from one of the purposes of the mission, to make a demonstration that would boost neo-fin self-confidence for a generation.
* Then in my leaving—
Learn a lesson,
* Aboard Streaker—
Is your captain. *
Tsh’t must have been running low on the breath she had taken at the sled’s airdome. Bubbles leaked from her blowmouth. Still she looked back at him resignedly and spoke in Anglic.
“All right-t. After Suessi leaves, we’ll get you on your way. We’ll continue working here until we get ordersss from Creideiki.”
“Good.” Tom nodded. “And you still approve of the rest of the plan?”
Tsh’t turned away, her eyes recessed.
* Keneenk and logic
Join to sing
* Its tune
* The plan is all between
Us and
* Our doom
* We’ll all do our part *
Tom reached over and hugged her “I know we can count on you, you sweet old fish-catcher I’m not worried at all. Now let’s say good-bye to Hannes, so I can be on my way. I don’t want Jill to get to the island before me.”
He dove toward the sled. But Tsh’t remained behind for a moment. Although the air in her lungs was growing stale, she lay still, watching him swim away.
Her sonar clicks swept over him as he descended. She caressed him with her hearing, and sang a quiet requiem.
* They cast their nets to catch us—
Those of Iki,
* Yet you are there—
To cut the nets.
* Good Walker,
Always,
* You cut the nets—
* Though they’ll take
In payment
Your life … *
26
Creideiki
The most formal Anglic, spoken carefully by a neo-dolphin, would be difficult for a human raised only in Man-English to understand. The syntax and many root words were the same. But a pre-spaceflight Londoner would have found the sounds as strange as the voices that spoke them.
The dolphin’s modified blowhold provided whistles, squawks, vowels and a few consonants. Sonar clicks and many other sounds came from complex resonant cavities inside the skull. In speech, these separate contributions were sometimes in phase and sometimes not. Even at the best of times, there were stretched sibilants, stuttered t’s, and groaned vowels. Speech was an art.
Trinary was for relaxation, for imagery and personal matters. It replaced and greatly expanded on Primal Delphin. But Anglic linked the neo-dolphin to the world of cause and effect. Anglic was a language of compromise between the vocal abilities of two races—between the hands-and-fire world of Men and the drifting legends of the Whale Dream. Speaking it, a neo-dolphin could equal most humans in analytic thought, consider past and future, make schemes, use tools, and fight wars.
Some thoughtful humans wondered if giving the cetacean Anglic had really been much of a favor, after all.
Two neo-dolphins alone together might speak Anglic for concentration, but not care if the sounds resembled English words. They would drift into frequencies beyond human hearing, and consonants would virtually disappear. Keneenk allowed this. It was the semantics that counted. If the grammar, the two-level logic, the time-orientation were Anglic, pragmatic results were all that mattered.
When Creideiki took Hikahi’s report, he purposely spoke a very relaxed form of fin-Anglic. By example he wanted to say that what went on here was private.
He listened to her while he took the kinks out of his body, diving and racing back and forth across the exercise pool. Hikahi recited her report on the planetology meeting, enjoying the sweet smell of real air in her main lungs. Occasionally, she paused and sped alongside him for a stretch before continuing. Right now her words sounded nothing like human speech, but a very good voicewriter could have transcribed them.
“… He feels very strongly about it, Captain. In fact, Charlie suggests that we should leave a small study team here with the longboat, if Streaker tries to escape. Even Brookida is tempted by the idea. I was a bit stunned.”
Creideiki passed in front of her. He burst out a quick question.
“What would they do if we left them behind, and we were then captured?” He dove back underwater and sped toward the far wall.
“Charlie thinks he and a detached team could be declared noncombatants, and the Sudman-Sah’ot group out on the island, as well. He says there are precedents. That way, whether we get away or not, part of the mission is preserved.”
The exercise room was in Streaker’s centrifugal ring, ten degrees up the side of the wheel. The walls were canted and Creideiki had to watch out for shallows in the pool’s port side. A cluster of balls, rings, and complex toys floated to starboard.
Creideiki felt much better. The frustration which had