Kaa
STRANDED, BY UNYIELDING FATE, ON IFNI’S SHORE.
Stranded, like a beached whale, barred from ever going home.
Five ways stranded—
First, cut off from Earth by hostile aliens bearing a death grudge toward Terrans in general, and the Streaker crew in particular, though Kaa never quite understood why.
Second, banished from Earth’s home galaxy, blown off course, and off-limits, by a caprice of hyperspace — though many on the crew still blamed Kaa, calling it “pilot’s error.” Third, starship Streaker taking refuge on a taboo world, one scheduled to have a respite from sapient minds. An ideal haven, according to some. A trap, said others.
Fourth, when the vessel’s weary engines finally ceased their labors, depositing the Streaker in a realm of ghosts, deep in this planet’s darkest corner, far from air or light.
And now, this, Kaa thought. Abandoned, even by a crew of castaways!
Of course Lieutenant Tsh’t didn’t put it that way, when she asked him to stay behind in a tiny outpost with three other volunteers for company.
“This will be your first important command, Kaa. A chance to show what you’re made of.”
Yeah, he thought. Especially if I’m speared by a hoonish harpoon, dragged onto one of their boats, and slit open.
That almost happened yesterday. He had been tracking one of the native sailing craft, trying to learn its purpose and destination, when one of his young assistants, Mopol, darted ahead and began surfing the wooden vessel’s rolling bow wake … a favorite pastime on Earth, where dolphins frequently hitched free rides from passing ships. Only here it was so dumb, Kaa hadn’t thought to forbid it in advance.
Mopol offered that lawyerly excuse later, when they returned to the shelter. “B-besides, I didn’t do any harm.” “No harm? You let them see you!” Kaa berated. “Don’t you know they started throwing spears into the water, just as I got you out of there?” Mopol’s sleek torso and bottle beak held a rebellious stance. “They never saw a dolphin before. Prob’ly thought we were some local kind of fish.” “And it’s gonna stay that way, do you hear?”
Mopol grunted ambiguous assent, but the episode unnerved Kaa.
A while later, dwelling on his own shortcomings, he worked amid clouds of swirling bottom mud, splicing optical fiber to a cable the submarine Hikahi had laid, on its return trip to Streaker’s hiding place. Kaa’s newly emplaced camera should let him spy more easily on the hoon colony whose sheltered docks and camouflaged houses lay perched along the nearby bay. Already he could report that hoonish efforts at concealment were aimed upward, at shrouding their settlement against the sky, not the sea. That might prove important information, Kaa hoped.
Still, he had never trained to be a spy. He was a pilot, dammit!
Not that he ever used to get much practice during the early days of Streaker’s mission, languishing in the shadow of Chief Pilot Keepiru, who always got the tough, glamorous jobs. When Keepiru vanished on Kithrup, along with the captain and several others, Kaa finally got a chance to practice his skill — for better and worse.
But now Streaker’s going nowhere. A beached ship needs no pilot, so I guess I’m expendable.
Kaa finished splicing and was retracting the work arms of his harness when a flash of silver-gray shot by at high speed, undulating madly. Sonar strafed him as waves of liquid recoil shoved his body. Clickety dolphin laughter filled the shallows.
In fact, Kaa had known the youth was approaching for some time, but he did not want to discourage Zhaki from practicing the arts of stealth.
“Use Anglic,” he commanded tersely.
Small conical teeth gleamed in a beam of slanted sunshine as the young Tursiops swung around to face Kaa. “But it’s much easier to speak Trinary! Sometimes Anglic makes my head hurt.” Few humans, listening to this exchange between two neo-dolphins, would have understood the sounds. Like Trinary, this underwater dialect consisted mostly of clipped groans and ratchetings. But the grammar was close to standard Anglic. And grammar guides the way a person thinks — or so Creideiki used to teach, when that master of Keeneenk arts lived among the Streaker crew, guiding them with his wisdom.
Creideiki has been gone for two years, abandoned with Mr. Orley and others when we fled the battle fleets at Kithrup. Yet every day we miss him — the best our kind produced.
When Creideiki spoke, you could forget for a while that neo-dolphins were crude, unfinished beings, the newest and shakiest sapient race in the Five Galaxies.
Kaa tried answering Zhaki as he imagined the captain would.
“The pain you feel is called concentration. It’s not easy, but it enabled our human patrons to reach the stars, all by themselves.” “Yeah. And look what good it did them,” Zhaki retorted.
Before Kaa could answer, the youth emitted the need-air signal and shot toward the surface, without even performing a wariness spiral to look out for danger. It violated security, but tight discipline seemed less essential as each Jijoan day passed. This sea was too mellow and friendly to encourage diligence.
Kaa let it pass, following Zhaki to the surface. They exhaled and drew in sweet air, faintly charged with distant hints of rain. Speaking Anglic with their gene-modified blowholes out of the water called for a different dialect, one that hissed and sputtered, but sounded more like human speech.
“All right-t,” Kaa said. “Now report.”
The other dolphin tossed his head. “The red crabs suspect nothing. They f-fixate on their crayfish pensss. Only rarely does one look up when we c-come near.” “They aren’t crabs. They’re qheuens. And I gave strict orders. You weren’t to go near enough to be seen!” Hoons were considered more dangerous, so Kaa had kept that part of the spy mission for himself. Still, he counted on Zhaki and Mopol to be discreet while exploring the qheuen settlement at the reef fringe. I guess I was wrong.
“Mopol wanted to try some of the reds’ delicaciesss, so we p-pulled a diversion. I rounded up a school of those green-finned fishies — the ones that taste like Sargasso eel — and chased ’em right through the q-qheuen colony! And guess what? It turns out the crabs have pop-up nets they use for jussst that kind of luck! As soon as the school was inside their boundary, they whipped those things up-p and snatched the whole swarm!” “You’re lucky they didn’t snag you, too. What was Mopol doing, all this time?”
“While the reds were busy, Mopol raided the crayfish pens.” Zhaki chortled with delight. “I saved you one, by the way. They’re delisssh.” Zhaki wore a miniharness fastened to his flank, bearing a single manipulator arm that folded back during swimming. At a neural signal, the mechanical hand went to his seamed pouch and drew out a wriggling creature, proffering it to Kaa.
What should I do? Kaa stared at the squirmy thing. Would accepting it only encourage Zhaki’s lapse of discipline? Or would rejection make Kaa look stodgy and unreasonable?
“I’ll wait and see if it makes you sick,” he told the youth. They weren’t supposed to experiment on native fauna with their own bodies. Unlike Earth, most planetary ecosystems were mixtures of species from all across the Five Galaxies, introduced by tenant races whose occupancy might last ten million years. So far, many of the local fishoids turned out to be wholesome and tasty, but the very next prey beast might have its revenge by poisoning you.
“Where is Mopol now?”
“Back doing what we were told,” Zhaki said. “Watching how the red crabs interact with hoonsss. So far we’ve seen ’em pulling two sledge loads toward the port, filled with harvested ssseaweed. They came back with cargoes of wood. You know. ch-chopped tree trunks.” Kaa nodded. “So they do trade, as we suspected. Hoons and qheuens, living together on a forbidden world. I wonder what it means?” “Who knows? If they weren’t mysterious, they wouldn’t be eateesss. C-can I go back to Mopol now?” Kaa had few illusions about what was going on between the two young spacers. It probably interfered in their work, but if he raised the issue, Zhaki would accuse him of being a prude, or worse, “jealous.” If only I were a real leader, Kaa thought. The lieutenant should never have left me in
