The Dolphins of Pern (10 page)

Idarolan scrambled down the ladder to the float as neatly as Alemi did. Feeling a trifle self-conscious, Alemi grabbed up the small handbell and vigorously sent the peals of the Report sequence out across the gently lapping tide.

Both he and Idarolan flinched when two dolphins,
crossing each other’s paths, leaped out of the water, finger-widths from the edge of the float.

“That’s jumping to with a vengeance, boy!” Idaro-lan said.

“Lemi, ring bellill! Reporrrit! Afo reporit!” The words came distinctly to both men.

“Kib reporrrit!” came from the second dolphin.

“As I live and breathe!” Idarolan gasped in a low, awed tone. Kneeling at the very edge of the float, he tried to follow the motion of the now submerged dolphins. He lurched back as one surfaced right in front of him, its rostrum nearly touching his chin. “My very word!” He stared at Alemi for a long moment.

“OOO rang?”

“Kib?” Alemi said, holding out an offering of bread. “You eat mans food?”

“No fish?”

“Not this morning.”

“He distinctly said ‘No fish?’ Interrogatory tone!” Master Idarolan exclaimed softly, rocking back on his heels.

Alemi grinned.

“No fish?” the second dolphin queried, bobbing up in front of Alemi, who put out his hand to scratch under the chin.

“Will scratching do? Or do you need bloodfish taken off?” He grinned as he explained to Idarolan about the parasites.

“Well, I never! And they let you scrape ’em off with your knife?”

“They seemed very pleased to get them off. I think I’ve done five in this pod. And they like to be scratched. Sometimes their skin sloughed off, but
that’s normal. Skritching?” he asked again. “Or does someone have another bloodfish?”

“Skritch. Bloodfish.” The dolphin enunciated carefully as he raised his head. “Gooddee. Again!” The dolphin twisted his head so that the exact spot was under Alemi’s fingers.

“What do they feel like?” Master Idarolan asked, his hands twitching.

“Find out yourself. Give Afo a caress. Don’t touch the blowhole, but just about anywhere on the head—the melon—and the nose will please them.”

“They’re rubbery, but firm. Not at all slimy. Like a fish.”

“Not fish. Mammal!” was Afo’s instant response.

“Stars!” Idarolan lost his balance in surprise and sat down so heavily on the float that it bounced in the water and they got soaked by the backwave. “It knows what it is!”

Alemi chuckled. “Just like we do. Do you doubt their intelligence now?”

“No, I can’t,” Idarolan admitted. “I’m just gobsmacked, is what I am. All these Turns I’ve admired ’em and never thought to pass the time of day with ’em. Never thought the sounds they were making
could
be words so I didn’t
listen!
Oh, I’ve heard others who got rescued tell me what they
thought
…” He put a gnarled finger to his temple and twisted it in the old gesture of mental instability. “But a course, they’d have been under stress being nearly drowned and all—and the wind and storm so bad anyone could easily mistake the matter. But I’ve heard ’em now and no mistake.” He gave his head a
decisive jerk. “So, what do we do now, young Alemi?”

“Reporrrit?” Kib asked, one eye on Alemi, mouth parted in a dolphin smile.

Both men laughed aloud at that, and the two dolphins tailed it, squeeing and clicking.

“Belllill? Belllill?” The cry sounded across the sea, and Alemi and Idarolan saw more dolphins heading toward them. “Bellill rrrring! Bellill ring!”

Idarolan shook his head from side to side. “They’re making ‘bell’ into two syllables.”

“And ‘oo’ is you. ‘Blufisss’ are the parasites.” Alemi grinned at the stupidity of not having understood such a common marine hazard. “A couple of other oddities, but I think if I just use the correct pronunciations, we’ll have them talking the way we do. What I’d like to do now, Master Idarolan, is consolidate this start. Aivas gave me instructions on how to proceed. You could use your ship’s bell at sea … use the sequence I rang, and ask them to report. Aivas said they know where fish are schooling, where rocks and reefs form, what the weather’s likely to be. We know they rescue the shipwrecked. But there were lots of other tasks that humans and dolphins did together.”

“Hmmm … check a ship for barnacles and holings. Check the current for speed … Aivas gave me the logs kept by a Captain James Tillek …”

“Tillek! Tillek! T’ere is a Tillek?” the dolphins cried with such passion and surprise that Alemi and Master Idarolan were startled.

“No, no Tillek here,” Alemi said.
“James”—
Alemi stressed the first name—“Tillek is dead. Long
dead. Gone.” The dolphins nosed each other and a sad sort of sound came up from the group.

“Any rate, the captain”—Alemi grinned at Idaro-lan’s choice of words to forestall another violent del-phinic reaction—“was one of the first settlers to chart our Pernese waters. I’ve been reading about how the dolphins helped people get safely to the North after the volcanoes erupted. Amazing journey. Lots of small boats, and the dolphins saving everyone from drowning in one of those squalls you whip up down in these latitudes.” He gave Alemi a dour glance for such squalls. “Hmmm, smart as they are, maybe they could take messages now and then. Maybe not as fast as fire-lizards, but some of those distract easily—not smart enough to keep their minds on one thing at a time.”

The other dolphins had reached the float by then and were crowding about to be recognized, to speak their name and find out what Idarolan’s was.

“How do they tell us apart?” Idarolan wondered.

“Ezee. Mans color,” Kib said, gargling.

Alemi was positive the dolphin was laughing at them.

“These are clothes, Kib, clothes,” Alemi said, holding out the fabric of the light vest he wore with one hand and the sturdy sailcloth short pants.

“Dolphins … not…” Kib enunciated clearly, “dresssssss.” Then he rolled over and over in the water as if convulsed with mirth.

“Iddie” was what they could say of the Masterfish-man’s name, but the man didn’t feel at all insulted.

“I’m honored, you know. I’ve talked to an animal and it has understood my name,” Idarolan said, puffing
out his broad chest a bit in pride. Then he went on more confidentially: “Never would I tell of this morning to Yanus of Half Circle Sea Hold! Never! But I shall enlist the assistance of those Masters I know would appreciate the connection.” He was nearly butted off his feet by an impetuous prod of a rostrum. “Excuse me, where was I?”

“Ski-ritch Temp,” he was told in a very firm request. “Ski-ritch Temp.”

Idarolan complied.

“This’s one thing I never thought I’d find myself doing,” he remarked in an undertone to Alemi.

“Nor me!”

A
LEMI WAS NOT
the only one wanting to have a closer understanding of the dolphins.

After T’lion and Gadareth returned Alemi to his Sea Hold, and collected the clothes that T’lion had hastily borrowed from a sleepy brown rider, the boy and the bronze did not immediately return to the Eastern Weyr.

“They’re not as good as you, Gaddie,” T’lion told his dragon as the bronze leaped skyward, “But don’t you think talking sea animals are
great?”

Would they talk to me, too?

“Ah, Gaddie, don’t for a moment think I’d trade you for a dolphin!” T’lion laughed at the very notion, scratching the bronze neck as hard as he could with gloved fingers. He had yet to grow into all his flying gear, and the glove fingers were a joint too long, so scratching was difficult. “You and me are different …”

You are my rider and I am your dragon and that is a good difference
, Gadareth said stoutly. I
chose you of all who were there the day I hatched
…

“And I wasn’t even supposed to
be
a Candidate,” T’lion said, grinning, vividly remembering that most exciting of all days in his life.

His brother, Kanadin, had been the official Candidate and, even though he had Impressed a brown, Kanadin had never quite forgiven his younger brother for making such a show of himself and Impressing when he hadn’t even been
presented
as a possible rider. Impressing a bronze was an even more unforgivable injury.

“You’re too young!” K’din had yelled at his brother when the weyrlings were led to their quarters. “You were only brought along because Ma and Pa didn’t dare leave you home. How could you do this to me?”

It had never done any good for T’lion to tell K’din that he hadn’t
meant
to Impress a dragon, much less a bronze, but K’din saw it as a personal offense. Not that he would have swapped his Bulith for Gadareth even ten minutes after the Impression was made. It was the fact that what should have been a momentous day for the eldest son of a journeyman resident at Landing had been trivialized by a much younger brother who had been barely the acceptable age at the time of his Impression.

T’lion had tried to explain that perhaps if this had been a Weyr like the northern ones, an interior cavern with tiers of seats set up high for the witnesses, instead of an open space around the Hatching Ground, Gadareth wouldn’t have found it so easy to reach him. But the little bronze had flopped and crawled, keening with anguish, from the Hatching Sands and right up to T’lion where the boy had been standing
with his parents and sister. It wasn’t as if T’lion had
tried
, in any way, to attract the hatchling’s attention. He hadn’t so much as moved a muscle. Of course, he had been so flabbergasted to find a little dragon butting him that he had had to be urged by T’gellan—the Weyrleader—and the Weyrlingmaster to accept the Impression. Not that he could have resisted much longer, not with Gadareth so upset that he wasn’t immediately accepted by his choice of partner.

Even three years on, at fifteen, T’lion stayed out of K’din’s way as much as possible. Which was easier now that K’din was with a fighting wing and could sneer that T’lion had Turns yet before he, as a bronze rider, would be
useful
to the Weyr that housed and nurtured him.

T’lion was very grateful to T’gellan, the Weyrleader, and his weyrmate, Mirrim, green Path’s rider, because they never once made the youngster feel unacceptable.

“The dragon chooses,” T’gellan had said at the time, and often at other Impressions, shaking his head ruefully at dragon choice. Then he’d congratulated the stunned family on having
two
such worthy sons.

Since T’lion could not be included in a fighting Weyr until he was sixteen, T’gellan used the bronze pair as messengers, giving them plenty of practice in finding coordinates all over what was settled of the Southern Continent as well as the major and minor Holds and Halls in the North. T’lion took pride in being a conscientious messenger and was infallibly courteous to his passengers, never once mentioning the behavior of some of them who found going
between
frightening or unnerving. Or those who tried to
order him about as if he were a drudge. No dragon
ever
chose a drudge personality. Of course, his being so young made some adults feel as if they had to patronize him …
him!
A dragonrider!

There are some of the fins
, Gadareth said, adroitly interrupting T’lion’s less than amiable thoughts. And, knowing his rider’s wish before T’lion could even think it, the bronze glided down toward the pod.

Being up high gave T’lion a superb view of the pod, of their sinuous bodies leaping and plunging in the water. It was sort of like the formation of fighting wings going against Thread, T’lion thought. Only he’d heard that shipfish—no, dolphins—
liked
Thread. They’d been seen by dragonriders, swarming with other types of marine life, actually following the leading edge of Thread across the ocean.

“Less for us to flame, boy,” bronze rider V’line had remarked.

However, being airborne made it a little difficult for T’lion to speak to the dolphins, even though Gadareth was agreeable to flying just above the surface, being careful not to plunge a wing into the water and off-balance himself.

Then a dolphin heaved itself up out of the water, momentarily on a level with dragon and rider, eyeing them as it reached the top of its jump before sliding gracefully back into the water.

The surprise was enough to make Gadareth veer, catching his wing tip in the water. He struggled to recover his balance, tipping T’lion dangerously against his riding straps.

“Squeeeeeeh! Squeeeh! Carrrrrrrerfullllll!”

There was no doubting the shout from several dolphins
as Gadareth righted himself and kept a reasonable distance above the waves. Two more dolphins launched themselves up, each eyeing dragon and rider.

Recovering from the fright, T’lion responded to their scrutiny with an enthusiastic wave, trying to keep his eyes on them as they cued up and down. Then Gadareth caught the rhythm of the dolphins’ maneuver: dipping down as he saw a dolphin nose appear, he arched up and over with the acrobat.

This is fun!
the dragon said, his eyes whirling with green and blue.

“Funnnhn! Funnnhnn! Gaym! Pullay gaym!” the dolphins cried as they leaped up and over.

Did they hear me?
Gadareth asked his astonished rider.

Getting any dolphin to answer that question was beyond the physical constraints of their present maneuvering, though T’lion shouted as loud as he could at each dolphin arching past him.

“I’ll have to ask Master Alemi, Gaddie,” T’lion told his dragon. “Maybe he’ll know. He said Aivas told him a lot about dolphins. That’s what they really are, not shipfish, you know.”

I
know now. Dolphins, not shipfishes. And they can talk.

“I think we’d better go back to the Weyr,” T’lion said, checking the slant of the westering sun. “And, Gaddie, let’s keep this adventure to ourselves, shall we?”

It’s fun to know something other people don’t
, the bronze replied, just as he had on several other occasions when he and his rider had spent some private
time investigating on their own. There was so much to explore! Of course, if T’lion had not been conscientious about his
duties
, Gadareth would not have been so willing to take free time, but T’lion was very good about doing fun things only when he had finished his assigned chores.