Startide Rising (The Uplift Saga, #2) - David Brin Page 0,81

his body.

Makanee sighed and turned away. She swam over to a nearby comm unit and considered.

Metz and Takkata-Jim can’t be back on the bridge yet, she thought. She clicked a sonar code that activated the unit. Almost instantly the face of a young, blue-finned dolphin appeared before her.

“Communications. C-can I help you?”

“Akki? Yes, child, it’s Dr. Makanee. Have you made any plans for lunch? You know, I do think I still have some of that candied octopus left. You’re free? How sssweet. I’ll see you soon, then. Oh, and let’s keep our date our little secret. Okay? That’sss a good lad.”

She departed Intensive Care, a scheme beginning to form in her mind.

40

Creideiki

In the quiet grayness of the gravity tank, a faint moaning cry.

* Desperate, he swims

Tossed by gray storm winds, howling:

Drowning! Drowning! *

41

Tom Orley

A foul-tempered mountain growled in the middle of a scum-crusted sea.

It had stopped raining a while ago. The volcano grumbled and coughed fire at low overhanging clouds, casting orange on their undersides. Thin, twisting trails of ash blew into the sky. Where the hot cinders finally fell, it was not to a quenching by clean sea water. They landed in a muddy layer atop a carpet of dingy vines which seemed to go on forever.

Thomas Orley coughed in the dank, sooty air. He crawled up a small rise of slippery, jumbled weeds. The dead weight of his crude sledge dragged a tether wrapped around his left hand. With his right he clutched a thick tendril near the top of the weed-mound.

His legs kept sliding out from under him as he crawled. Even when he managed to wedge them into gaps in the slimy mass, his feet frequently sank into the mire between the vines. When he awkwardly pulled them out, the quagmire would let go reluctantly, giving off an awful sucking sound.

Sometimes “things” came out with his feet, squirming along his legs and dropping off to slither back into the noisome brine.

The tightly wrapped thong cut into his left hand as he pulled the sledge, a meager remnant of his solar plane and supplies. It was a miracle that he had been able to salvage even that much from the crash.

The volcano sent ochre flickers across the weedscape. Rainbow specks of metallic dust coated the vegetation in all directions. It was late afternoon, almost a full Kithrup day since he had banked his glider toward the island, searching for a safe place to land.

Tom raised his head to look blearily over the plain of weeds. All of his well-laid plans had been brought down by this plain of tough, ropy sea plants.

He had hoped to find shelter on an island upwind of the volcano, or, barring that, to land at sea and turn the glider into a broad and seaworthy raft from which to perform his experiment.

I should have considered this possibility. The crash, those dazed, frantic minutes diving after gear and piling together a crude sledge while the storm lashed at him, and then hours crawling among the fetid vines toward a solitary hump of vegetation—it all might have been avoided.

He tried to pull forward, but a tremor in his right arm threatened to turn into a full-scale cramp. It had been badly wrenched during the crash, when the plane’s wing pontoons had come off and the fuselage went tumbling across the morass, splashing at last into an isolated pool of open water.

A gash across the left side of his face had almost sent him into shock during those first critical moments. It reached from his jaw almost to the neural socket above his left ear. The plastic cover that normally protected the delicate nerve interface had spun out into the night, hopelessly lost.

Infection was the least of his worries, now.

The tremor in his arm grew worse. Tom tired to ride it out, lying face down on the pungent, rubbery weeds. Gritty mud scraped his right cheek and forehead each time he coughed.

Somewhere he had to find the energy. He hadn’t time for the subtleties of self-hypnosis, to coax his body back into working. By main force of will, he commanded the abused muscles to behave for one final effort. He could do little about what the universe threw at him, but dammit, after thirty hours of struggle, within meters of his goal, he would not accept a rebellion by his body!

Another coughing fit ripped at his raw throat. His body shook, and the hacking weakened his grip on the dry root. Just when he thought

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