Insistence of Vision

by David Brin

  Peepoe nodded. “I will carry your vision to the others.”

  “Excellent! In fact, you can start without even leaving this pool! For I can now inform you that a pair of your compatriots already reside aboard one of our nearby vessels... and those two seem to be having trouble appreciating the wondrous life we offer.”

  “Not Zhaki and Mopol!” Peepoe pushed back with her ventral fins, clicking nervously. She wanted nothing further to do with them.

  “No, no.” The magician assured. “Please, wait calmly while we open a channel between ships, and all will become clear.”

  Tkett

  “Hello, Peepoe,” he said to the wavering image in front of him. “I’m glad you look well. We were all worried sick about you. But I figured when we saw Zhaki and Mopol you must be nearby.”

  The holo showed a sleek female dolphin, looking exquisite but tired, in a jungle-shrouded pool, beside a miniature castle. Tkett could tell a lot about the style of “experiment” aboard her particular vessel, just by observing the crowd of natives gathered by the shore. Some of them were dressed as armored knights, riding upon rearing steeds, while gaily attired peasants doffed their caps to passing lords and ladies. It was a far different approach than the crystal fruits that hung throughout this vessel – semi-transparent receptacles where individuals lived permanently immersed in virtual realities.

  And yet, the basic principle was similar.

  “Hi Tkett,” Peepoe answered. “Is that Chissis with you? You both doing all right?”

  “Well enough, I guess. Though I feel like the victim of some stupid fraternity practical –”

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Peepoe interrupted, cutting off what Tkett had been about to say. “Across all the ages, visionaries have come up with countless utopian schemes. But this one could actually w-w-work!”

  Tkett stared back at her, unable to believe he was hearing this.

  “Oh yeah?” He demanded. “What about free will?”

  “The Buyur will provide whatever your will desires.”

  “Then how about truth!”

  “There are many truths, Tkett. Countless vivid subjective interpretations will thrive in a future filled with staggering diversity.”

  “Subjective, exactly! That’s an ancient and d-despicable perversion of the word truth, and you know it. Diversity is wonderful, all right. There may indeed be many cultures, many art forms, even many styles of wisdom. But truth should be about finding out what’s really real, what’s repeatable and verifiable, whether it suits your fancy or not!”

  Peepoe sputtered a derisive raspberry.

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “Life isn’t just about having fun, or getting whatever you want!” Tkett felt his guts roil, forcing sour bile up his esophagus. “Peepoe, there’s such a thing as growing up! Finding out how the world actually works, despite the way you think things ought to be. Objectivity means I accept that the universe doesn’t revolve around me.”

  “In other words, a life of limitations.”

  “That we overcome with knowledge! With new tools and skills.”

  “Tools made of dead matter, designed by committees, mass-produced and sold on shop counters.”

  “Yes! Committees, teams, organizations and enterprises, all of them made up of individuals who have to struggle every day with their egos in order to cooperate with others, making countless compromises along the way. It ain’t how things happen in a child’s fantasy. It’s not what we yearn for in our secret hearts, Peepoe. I know that! But it’s how adults get things done.

  “Anyway, what’s wrong with buying miracles off a shop counter? So we take for granted wonders that our ancestors would’ve given their tail fins for. Isn’t that what they’d have wanted for us? You’d prefer a world where the best of everything is kept reserved for wizards and kings?”

  Tkett felt a sharp jab in his side. The pain made him whirl, still bitterly angry, still flummoxed with indignation.

  “What is it!” He demanded sharply of Chissis, even though the little female could not answer.

  She backed away from his bulk and rancor, taking a snout-down submissive posture. But from her brow came a brief burst of caustic Primal.

  # idiot idiot idiot idiot

  # idiots keep talking human talk-talk

  # while the sea tries to teach #

  Tkett blinked. Her phrasings were sophisticated, almost lucid. In fact, it was a lot like a simple Trinary chiding-poem, that a dolphin mother might use with her infant.

  Through an act of hard self-control, he forced himself to consider.

  While the sea tries to teach...

  It was a common dolphin turn-of-phrase, implying that one should listen below the surface, to meanings that lay hidden.

  He whirled back to examine the hologram, wishing it had not been designed by beings who relied so much on sight, and ignored the subtleties of sound transmission.

  “Think about it, Tkett,” Peepoe went on, as if their conversation had not been interrupted. “Back home, we dolphins are the youngest client race of an impoverished, despised clan, in danger of being conquered or rendered extinct at any moment. Yet now we’re being offered a position at the top of a new pantheon, just below the Buyur themselves.

  “What’s more, we’d be good at this! Think about how dolphin senses might extend the range of possible magics. Our sound-based dreams and imagery. Our curiosity and reckless sense of adventure! And that just begins to hint at the possibilities when we finally come into our own....”

  Tkett concentrated on sifting the background. The varied pulses, whines and clicks that melted into the ambiance whenever any neo-dolphin spoke. At first it seemed Peepoe was emitting just the usual mix of nervous sonar and blowhole flutters.

  Then he picked out a single, floating phrase... in ancient Primal... that interleaved itself amid the earnest logic of sapient speech.

  # sleep on it sleep on it sleep on it sleep on it #

  At first the hidden message confused him. It seemed to support the rest of her argument. So then why make it secret?

  Then another meaning occurred to him.

  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 of 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 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.

  ᚖ

  “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 re-entered 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.

  ᚖ

  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, they would sleep one brain hemisphere at a time.

  All sorts of quirks and problems lay rooted in this divide. Information stored in one side could be frustratingly hard to get at from the other.

  Though 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, interpreting and extrapolating them, holding a complex conversation of enquiry 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 everyone 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 to 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?”

  The 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 befo
re, he realized. One that takes advantage of our greatest weakness, by offering to make all our dreams come true.

  ᚖ

  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.

  ᚖ

  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, sets hearts astir.

  * 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.