some reason he had expected her main concern to be Tom Orley. Well, he wasn’t about to bring the subject up if she didnt.
* Makanee—
Patient healer
* Sends me out—
With danger warning
* Soundless, flukeless
Lies Creideiki
* Streaker’s fortunes
Strangely waning
* And the taste—
Of atavism
* Fouls the waters—
There was silence at the other end. No doubt Gillian was formulating her next question in a way that would let him answer unambiguously in Trinary. It was a skill Toshio sometimes sadly lacked.
Akki brought his head up quickly. Was that a sound? It hadn’t come from the comm line, but from the dark waters around him.
“Akki,” Gillian began. “I’m going to ask you questions phrased to take three-level answers. Please spare artistry for brevity in answering.”
Gladly, if I can, Akki thought. He had often wondered why it was so hard to hold direct conversations in Trinary without beating around the bush in poetic allusion. It was his native tongue as much as Anglic was, and still he felt frustrated by its resistance to shortcuts.
“Akki, does Creideiki ignore the Fish-of-Dreaming, does he chase them, or does he feed them?”
Gillian was asking if Creideiki still functioned as a tool user, was he lost to injury, drifting in an unconscious dream-hunt or, worse, was he dead. Somehow, Gillian had immediately gone right to the heart of the matter. Akki was able to answer with blessed brevity.
* Chasing squid—
In deepest water *
There was that sound again! A rapid clicking, coming from not far away. Curse the necessity to keep his neural socket linked to the static of this line! The sounds were close enough to leave little doubt. Someone was hunting for him out here.
“All right, Akki. Next question. Does Hikahi calm all with her Keneenk rhythms, does she echo herd obedience, or does she sing an absent silence?”
Dolphin sonar is a highly directional thing. He felt the edge of a lobe of a sonic beam pass just above him, without hitting him broadside. Akki got down as close to the ocean floor as he could, and made an effort to direct his own nervous clickings into the soft sand. He wanted to reach out with one of his harness arms and grab a rock or something for stability, but was afraid the tiny whirring of the motors would be heard.
* Absent silence—
Fades the memory—
* Of Hikahi
* Absent silence—
From Tsh’t
* And Suessi *
He wished he, too, were absent this place and back in his quiet stateroom aboard Streaker.
“Okay, is their silence that of netted capture? Is it of orca-fearful waiting? Or is it the silence of fishes feeding?”
Akki was about to answer when, like one whose eyes were suddenly struck by a bright light, he was awash in a beam of pulsed sound, highly directional, somewhere from his left and above. No question a dolphin up there was instantly aware of him.
* Takkata-Jim—
Bites the cables
* My own job—
Is mine no longer
* His fen relay—
His lying songs *
Akki was so agitated that some of that actually came out as sound rather than impulses sent to the monofilament. There was no use trying any longer for secrecy. He made ready to jettison the line and turned his melon toward the intruder. He fired off a sonar pulse strong enough, he hoped, to momentarily stun him.
The echoes of his burst returned giving him a vivid image. There was a thrashing sound as a very large dolphin swung aside, out of his beam.
K’tha-Jon! Akki recognized the echo at once.
“Akki? What was that? Are you in fighting patterns? Break off if you have to. I’m coming home fast as I …”
Duty absolved, Akki popped the neural link free and rolled to one side.
He acted none too soon. A blue-green laser bolt sizzled through the spot where he had been seconds before.
So, that’s the way of it, he thought as he dove into the canyon next to the ocean ridge. The hammerhead is out to get me, and no politeness about it.
He did a quick roll to his right and speared downward toward the shadows.
Dolphins were known for a reluctance to kill anything that breathed air, but they were not a limited race. Even before uplift, humans had witnessed cases of fin murdering fin. In enabling cetaceans to be starfarers, men also made them more efficient when they chose to kill.
A line-bright laser beam hissed a bare meter ahead of him. Akki clenched his jaw and dove through the streak of scalding bubbles. Another narrow, searing bolt sizzled between his pectoral fins. He whirled and dove