widening V of the wake and the drift of the scores of tendrils showed that the isle was moving more quickly now, moving mindlessly to other feeding grounds, distant waters.
'Where are the…' I began to subvocalize.
'Shhh,' said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. I could hear them then; the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat purrs and echoing cries. The depths were suddenly filled with strange music.
'Jesus,' I said and because Siri had tuned our comthreads to the translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless whistle and toot.
'Hello!' she called and the translated greeting echoed from the transmitter; a high-speed bird's call sliding into the ultrasonic. 'Hello!' she called again.
Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate. They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong enough to convince me of the animal's power.
'Hello,' called Siri but the swift form faded into distant haze and there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the translator. 'Do you want to talk to them?' she asked.
'Sure.' I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea-mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth's two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had written that speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party would come away the more knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator disk back on. 'Hello,' I said.
There was a final minute of silence and then our earphones were buzzing while the sea echoed shrill ululations.
'What the hell?' I asked Siri and the translator trilled out my question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.
I tried again. 'Hello! Greetings from… uh… the surface. How are you?'
The large male… I assumed it to be a male… curved in toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the water ten times faster than I could have swum even if I had remembered to don flippers that morning. For a second I thought he was going to ram us and I raised my knees and clung tightly to the keelroot. Then he was past us, climbing for air, while Siri and I reeled from his turbulent wake and the high tones of his shout.
Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She lightly grasped my shoulders while I held onto the keelroot with my right hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through the warm water. A school of tiny, crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled further out.
'Had enough?' she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.
'One more try,' I said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to life. The current pushed us together again. She slid her arm around me.
'Why do you herd the islands?' I asked the bottle-nosed shapes circling in the dappled light. 'How does it benefit you to stay with the isles?'
Siri's body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm tightened around me. 'Great Voices were the whales,' she whispered. Her hair fanned out in streamers. Her right hand moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.
'Do you miss the Great Voices?' I asked the shadows. There was no response. Siri slid her legs around my hips. The surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.
'What do you miss most of Old Earth's oceans?' I asked. With my left arm I pulled Siri closer, slid my hand down along the curve of her back to where her buttocks rose to meet my palm, and held her tight. To the circling dolphins we must have appeared a single creature. Siri lifted herself against me and we became a single creature.
The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over Siri's shoulder. I reached to shut it off but paused as the answer to my question buzzed urgently in our ears.
I turned off the disk and shook my head. I did not understand. There was so much I did not understand. I closed my eyes as Siri and I moved gently to the rhythms of the current and ourselves while the dolphins swam nearby and the cadence of their calls took on the sad, slow trilling of an old lament.
I sit here in the sunlight and wait. Now that I have made my decision, I wonder if it is what Siri wanted all along.
The tomb is a white glare behind me. The sunlight touches my skin. I can hear a low murmur from the restless crowd on the hillside. Several of the council members are conferring with Donel. Soon he will climb the slope to urge me on. The farcaster ceremonies cannot wait for me.
I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.
Surf breaks against the lavastone seawall. I can hear the bells ringing as the small boats bob at anchorage. I sit in the sunlight and wait.
Somewhere to the south a Thomas Hawk screams. There is no other answer.
Siri and I came down out of the hills and returned to the Festival just before sunrise of the second day. For a night and a day we had roamed the hills, eaten with strangers in pavilions of orange silk, bathed together in the icy waters of the Shree, and danced to the music which never ceased going out to the endless file of passing isles. We were hungry. I had awakened at sunset to find Siri gone. She returned before the moon of Maui-Covenant rose. She told me that her parents had gone off with friends for several days on a slow-moving houseboat. They had left the family skimmer in Firstsite. Now we worked our way from dance to dance, bonfire to bonfire, back to the center of the city. We planned to fly west to her family estate near Fevarone.
It was very late but Firstsite Common still had its share of revelers. I was very happy. I was nineteen and I was in love and the.93 gravity of Maui-Covenant seemed much less to me. I could have flown had I wished. I could have done anything.
We had stopped at a booth and bought fried dough and mugs of black coffee. Suddenly a thought struck me. I asked, 'How did you know I was a Shipman?'
'Hush, friend Merin. Eat your poor breakfast. When we get to the villa, I will fix a true meal to break our fast.'
'No, I'm serious,' I said and wiped grease off my chin with the sleeve of my less-than-clean harlequin's costume. 'This morning you said that you knew right away last night that I was from the ship. Why was that? Was it my accent? My costume? Mike and I saw other fellows dressed like this.'
Siri laughed and brushed back her hair. 'Just be glad it was I who spied you out, Merin my love. Had it been my Uncle Gresham or his friends it would have meant trouble.'
'Oh? Why is that?' I picked up one more fried ring and Siri paid for it. I followed her through the thinning crowd. Despite the motion and the music all about, I felt weariness beginning to work on me.
'They are Separatists,' said Siri. 'Uncle Gresham recently gave a speech before the All Thing urging that we fight rather than agree to be swallowed into your Hegemony. He said that we should destroy your farcaster device before it destroys us.'
'Oh?' I said. 'Did he say how he was going to do that? The last I heard you folks had no craft to get
