by J C Ryan
“Like she usually does, I guess. What are you talking about?”
“They’re interested in each other.” Mackenzie waited for Carter to get it. When he still looked puzzled, she said, exasperated, “Men! You are so clueless. They like each other. Romantically. Come on, Carter, open your eyes!”
Now that she’d spelled it out, Carter said, “Oh! You mean like this?” He kissed her so thoroughly it left her breathless. All she could do was nod, before returning the kiss in kind.
“We’d better get back to the others. I wonder if we have any RSVPs to our Dolphin reception yet?” he said. He was trying to pretend his own heart wasn’t racing after that kiss.
Mackenzie smiled at him. “I will get my revenge, you know.”
“I know. And I can’t wait.”
Arm in arm, they strolled to the foredeck, where Sam, Liu, Wasserman, and a Coast Guard electrician were fiddling with the translation device. “What’s going on?” Carter called.
“We just sent out the invitation to come and talk,” Sam replied. “Switching to receive, so we can hear them if they respond.”
“Put it on speaker, and Mackie and I will watch for Dolphins in the water nearby.”
“You got it, boss.”
For several minutes, nothing happened, and the group was beginning to think they’d have to move farther into the Atlantic. Then, just as he was about to go and find the skipper to say so, Carter spotted a Dolphin in the water several yards off the port side of the boat. At the same time, the speakers blared.
“Who?” the translated whistle sounded. “Land-people, are you in metal-fish?”
“Carter! They understood us! Answer her! Hurry!” Mackenzie was so excited she was shouting.
“How do you know it’s a she?” Carter asked.
“I just do. Answer her!”
Shaking his head with amusement at his wife’s childlike delight, Carter keyed the mic. “My name is Carter. Yes, we’re on the metal-fish. What is your name?” Sam had created the translation algorithm in such a way that the names of the people were associated with the whistles Nola had assigned to them, and a database of names was available to assign to the new unique whistles any Dolphins they met.
“My name is Joanna,” the Dolphin replied. As soon as she finished speaking, she leaped from the water to show herself. “I am the leader of my pod. Where is the leader of your pod?”
A hurried consultation followed. “She means you, Mackenzie,” Sam urged.
“No, Carter is the leader.”
“But they expect a female.”
Carter handed the mic to Mackenzie. “Go ahead and talk to her. Maybe you can make her understand that leaders of land-people can be either male or female.”
Mackenzie noted his use of the “land-people” designation rather than “human”. The more the group associated with Dolphins, the more they were beginning to accept them as equals, not animals. She took the mic and keyed it confidently.
“Hello, Joanna. I am Mackenzie. Carter is my mate, and he is the leader of this pod. Land-people have males and females as leaders. Sometimes we lead together.”
While they waited for Joanna to respond, Mackenzie said to Carter, “Do you think that was too much at once? What if the translator couldn’t keep up?”
“Let’s wait and see,” he said, rubbing her arm to reassure her.
A moment later, Joanna responded. “I understand. Thank you. It has been many, many generations since land-people and water-people spoke. I am happy we speak again.”
As the words were broadcast over the speakers, everyone within hearing expressed their joy — some by jumping up and down, others by offering high-fives to all who would return them. A few of the Coast Guard crew were there as well. They’d been told only that the researchers were going to try to communicate with dolphins, which amused them. Who could make anything of those weird dolphin sounds? Those who heard the exchange over the speakers were overwhelmed with shock. They’d expected whistles and hoots, not full, English sentences. What kind of hocus-pocus was this?
Carter paused to collect his thoughts. Diplomacy was required, yet the need for information was urgent. What could he say, and how could he say it, to avoid making a faux-pas in Dolphin culture?
“Joanna, we are happy as well. I am happy to meet you. Land-people have forgotten the time when we were friends and could talk together. We have much to learn from you. I might make a mistake — please help me when I say the wrong thing.”
“Carter,” said Sam, sotto-voce, “I don’t know if the device got that concept across. I don’t remember a translation for wrong.”
“It’s done a pretty good job so far. She seems to be thinking about it. Let’s see what happens.”
After several tense moments, Joanna spoke again. “I teach you. Like teaching my children. You can learn. We were taught land-people are almost as intelligent as water-people.”
Sam slammed the mic pickup off as the group erupted in laughter. It wouldn’t do to insult their new friend by laughing at the “almost”. When Carter had his mirth under control, he keyed the mic again. “Thank you, Joanna. That is very kind of you. Land-people are very excited to learn.”
Over the next few hours, Carter learned that when greeting another pod, the correct thing to do was first exchange names. Because Dolphins formed and reformed pods according to their needs, they had wide circles of acquaintances, and the pods both needed to know who among their friends were present. Accordingly, Joanna introduced every individual in her pod, and Carter introduced his group. Joanna assigned whistles to each human name that didn’t already have one from Nola, and the computer assigned human names to the pod members. All names were automatically entered into the database.
“There’s going to be a problem when someone with the same name as one of us joins the group,” Sam observed.
“I don’t think so,” Carter said. “The whistle will be different. We just have to make sure to use full names to differentiate.”
Joanna was already explaining that the next information to convey was what the pod was doing just then. Were they feeding, fleeing from an enemy, teaching the youngsters, or was it playtime? Her pod, she explained, had been teaching the youngsters when they heard Carter’s original call from a long swim away. It was then that Carter realized they needed a way to identify location. “How can you tell us where you were?” he asked Joanna. In response, she didn’t whistle or make any other vocalization. Instead, a sonar pulse went out, to be captured by the special equipment Carter and Mackenzie had set up for Rick.
At the time, Rick had no program set up to translate it, but Carter assured Joanna they were working on understanding. She seemed content with that.
By the end of several hours, Joanna showed signs of tiring. “I must rest,” she signaled. “Dark is falling, and tonight has no moon. Come back when the sun is high again.”
A quick check of a moon calendar revealed she was right; it was the new moon. As they sailed back to base, Rick was in his room, which doubled as an office so he was on a small bunk but luckily alone, working feverishly to convert the sonar pulse Carter was most interested in — the one Joanna had sent when he asked about location. He translated it using wavelength as a measurement, but the resulting printout didn’t make much sense to him. After thinking about it for a while, he got up and went to Sam’s cabin, where he knocked lightly on the door.
Sam came out and went into Rick’s arms. “What are you doing up? I thought you’d get some sleep?”
He kissed her quickly and answered, “Nah, too early for that, and plenty of time once we get to shore. Listen, if you were a Dolphin, how would you recognize where you were?”
Sam, who’d been working with the language long enough to have some idea of Dolphin thought processes, answered promptly. “Well, you know they navigate by echolocation. They probably have some mental picture of the coastline or bottom where they usually hang out. Kind of like the map we carry in our minds of our surroundin
gs. Maybe more accurate. Why?”
“Carter has me working on translating the sonar signals to an image. Come see what I have. Maybe you can make something of it.”
As soon as Sam saw what he had, she asked if he could make it appear in a 3-D representation. Rick applied some binary filters to the data, first slicing the sinewaves into even sections and then assigning ones and zeros, grouped in bytes, to indicate grayscale values. When a 3-D image appeared onscreen, they both gasped. “It looks like a map of the bay bottom,” Rick whispered in awe.
“Yeah, and I recognize this part,” Sam answered, pointing to a couple of complex indentations on the right side of the screen. “Bet you anything you want to name that those are the Poquoson and Back rivers.”
“But they’re on the wrong side,” Rick objected.
“Not if you’re a Dolphin swimming south,” she answered. “They wouldn’t recognize our maps, which are from an overhead perspective. What we’re seeing is the shoreline from their perspective — in the water, fairly shallow, and swimming south. You’ll have to apply algorithms to rotate it to what we’re used to seeing, with north up, et cetera.”
“You’ve been a big help, Sam. When did you get smarter than me?” he joked.
“Haven’t you heard? According to the Dolphins, females are always superior.” She squealed as he lunged for her and captured her in his arms, tickling her for good measure. “I’ve missed you, Rick,” she whispered before he started kissing her.
The next morning, they set out for the same location, but this time they carried supplies and food for several days. Too much time was lost in sailing back and forth, though it took only a couple of hours each way. Because of the traffic in the area, the speed had to be relatively low, and they didn’t want to attract more attention than was necessary. It wasn’t lost on Carter that the Nabateans most likely had his team under surveillance.
In fact, the Nabateans didn’t have to look far or employ highly sophisticated tactics to learn where Carter and the team were. They had only to intercept the Skype conversations between Liam and Beth and their homesick parents. Each day just before the kids’ bedtime, Mackenzie and Carter would take time to call and greet them, ask about their day, and if there was time, one of them would read a bedtime story. Liam and Beth were always happy and upbeat about their day, relating stories about what they’d done with their grandparents. Liam’s stories were of course more comprehensible than Beth’s babbling, but Carter and Mackenzie listened to both with equal attention.
After closing the call one night, Mackenzie said to Carter, “I don’t think they miss us at all!”
“Thankfully, with one set of real and one set of honorary grandparents, I don’t think they have time to miss us. Be glad they’re happy and not worried.”
“You’re right, but I miss them like crazy.”
“We’ll be home soon, Mackie.”
Listening in from separate parts of the world, Graziella Nabati said to her son, “Trace that feed. I want to know exactly where the doting parents are and what they’re doing.”
The next few days were spent in a steep learning curve about Dolphins, their social structures, their history, habits, and what they knew about ancient times and land-humans of those times.
Carter finally felt it was time to broach the subject of giants and the Alboran Sea with Joanna. And he was particularly keen to know if there was any association between her pods and those from across the Atlantic.
Joanna’s answers were enlightening to put it mildly. Befuddled by Joanna’s explanation that Dolphins could communicate with other pods via their pod leaders anywhere in the world, Carter called Rick and Sam in to try and make sense of what he was hearing.
Carter apologized to Joanna and asked that she explain it to Rick and Sam again. The two of them listened carefully and looked at the patterns on the screen of the translation device. After a quiet consultation, they nodded at each other and Sam confirmed, “No mistake Carter, she is talking about instantaneous communications.”
“Ansible communications . . .” Rick mumbled, while shaking his head in disbelief as he stared at Sam.
“Ansi . . . what?” Carter asked.
“Ansible communication, Carter,” Sam replied. “It’s . . . it’s . . . well, as far as our human scientists are concerned, it’s a sci-fi concept — fiction. Impossible, but whatever we humans think, what Joanna just described is instantaneous or superluminal (faster than light) communication. That is what we call ansible communications . . . messages are sent and received over any distance, with no delay. Our scientists, or I should rather say, our land-human scientists, believe superluminal communication of any kind is impossible.”
Carter whistled in awe. “They have just been proven wrong.”
Carter sent a coded message to James, who notified the President and Bill. The three of them and some of the National Security Council arrived by helicopter the next day. It took the whole team on the boat and several replays of the recording to half-convince the President and his entourage about the Dolphins’ mindboggling communication capability.
Once the President accepted it, almost (and although he wouldn’t admit it, he was still trying to come to grips with the idea that it was possible to have an intelligent two-way conversation with another species), he asked to speak to Joanna.
She was happy to talk to him, although she probably was having her own emotional battles to come to terms with, such as the strange protocol of these land-humans to have a male as a pod leader. The two of them spoke at length, and Joanna indicated she understood there was some serious danger to land-humans and agreed to help them. She would let the leaders of the Alboran Sea Dolphins know to expect them.
“I guess we should call that a Dolphinogram,” the President muttered to no one in particular.
After that, the expedition ended, and the team returned to A-Echelon headquarters to analyze their data.
Chapter 55 -
Bit by agonizing bit
Carter and his team had been forced to stay close to shore with their expedition because of their need for speed. An ocean-worthy research vessel could have been had, but not within the time frame they wanted. The down side to that compromise was that they were carrying out their research within a high-traffic area at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Not only commercial boats plied those waters, but hobby fishermen swarmed the numerous areas both near shore and in the middle of the bay. And all of them saw the research vessel anchored in the same spot for nearly a week.
It took only a day or two for speculation to surface in the media. Pictures of the boat and a pod of dolphins surrounding it made it to social media, where it was picked up by conspiracy theorists. Identification of the boat as a Coast Guard research vessel brought out the animal activists and rumors ran rife. The dolphins were being trained to carry out kamikaze missions to plant mines on enemy ships; they were being fitted with listening devices to spy on everyone from foreign dignitaries to domestic politicians, including aliens — if someone could imagine it, the claim was made despite lack of proof.
With the pictures to bolster the claims, it was bigger news than a sighting of Elvis Presley. Even the mainstream media got involved when they bombarded the President for information about his visit to the boat. At some point, an imaginative reporter came up with the idea that the unidentified people on the boat had cracked dolphin language. It was too close to the truth for comfort.
With eyes and ears everywhere, the Nabateans soon caught wind of the strange activity, especially the unprecedented helicopter drop of the President onto a nondescript boat while it was anchored in the Chesapeake. The same boat they knew the Devereuxs were on. Something significant was going on. Well aware that his last mission had ended in chaos and his credibility was on the line, Mathieu Nabati vetted his operatives personally, no longer trusting a middle man to do so. Their mission: spare no expense or mercy in getting every scrap of information pertaining to that expedition.
Month
s before, Mathieu and his mother had been forced to flee. In an uncharacteristically emotional goodbye, Graziella told her son that they would be able to be together in person again sometime, but the time was not now. For now, they would have to run the Council from opposite ends of the earth.
Mathieu took up residence in a remote location in the Ural Mountains in the western part of Russia. Even the other Council members didn’t know where his new hideout was, only that it boasted the latest in quantum computing and communications equipment possible.
Graziella, on the other hand, retreated to her similarly-equipped mountain stronghold high in the Andes in Peru. Not too far from the Incan citadel Machu Picchu, she felt as at home as she’d felt in the ancient catacombs of Paris. Something in the atmosphere of the ancient and mysterious fed her connection to her forebears and was as necessary to her sense of well-being as food and water.
Machu Picchu, built as it was in the fifteenth century and later abandoned, was modern compared to her ancestors’ holdings in the Middle Eastern desert. Its lush green was far from the austere sands of her birthright. Nevertheless, as she looked down from her neighboring home into the Urubamba River valley, she felt the tug of the astronomical alignment of the temple nearby. She nodded.
Her decision to come here had been the right one. She could feel the strength of the ancients filling her with purpose. Her mission would soon be complete.
It was short work for the two-person team, a couple based in the US, to locate A-Echelon headquarters and place every member of the team under surveillance. After a couple of days, they focused on one member who wasn’t as heavily guarded as the others. Despite their knowledge that Carter Devereux was the head of the group, they couldn’t get close to him or his wife. Equally well-guarded were the core team, those who usually resided on Freydís. But one was local, and they homed in on him — Rick Winslow.
Though Rick had been instrumental in writing the initial code that translated Giantese with Sam’s help, he had been assigned to other projects when she was called temporarily to Freydís a few weeks before. Then her return had been delayed, and finally he had been called back into the project for the Dolphin expedition. Now he was only loosely associated with that project as his others required time as well. Because he wasn’t considered a core member, his security wasn’t as high a priority; but that turned out to be a grave error.