

  Her departure from the habitat was more gay and colorful than her arrival.

  Dragons flew by overhead, belching gusts of heat that were much friendlier than before. Crowds of boats, ranging from canoes to bejeweled galleys pulled by sweating oarsmen, accompanied Peepoe from one pool to the next. Ashore, local wizards performed magnificent spectacles in her honor, to the awed wonder of gazing onlookers, while Peepoe swam gently past amid formations of fish whose scales glittered unnaturally bright.

  With six races mixing in a wild variety of cultural styles, each village seemed to celebrate its own uniqueness in a profusion of architectural styles. The general attitude seemed both proud and fiercely competitive. But today all feuds, quests, and noble campaigns had been put aside in order to see her off.

  “See how eagerly we anticipate the success of your mission,” the gray magician commented as they reached the final chamber. In a starship, this space would be set aside for an airlock, chilly and metallic. But here, the breath of a living organism sighed all around them as the great maw opened, letting both wind and sunshine come suddenly pouring through.

  Nice of them to surface like this, sparing me the discomfort of a long climb out the abyss.

  “Tell the other dolphins what joy awaits them!” the little mage shouted after Peepoe as she drifted past the open jaws, into the light.

  “Tell them about the vividness and adventure! Soon days of experimentation will be over, and all of this will be full-sized, with a universe lying before us!”

  She pumped her flukes in order to rear up, looking back at the small gray figure in a star-spangled gown, who smiled as his arms spread wide, causing swarms of obedient bright creatures to hover above his head, converging to form a living halo.

  “I will tell them,” she assured.

  Then Peepoe whirled and plunged into the cool sea, setting off toward a morning rendezvous.

  TKETT

  He came fully conscious again, only to discover with mild surprise that he was already swimming fast, leaping and diving through the ocean’s choppy swells, propelled by powerful, rhythmic fluke-strokes.

  Under other circumstances it might have been disorienting to wake up in full motion. Except that a pair of dolphins flanked Tkett, one on each side, keeping perfect synchrony with his every arch and leap and thrust. That made it instinctively easy to literally swim in his sleep.

  How long has this been going on?

  He wasn’t entirely sure. It felt like perhaps an hour or two. Perhaps longer.

  Behind him, Tkett heard the low thrum of a sea sled’s engine, cruising on low power as it followed the three of them on autopilot.

  Why aren’t we using the sled? he wondered. Three could fit, in a pinch. And that way they could get back to Makanee quicker, to report that…

  Stale air exchanged quickly for fresh as he breached, performing each move with flawless precision, even as his mind roiled with unpleasant confusion.

  …to report that Mopol and Zhaki are dead.

  We found Peepoe, safe and well, wandering the open ocean.

  As for the “machine” noises we were sent to investigate…

  Tkett felt strangely certain there was a story behind all that. A story that Peepoe would explain later, when she felt the time was right.

  Something wonderful, he recited, without quite knowing why. A flux of eagerness seemed to surge out of nowhere, priming Tkett to be receptive when she finally told everyone in the pod about the good news.

  He could not tell why, but Tkett felt certain that more than just the sled was following behind them.

  “Welcome back to the living,” Peepoe greeted in crisp Underwater Anglic, after their next breaching.

  “Thanks I…seem to be a bit muddled right now.”

  “Well, that’s not too surprising. You’ve been half-asleep for a long time. In fact, one might say you half slept through something really important.”

  Something about her words flared like a glowing spark within him—a triggered release that jarred Tkett’s smooth pace through the water. He reentered the water at a wrong angle, smacking his snout painfully. It took a brief struggle to get back in place between the two females, sharing the group’s laminar rhythm.

  I…slept. I slept on it.

  Or rather, half of him had done so.

  It slowly dawned on him why that was significant.

  There aren’t many water-dwellers in the Civilization of Five Galaxies, he mused, reaching for threads that had lain covered under blankets of repose. I guess the Buyur never figured…

  A shiver of brief pain lanced from right to left inside his skull, as if a part of him that had been numb just came to life.

  The Buyur!

  Memories flowed back unevenly, at their own pace.

  They never figured on a race of swimmers discovering their experiments, hidden for so long under Jijo’s ocean waves. They had no time to study us. To prepare before the encounter.

  And they especially never took into account the way a cetacean’s brain works.

  An air-breathing creature who lives in the sea has special problems. Even after millions of years evolving for a wet realm, dolphins still faced a never-ending danger of drowning. Hence, sleep was no simple matter.

  One way they solved the problem was to sleep one brain hemisphere at a time.

  Like human beings, dolphins had complex internal lives, made up of many temporary or persistent subselves that must somehow reconcile under an overall persona. But this union was made even more problematic when human genetic meddlers helped turn fallow dolphins into a new sapient race. All sorts of quirks and problems lay rooted in the hemispheric divide. Sometimes information stored in one side was frustratingly hard to get at from the other.

  And sometimes that proved advantageous.

  The side that knew about the Buyur—the one that had slept while amnesia was imposed on the rest—had much less language ability than the other half of Tkett’s brain. Because of this, only a few concepts could be expressed in words at first. Instead, Tkett had to replay visual and sonic images, reinterpreting and extrapolating them, holding a complex conversation of inquiry between two sides of his whole self.

  It gave him a deeper appreciation for the problems—and potential—of people like Chissis.

  I’ve been an unsympathetic bastard, he realized.

  Some of this thought emerged in his sonar echoes as an unspoken apology. Chissis brushed against him the next time their bodies flew through the air, and her touch carried easy forgiveness.

  “So,” Peepoe commented when he had taken some more time to settle his thoughts, “is it agreed what we’ll tell Makanee?”

  Tkett summed up his determination.

  “We’ll tell everything…and then some!”

  Chissis concurred.

  # Tell them tell them

  # Orca-tricksters

  # Promise fancy treats

  # But take away freedom! #

  Tkett chortled. There was a lot of Trinary elegance in the little female’s Primal burst—a transition from animal-like emotive squawks toward the kind of expressiveness she used to be so good at, back when she was an eager researcher and poet, before three years of hell aboard Streaker hammered her down. Now a corner seemed to be turned. Perhaps it was only a matter of time till this crewmate returned to full sapiency…and all the troubles that would accompany that joy.

  “Well,” Peepoe demurred, “by one way of looking at things, the Buyur seem to be offering us more freedom. Our descendants would experience a wider range of personal choices. More power to achieve their wishes. More dreams would come true.”

  “As fantasies and escapism,” Tkett dismissed. “The Buyur would turn everybody into egotists…solipsists! In the real world, you have to grow up eventually, and learn to negotiate with others. Be part of a culture. Form teams and partnerships. Ifni, what does it take t
o have a good marriage? Lots of hard work and compromises, leading to something better and more complicated than either person could’ve imagined!”

  Peepoe let out a short whistle of surprise.

  “Why, Tkett! In your own prudish, tight-vented way, I do believe you’re a romantic.”

  Chissis shared Peepoe’s gentle, teasing laughter, so that it penetrated him in stereo, from both sides. A human might have blushed. But dolphins can barely conceal their emotions from each other, and seldom try.

  “Seriously,” he went on. “I’ll fight the Buyur because they would keep us in a playpen for eons to come, denying us the right to mature and learn for ourselves how the universe ticks. Magic may be more romantic than science. But science is honest…and it works.

  “What about you, Peepoe? What’s your reason?”

  There was a long pause. Then she answered with astonishing vehemence.

  “I can’t stand all that kings and wizards dreck! Should somebody rule because his father was a pompous royal? Should all the birds and beasts and fish obey you just because you know some secret words that you won’t share with others? Or on account of the fact that you’ve got a loud voice and your egotistic will is bigger than others’?

  “I seem to recall we fought free of such idiotic notions ages ago, on Earth…or at least humans did. They never would’ve helped us dolphins get to the stars if they hadn’t broken out of those sick thought patterns first.

  “You want to know why I’ll fight them, Tkett? Because Mopol and Zhaki will be right at home down there—one of them dreaming he’s Superman, and the other one getting to be King of the Sea.”

  The three dolphins swam on, keeping pace in silence while Tkett pondered what their decision meant. In all likelihood, resistance was going to be futile. After all, the Buyur were overwhelmingly powerful and had been preparing for half a million years. Also, the incentive they were offering would make all prior temptations pale in comparison. Among the Six Races ashore—and the small colony of dolphins—many would leap to accept, and help make the new world of magical wonder compulsory.

  We’ve never had an enemy like this before, he realized. One that takes advantage of our greatest weakness, by offering to make all our dreams come true.

  Of course there was one possibility they hadn’t discussed. That they were only seeing the surface layers of a much more complicated scheme…perhaps some long and desperately unfunny practical joke.

  It doesn’t matter, Tkett thought. We have to fight this anyway, or we’ll never grow strong and wise enough to “get” the joke. And we’ll certainly never be able to pay the Buyur back, in kind. Not if they control all the hidden levers in Oz.

  For a while their journey fell into a grim mood of hopelessness. No one spoke, but sonar clicks from all three of them combined and diffused ahead. Returning echoes seemed to convey the sea’s verdict on their predicament.

  No chance. But good luck anyway.

  Finally, little Chissis broke their brooding silence, after arduously spending the last hour composing her own Trinary philosophy glyph.

  In one way, it was an announcement—that she felt ready to return to the struggles of sapiency.

  At the same time, the glyph also expressed her manifesto. For it turned out that she had a different reason for choosing to fight the Buyur. One that Tkett and Peepoe had not expressed, though it resonated deep within.

  * Both the hazy mists of dreaming,

  * And the stark-clear shine of daylight,

  * Offer treasures to the seeker,

  * And a trove of valued insights.

  * One gives open, honest knowledge.

  * And the skill to achieve wonders.

  * But the other (just as needed!)

  * Fills the soul and sets hearts a’stir.

  * What need then for ersatz magic?

  * Or for contrived disney marvels?

  * God and Ifni made a cosmos.

  * Filled with wonders…let’s go live it!

  Peepoe sighed appreciatively.

  “I couldn’t have said it better. Screw the big old frogs! We’ll make magic of our own.”

  They were tired and the sun was dropping well behind them by the time they caught sight of shore, and heard other dolphins chattering in the distance. Still, all three of them picked up the pace, pushing ahead through Jijo’s silky waters.

  Despite all the evidence of logic and their senses, the day still felt like morning.

  AFTERWORD

  I seldom write two space-oriented “universe” books in a row. There are so many possible settings and situations for stories, and I like especially to intersperse more “grown-up” novels set on Earth, in near-plausible futures. Still, my Uplift Series of far-future space tales proved popular enough to draw me into a recent trilogy—Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, and Heaven’s Reach. Added to three earlier novels—Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War—they form a cluster of adventures in the unabashedly proud space-opera tradition…though I hope with some ideas mixed in with all the dash and sci-fi élan.

  At one level, these works deal with the moral, scientific, and emotional implications of “uplift”—the genetic engineering of other animals to bring them into our civilization with human-equivalent powers of thought. Many other authors (e.g. H.G. Wells, Pierre Boulle, Mary Shelley, and Cordwainer Smith) dealt with this general concept before, but they all approached it in nearly the same way, by assuming the process would be abused—that the humans bestowing this boon would be mad, and would spoil things by establishing a cruel slave-master relationship with their creations.

  Now of course that is one possible (and despicable) outcome. Those were good stories with wholesome moral messages. But that vein is overworked, so I chose a different tack. What if we someday begin modifying higher animals—and I think we clearly will—guided by the morality of modern liberal society? Filled with stylish hyper-tolerance and guilt-ridden angst, would we be in danger of killing our clients with kindness? More important, these new kinds of sapient beings would face real problems, even if they were treated well. Adjustment would be hard. One needn’t picture slavery in order to sympathize with their plight.

  Pondering the notion of uplift, it occurred to me how obvious the process might seem to alien beings who have traveled the stars for eons, encountering countless presapient life-forms and giving each one a boost, creating new generations of starfarers who would then do the same for others, and so on. The resulting image of a galaxy-spanning culture enthralled me. It would have great advantages, but perhaps would lead also to a kind of stultified cultural conservatism—an obsession with the past. Now suppose a young clan of Earthlings—not only humans, but also uplifted dolphins and chimps—encountered such a vast, ancient civilization. How would the newcomers be treated? How would we upstarts react?

  Too many science-fictional scenarios assume states of unexplained disequilibrium, in which exploring humans happen to emerge just in time to bump into others out there at exactly the right level to be interesting competitors or allies. In fact, the normal state of affairs will be one of equilibrium—an equilibrium of law, or perhaps death. We may be the First Race, as I discuss in my story, “The Crystal Spheres,” or very late arrivals, as depicted in the Uplift books. Either way, we’re unlikely to meet aliens as equals.

  My second motivation in this series was ecological. What we’re doing to our Earth makes me fear there may already have been “brushfire” ecological holocausts across the galaxy. The common science-fictional scenario depicts eager settlers shouting, “Let’s go fill the universe!” The wild frontier is a very satisfying image, but thoughtless expansion might create eco-wastelands within only a few years. If this has already happened a few times, it would help to explain the apparent emptiness that scientists now observe, in which the galaxy seems to have few, if any, other voices. This pattern might be avoided if something regulated the way colonists treat planets, forcing them to consider the long term. The Uplift universe p
resents one way this might happen. For all of their inscrutability and occasional nastiness, my Galactics set a high priority to preserving planets, habitats, and potential for new sapient life. The result is a noisy, bickering universe, but one filled with much more diversity than there otherwise might have been.

  Of course, much of the fun has been trying to get into the heads of neo-dolphin or -chimp characters. The uplift concept makes this a nifty authorial exercise. When characters seem just a bit too human, that is a result (naturally) of both the genetic and cultural measures that were taken to make them members of Earth culture. But from the safe ground I’ve enjoyed exploring outward, harkening to older and more natural cetacean and simian instincts, both ennobling ones and those that might embarrass a proud sapient being—the way ghosts of ancient prehumanity sometimes trouble men and women in the modern era. In neo-dolphins, especially, I tried to combine the latest scientific facts and models of cetacean cognition with my own imaginative extrapolations of their “cultural” and emotional life.

  Finally, like any good yarn, each story in the Uplift universe deals with some issue of good and evil—or the murky realm between. One that I’ve been confronting lately is the insidious and arrogant, but all too commonplace, assumption that words are more important than actions.

  For centuries there has been a running conflict between those who believe that ideas are inherently dangerous, or toxic, and those on the other hand who propose that we can raise bold children into mature adults, able to evaluate any notion skeptically, on its merits. Even today, there are those in all political wings who feel that some elite (of the left or the right) should protect the masses from dangerous images or impressions. The same people often preach that “to think a thing is the same as doing it.”