The Dolphins of Altair

by Margaret St. Clair

  “Madelaine did all that?” Lawrence said when he had finished. “She couldn’t have. She’s not only comatose most of the time, she’s far too weak to stand up for more than a minute.”

  “She did, though,” Ivry answered. “But I don’t know whether or not the man believed her.”

  “Um. The navy may have traced me here, or they may just have been making a routine check, as you said. In either case, there’s no use worrying about it.”

  “You’re taking it very calmly,” Ivry said.

  Lawrence shrugged. “What else can I do ? The Akbar’s no ocean-going craft. I can’t sail her away from Sausalito. We’ll have to stay here and see what happens. Incidentally, Gordon is the name I used when I was buying her.”

  “How is Moonlight now?” I asked.

  “Semiconscious. She spoke to me when I was changing the dressing on her arm just now.”

  “What did she say?” I wanted to know.

  “She said, ‘Something has happened about Sven’,” Lawrence answered slowly. “She didn’t even open her eyes when she said it.

  “There is something very peculiar about this semiconsciousness of hers.”

  Chapter 9

  “Who was Sosa?” Dr. Lawrence asked.

  “She was a heroine of the sea people who lived a very long time ago,” I answered. “We call Madelaine by her name because Madelaine came to give us help.”

  It was a little after midnight; the Diamond Lil had left her mooring during the day, and the Akbar was currently the only craft tied up at the little jetty. We could talk more freely than we usually could.

  “You’ve mentioned the covenant several times,” Lawrence said. “Did the first Sosa have something to do with it?”

  “With which covenant?”

  Lawrence ran his hand over his hair. “I didn’t know there was more than one covenant. Tell me about the covenants, then, and what Sosa had to do with them.”

  Ivry wriggled impatiently. He and I had gone looking for Djuna during the day, with the usual negative result, and he was in an impatient, irritable mood. “Why are you asking us so many questions, Dr. Lawrence? If you don’t remember the covenant yourself, there is not much use in trying to tell you about it. Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m asking because I’m not satisfied with our position or our prospects,” Lawrence replied. “We’re unarmed, Sven’s gone, and if the navy decides I was telling the truth, they’ll try to hunt down every dolphin in the ocean. I’m trying to get a line on what we should do next.”

  It sounded reasonable enough to me, and, I suppose, to Pettrus, but Ivry was not convinced. “How do we know what use you’ll make of what we tell you? You say our position’s bad. Yes, it is, but it could be worse.”

  “Um. Madelaine—”

  “Madelaine! Why is she unconscious so much of the time, Dr. Lawrence?”

  “I wish I knew,” Lawrence answered ruefully.

  “I think you do know,” Ivry honked excitedly. “I think you’re drugging her.”

  Lawrence sighed. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious of me. But why the devil should I be drugging Madelaine? This is silly. What would my motive be?”

  “To make a—a cat’s-paw out of her. When you finally let her come back to consciousness, you’ll have weakened her so she’ll do whatever you say. Then you can use her—our poor Moonlight—to lead us all into a trap.”

  There was a slight pause. “Well, I’m not drugging her,” Lawrence answered finally. “You don’t know much about drugs. You were here yourself yesterday when she was talking to the naval intelligence man. There isn’t a drug in the pharmacopoeia that would affect a woman like that.”

  If we had not been so intent on what Lawrence was saying, I think we would have heard the noises within the cabin. As it was, we were all taken by surprise when the deckhouse door opened and Madelaine came out on deck.

  She was indefinably changed. For a moment I did not recognize her at all, and then I wondered whether Ivry were right in his suspicions that Lawrence was drugging her.

  She came over to the boat’s railing and looked down at us. “You waited for me,” she said smilingly, “Dear Amtor, dear Ivry and Pettrus. There were dreams I had to have; it took time. But I think I’m done dreaming now.”

  “What were you dreaming of?” Ivry asked, still suspicious. “Did he make you dream?”

  “No. My dreams were like your dreams, Ivry, very strange for a Split.

  “But never mind about my dreams. The doctor is right to want to know about the covenant. Tell him what he wants to know. It might help.”

  I was still not ready to trust Lawrence completely. “You mean about how the covenant was drawn up and signed?” I asked. This was a trap; I thought that if Madelaine had been drugged, she would fall into it.

  “Drawn up and signed!” She laughed. “You know as well as I do that the covenant was something lived.”

  “It will be hard to make him understand,” I answered.

  “Why?” Lawrence asked practically.

  “The minds of Splits are very different from ours.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” replied the doctor. “But a basic communication should be possible. After all, both species are mammals.”

  “Yes. But by now the gulf between us is exceedingly wide and deep.”

  “Try anyhow,” Lawrence said.

  “Very well,” I answered. “What do you want to know?” He sighed with exasperation. “Tell me what the covenant is.”

  “It is a poem,” I said. “What!”

  “Yes, a poem. Do you not understand, Dr. Lawrence? We are the people of the word. We have enormous verbal memories. Our culture is based on speech. I can recite the genealogies straight back to the beginning, almost a million years.”

  “You mean that you can recite the pedigrees of—of dolphins, I suppose—going back a million years?” Lawrence still sounded jarred. “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it is not. I can do it. Of course, it takes a very long time for me to say them all.”

  “Well, go on. You say the covenant is a poem. Maddy said it was something lived. The ideas seem a little incompatible, to me.”

  “No, not really,” Madelaine answered. “In a sense there were three covenants, Dr. Lawrence. All of them could be said to be lived. The first one, the one Amtor called a poem, was made nearly a million years ago.”

  “Between dolphins and human beings?” the doctor said keenly. “There weren’t any human beings—Homo sapiens—on earth a million years ago.”

  “No, not between Splits and the sea people. Mankind is older than Splits think. But it did not originate on earth.”

  Before the doctor could comment on what I had said, we heard the sound of a boat’s engine. It was coming nearer.

  “We can’t talk any more tonight,” Sosa said softly. “It’s the Diamond Lil. Good night, my sea darlings.”

  “Good night, Sosa, good night.”

  * * *

  Next day Ivry and Pettrus went looking for Djuna, and I stayed behind. I could hear the sound of voices in the deckhouse now and then, and the noise of the radio playing. About noon Lawrence went ashore and came back with a newspaper and groceries. Madelaine—I could tell from her lighter footsteps—cooked the lunch.

  In the afternoon she came out on deck and sat in the sunlight for a little while. Her tan had faded, and she was as fair as she had been when we first nicknamed her Moonlight. Yet there was a change in her, and I couldn’t define it. I was glad when, before she went back into the deckhouse, she leaned over the railing and dabbled her hands in. the water. I nuzzled her fingers and knew that she was still Madelaine.

  Ivry and Pettrus came back from their search with the news that they had found a faint faint trace of Djuna’s smell in the water near Pescadero. They had tried to follow the trace but failed; the water had been too turbulent. But that they had found a trace at all meant that Djuna was still alive, and the news heartened us.

 
When it got dark and the people on the Diamond Lil had gone to bed, the doctor and Madelaine came out of the cabin and we prepared to resume our attempt to make him understand the nature of the covenant.

  “What did you mean when you said, ‘Mankind did not originate on earth’?” Lawrence asked without preamble. “I thought you meant that terrestrial life had originated in, say, spores that came from outside the solar system. But Maddy says that’s not it.”

  “No,” I answered, “most terrestrial life is native to this planet. But men and dolphins have a common a ncestor—”

  “Go on.”

  “—and this ancestor—these ancestors—were not natives on earth.

  “Splits and the sea people are the descendants of colonists who came to earth almost a million years ago from a planet of the star you call Altair. The colonists—we call them the Old Ones—were mammals, and they were humanoid. They looked quite a bit more like you and Sosa than like us sea people today. But they were amphibious.”

  Dr. Lawrence made a strangled noise. “I—go on.”

  “When I say they were amphibious, I don’t mean they were like frogs or toads or salamanders. But they were accustomed to living half in and half out of the water, on the littoral, and their culture had grown up in an aquatic environment. Their cities were always built where they would be bathed by the tides.

  “When they came to earth, they found conditions very different from those on their home planet. It was plain they couldn’t reestablish the life they had been accustomed to. They could see that climatic changes—changes they couldn’t control—were coming to earth that would make it even more different from the world they knew. They knew they would have to decide whether they were to have an aquatic or a terrestrial mode of life from then on.

  “There was a great deal of debate. It was clear that, if they opted for an aquatic life, they would have to surrender most of their material culture and become what we dolphins now are, the people of the word. On the other hand, dryland conditions on earth at that time were very rough indeed, and the Old On es thought it unlikely they would be able to keep their material culture intact.

  “The debate lasted for years. Two parties sprang up, one that supported the claims of the dry land and one that favored life in the water. Neither could convince the other one.”

  “Politics one million years ago,” Lawrence said wryly. “Well, what happened?”

  “They decided to separate. The first Sosa suggested this. Each faction should do as it wished. But before they parted, they made the covenant.

  “The water was to belong to those who chose the sea, the dry land to those who chose the earth. Each was to respect the other’s domain, each was to help the other if he needed assistance. And each was to remember the covenant.

  “This did not happen all at once, of course. It took five or six generations for the separation between the land and water dwellers to be complete. Deliberate changes were made in the germ plasm, a little more with each generation, to fit each of the two groups for its new life.

  “These generations were not an easy time for the Old Ones. The poem is full of the pain of separation, of seeing a gulf created between beings that had originally been alike. But at last the time came, the poem was completed, and we parted. But we parted as brothers, and in love.”

  Lawrence drew a deep breath. “Well! I’ve a lot of questions to ask. But the first one I want to ask is this: are you really saying that, a million years ago, more or less, the earth was populated by intelligent, civilized mammals that looked a good deal the way human beings do now?”

  ” ‘Populated’ isn’t the right word,” I replied. “There were only a few of the Old Ones after the separation had been made. But the rest of what you said is substantially correct.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “It’s impossible. All the evidence shows that Homo sapiens originated from a tailless ground ape about, oh, 400,000 years ago.”

  “He reoriginated,” I said. “Pettrus, you talk for a while. My throat is getting tired.”

  “All right,” Pettrus said. “Do you think it’s impossible, Dr. Lawrence, that there should have been intelligent, civilized mammals on earth about a million years ago?”

  “Maybe not impossible,” the doctor said. “But look at the palaeological record. We can trace Homo sapiens’ ancestors back, getting more simian all the time, for about 400,000 years. I don’t see how these brilliant humanoids from Altair fit into it. For one thing, where are their bones?”

  Madelaine said, “I know the answer to that. There were not many of them, and they practiced cremation of their dead. Then they threw the ashes into the sea. Isn’t that right, Pettrus?”

  “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

  “Oh, my dreams! I don’t know why they didn’t leave Other traces—buildings and so on—though.”

  “They did leave traces, I think,” Pettrus answered. “One might still be able to find them, if one knew what to look for and where to look. But the Old Ones’ favorite building material was metal, and in a million years even a corrosion-resistant metal corrodes away. It’s not like baked brick.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “I’m still not convinced. If their civilization lasted for even a thousand years, it ought to have left some traces.”

  “There were never very many of the Old Ones,” Pettrus said patiently. “And their civilization began to go down hill almost immediately after the covenant was finally made. It lasted a lot less than a thousand years.”

  “How do you know what happened after your forebears took to the water?” Lawrence asked.

  “Because we were in telepathic communication with the first generations of dryland colonists. But after only a few generations the communication began to fail, and with every new generation it grew feebler. We knew that not only their culture but they themselves, as rational beings, had begun to deteriorate.

  “The original stock had been slow-breeding and long lived. When they began to decline, they bred faster and their numbers increased. But by then we could hardly talk to them any more.”

  “What made them go downhill so rapidly?” Lawrence asked.

  “We don’t really know,” I answered. “Conditions were rough for them, climatically speaking, and it must have been hard for them to maintain their material culture. But probably the real reason for their decline was that the genetic changes they had made in themselves to make them fit for dryland life were unstable. The adaptation had been too fast. The original Altairan stock had really been more suited to aquatic life.”

  “They didn’t die out, though?” Lawrence asked.

  “No. Their biological dete rioration was the prelude to a slow adaptation to permanent dryland life on earth.”

  “How do you know they didn’t die out? You weren’t in touch with them any more.”

  “We have two reasons for thinking they didn’t die out,” I said. “One is that, about 500,000 years ago, we began to be aware that something like intelligent life was arising on earth. We couldn’t read their thoughts—they were not really thoughts. But the new life was a little more than merely animal.”

  “Couldn’t this new life, new intelligent life, have been native to earth?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes, it could. And we do think that there is a possibility that you Splits are the result of breeding between the deteriorated Altairan stock and native proto-simians. But we are sure that the stock of the Old Ones persisted because, about 200,000 years ago, we renewed the covenant with their descendants, the hominids, the proto-men.”

  “Wait a minute,” the doctor protested. “All through this you’ve been talking as if you dolphins were always the same. Didn’t you change any in 800,000 years?”

  “Of course we did,” I answered. “We have changed very much since we first went into the water. We are larger and heavier, and very much faster swimmers. Our brains are larger, our verbal ability is greater, and our eyes far better. We have evolved senses unlike any the Old Ones ha
d. But through all the changes, we never lost the memory of the covenant.”

  Dr. Lawrence sighed. “The past is opening up,” he said, “and—it’s difficult to believe. How do you know the hominids were the descendants of the Old Ones?”

  “Because they remembered the covenant.”

  There was a silence. Madelaine said, “Tell him, Amtor, how the memory was passed on.”

  “It wasn’t transmitted verbally,” I said. “The memory was an impression made on the germ cells, and it was handed on genetically.”

  “I am not much enlightened,” said Lawrence. “But this was the second covenant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was any means of enforcing it provided?”

  “No. The covenants never depended on force. The Old Ones had hoped we would be bound by the love we had for each other.”

  “What about the third covenant?”

  “It was made about twenty thousand years ago, between us, the sea people, and the first true men. Like the other covenants, it was something lived.”

  “Did the sea people make a poem about it?” Lawrence asked.

  “No. By then we and the dry-landers had grown too far apart from each other for making a poem to be worthwhile. The new men thought they were making the covenant for the first time.

  “I will tell you one thing more about the covenant, Dr. Lawrence, though I don’t think you will understand it. The covenant looks forward. Part of it—is yet to be made.”

  “No, I don’t understand that,” he said. “Is this all you are going to tell me about the covenant?”

  “It is as much as there is any point in telling you. Now that you know, do you think you can use it to help us? Have you learned anything that would add to our armory?”

  “I’m not sure,” he answered heavily. “It’s possible that after I—what was that?”

  The Akba r had rocked sharply and then been slammed against the piling of the jetty with such force that Madelaine, who was standing, was almost knocked from her feet.

  “It’s a quake!” Ivry honked excitedly. “There’s been another earthquake!”