The Dolphins of Pern (7 page)

“Instructions on how to conduct yourself in reestablishing a meaningful contact with the dolphins, Master Alemi. A report on your progress would be appreciated.”

Alemi gathered the sheets with careful hands, awed by the responsibility he somehow found himself eager to accept. He had always half envied riders their dragons, though, unlike many of his boyhood friends, he had never aspired to
be
a dragonrider: the sea was already in his blood. He found his sister Menolly’s fair of fire-lizards engaging, as well as useful creatures, but the thought that he could have contact with an intelligent sea creature was irresistible: creatures as awesome in the medium of water as dragons were in the air.

As he left the Admin Building, absently responding to the Harper’s farewell, he wondered where he could find a bell that would call dolphins.

Young T’lion had been watching from his vantage point on the hill behind the Admin Building, so he and Gadareth were landing before Alemi could signal them.

“How did you know I was here?” Alemi asked, surprised and gratified.

The boy flushed. “Well, sir, I saw you leave Admin. You walk different. You sort of roll.”

Alemi laughed. “Look, are you required to be back at the Weyr right away?”

“No, sir, I’m on duty for you today.”

“Good. Could we go down to the bay?” Alemi
pointed in the general direction of the distant unseen crescent of Monaco Bay. He wanted to see how big the dolphin bell was.

“Certainly.” T’lion reached his hand down as Alemi neatly jumped to Gadareth’s raised forearm and settled himself between the neck ridges.

“Do we have to go
between?”
Alemi asked. “Would it be too long to fly straight?”

“No, not at all,” T’lion replied.

So, when Gadareth reached a cruising height, he began to glide toward the sea, now visible as a sparkle on the horizon. Alemi had never had a chance to see much of the Landing area, where so many marvels from the early days of Pern’s settlement had been unearthed over the last Turns. Now he had a panoramic view of the excavated buildings, the old “landing field” and its crumpled tower, even the ship meadow where the three ancient aircraft had been unearthed. They continued over thick forestry that no longer could be destroyed by Thread, protected as it was by the grubs that had spread in the Southern Continent to neutralize the deadly organism.

T’lion turned his head occasionally to be sure his passenger was riding comfortably; Alemi gave him a thumbs-up signal that he was, and a big grin. This was the longest he had ever flown on a dragon, and he was enjoying it immensely, not even feeling slightly guilty about monopolizing the services of a dragon and his rider for personal reasons. But there was a purpose to the trip, Alemi reminded himself, and felt for the sheaf of instructions he had tucked into his jacket pocket.

Then the superb vista of the almost perfect orescent
of Monaco Bay came into view and what was left of the pier jutting out on its easterly tip. It must have been built of that almost indestructible material the ancients had used. At that, Alemi had heard from Masterfishman Idarolan that half of its original length had been sheered off. Pictures from Aivas’s archives had shown a substantial building at the sea end, floating docks and machinery of some kind. Alemi sighed. There were fishmen out on the deeper waters offshore, plying their ancient trade, which Master Idarolan had said had been conducted in the first days of Pern much as it was now. Some basic skills did not change. Still, so many others had benefited by processes and ideas that had become lost, or disused, during the darker Turns.

Then, from his lofty perspective, Alemi saw on the beach the long column and what had to be the bell. He touched T’lion’s shoulder and pointed down at it. T’lion nodded his understanding. A moment later, Gadareth angled downward, veering to the right and swinging around so that he landed neatly a few lengths from the flotsam. Despite himself, and hoping he wasn’t hurting the dragon, Alemi tightened his grip on the neck ridge.

A thick coating of barnacles on the long plinth distorted its actual shape, Alemi noted as he walked its length. The bell, which rested on a stand, was of a generous size—fully four of his hand spans across its mouth. A good deal of the encrustations had been chipped off, and someone was polishing the metal. The clapper was missing. He pinged the bell with an irreverent snap of his index finger and thumb and
was mildly surprised to hear a muted tolling, slightly distorted.

“Here, use this,” T’lion suggested, handing Alemi a fist-sized rock.

Alemi got a much better sound with that, a mellow rich sound that rolled resonantly out across the bay.

T’lion grinned. “Nice sound!” So, picking up a larger rock, he clouted the bell, getting a more forceful peal. Grunting, Alemi bent over and peered up inside the bell, trying to figure out how large the original clapper must have been.

“Mine was louder,” T’lion said, offering his rock to Alemi.

Alemi hefted both rocks in his hands and then clattered first one, then the other, against the bell, turning his ear to catch the echoes of the lovely sound. Suddenly T’lion exclaimed, looking up at his bronze dragon, whose eyes were beginning to whirl with excitement. T’lion swung his torso halfway toward the water and then stood bolt upright, staring at the bay.

“Shards! Gadareth’s right! Look!” he cried, urgently pointing.

Alemi, his back to the water, craned his neck and saw a phalanx of dolphins racing toward the shore, leaping and vaulting out of the water. The waters beyond seemed to be full of dorsal fins and leaping shipfish. The Masterfishman rose to his feet, gawping at the noises that drifted to him.

“Bellill! Squee! Bellill! Bellill rings! Squeee! Bellill! Bellill!”

Alarmed by their headlong charge straight to the strand, Alemi raced to the edge of the water, waving
his hands. “No, be careful! You’ll beach yourselves! Careful!”

He doubted his words could be heard over their babbling of “bell” and their squeeing. So he waded out into the water, hoping to turn them aside. Instead, he was butted and knocked off his feet by the many bodies that roiled the waters about him. Then he was uplifted by one dolphin body, nose-prodded by half a dozen more, and seemed to be flipped from one to another of the exultant creatures.

“Easy! Take it easy! You’ll drown me,” Alemi yelled, half laughing, half sputtering at these exuberant antics.

A huge shadow compressed the air above him, and he saw bronze Gadareth hovering, his claws extended as if he intended to pluck Alemi bodily from the attentions of the dolphins.

“I’m all right, T’lion, I’m all right. Call Gadareth off!”

“They’ll drown you,” T’lion shrieked, jumping up and down on the beach in his concern.

Simultaneously, Alemi tried to reassure the dolphins, fend off Gadareth, who still saw the human endangered, and reassure the young rider.

“Belay this!”
Alemi roared.

Abruptly the commotion about him ceased and bottle-nosed faces were turned up at him in a tight circle, an even larger ring just beyond them and more dorsal fins and leaping bodies homing in on him from farther out in the bay.

“I am Alemi, fishman. Who are you?” He pointed to a dolphin whose nose brushed his thigh.

“Naym Dar.” The dolphin squeed happily.

Two words, then, Alemi realized, hearing the first word as a distorted “name.” He was delighted that his question had been understood. “Who leads this pod?”

A second dolphin did a wiggle and came closer. “Naym Flo. Long … “And the creature used a word that Alemi didn’t recognize.

“I do not speak good dolphin,” Alemi said. “Say again, please?”

A ripple of squeeing and clicking greeted that admission.

“We titch. You listen,” Flo said, turning one eye on him so that he could see the happy curve of its mouth. “Bellill ring? Trub-bul? Do blufisss?”

“No, no trub-bul,” Alemi said with a laugh. “I didn’t mean to ring the bell to
call
you,” he added. And then shrugged because he didn’t understand their last question.

“Good call. Long listen. No call. We … [a word Alemi didn’t catch] … bell. Pul-lease?” She cocked her head—Alemi didn’t know why, all at once, he decided she was a female, but something about her seemed to give that clue to her gender. He was also peripherally aware of how much he had actually absorbed from the pictures that Aivas had shown and the explanations of these … mammals. That was going to shock the conservative fishmen. His father especially. “Fish” had no right to be intelligent, much less answer humans.

“That bell”—Alemi pointed back to the shore—“is … not working. I will get a bell that works. I will put it at Paradise River Hold. I will call you from there. Can you hear me anywhere?”

There were squeeings and clickings and noisy blowings out of their airholes as they seemed to be trying to understand him.

Suddenly Flo reared up out of the water, holding herself aloft by what Alemi decided could only be sheer determination. She tilted her head, her left eye regarding him. “Lemi ring bellill. Flo come. You oo-ait? ’Mis you oo-ait? Flo come!” She emphasized the last word with a flick of her tail before she sank into the water.

“’Mis you wait?” Alemi repeated.

“I tell you I come. I come,” Flo said with a burble and a whoosh from her blowhole. Everyone about her clicked and squee’ed in tones so emphatic that Alemi grinned broadly at their insistence. “Ooo skraaaabb blufiss?” Flo sounded hopeful.

The last thing he had expected was the eager participation of the dolphins in reestablishing contact with humans. He tried repeating her last query just as he’d heard it. “Ooo” meant “you” but what “skraaaabb” or “blufiss” were sounds for, he couldn’t even guess. Beside him, Flo turned over and over in the water. He had to laugh at her antics: they were childlike, almost. Then he became aware of being uncomfortably hot, in water now up to his chest, and weighed down by the sodden heavy jacket.

“Let me go ashore, will you?” he asked, indicating that he needed to pass by the dolphin bodies pressing about him. He put out his arms to swim and found himself crowded by helpful sleek forms. “I can swim. Let me.”

“Suwim, mans suwim, mans suwim …” Suddenly
the ring about him parted, dolphins flipping up and overhead, out of his way.

Dragon and rider were at the water’s edge, dubiously surveying the incredible scene.

“’Member! ’Member! Oooo ring. Oo-ee come!” a dolphin shouted as Alemi waded out of the bay. “Oooo do blufiss.”

He nodded enthusiastically as he turned, waving at the dolphins crisscrossing each other as they made for deeper water. There seemed to be an incredible number occupying the bay waters. Then, as the chorus was picked up by other voices, he cupped his hands. “I ring. You come. I wait.”

T’lion looked at him in blank amazement. “They were talking? Speaking to you?”

Alemi nodded, slipping out of his soaking jacket while he worked his sodden boots off his feet. “That’s what I saw Aivas about—the dolphins. I never thought we’d get that sort of response, just
tapping
a bell.”

T’lion shook his head slowly from side to side. “Me neither!” He let his breath out with a sigh and took Alemi’s coat from him, draping it on the bell, as Alemi now stripped off his shirt and began wringing it out. “I better go get you some dry clothes. Even in the midday sun, it’s going to take time to dry ’em, and you can’t go
between
in wet clothes.”

“No, I can’t, and I would appreciate dry things. Is that a problem?”

T’lion sized him up for a moment and shook his head. “No. It’ll only take a few minutes,” he said as he vaulted to his dragon’s back. “I’ll borrow some from a rider your size. We always have spares.”

Sand briefly showered Alemi as the young bronze leaped from the beach.

“Shards!” Alemi said, diving for the Aivas papers in his jacket.

With shaking hands he opened the wet sheath, but the writing appeared not to have suffered. Carefully, using pebbles to hold them down, he spread the sheets out on the sand to dry in the hot sun.

Now it was the turn of Flo, pod leader at Moncobay, to sound the news far and wide that the bell had been rung. Not exactly as it should be rung, but it had been rung and they had swarmed to answer, to prove to mans that they would reply when they heard the bell It had been so long since that sound had been heard upon the waters or under them. No member of the pod, even Teres, who was the oldest and had to be accompanied when she fed in the schools of fish, had ever heard the bell But they had remembered to remember. Those at Pardisriv were not the only ones to talk to mans and use the Words.

The mans had been two and they had sent happy feelings to the pod. There had been scratches and pats that had long been denied the dolphins. The entire pod had been made glad to answer the bell They had shown their appreciation with great leaps and tail walks and flips and deep divings. Mans had said they would scrape off the bloodfish, which was the best news of all That evening as they rested in the Great Current, Teres repeated the old tales that she had learned from the Tillek in her time at the Great Subsidence, before she had swum cleanly through the
whirlpool and been considered worthy of bearing dolphin calves. When mans had swum alongside dolphins, above and below the surface, and they had accomplished many wonderful things together. And now there would be mans to heal the wounded and keep the stranded from dying on the sands. There would be good Work to be done. The sea had changed the land in the time since humankind and dolphinkind had come to these waters. Humankind should know. Dolphins could show mans where the shore had changed, and the Currents, and where the biggest schools of fish were. And there might even be games to play.

W
HEN
A
LEMI RETURNED
to Paradise Hold, he was bursting with his tidings and tracked Jayge down to make his report.

Perhaps what Jayge was doing—chopping down the verdant undergrowth that relentlessly encroached on the clearings about the holds, a sweaty, difficult job but one best done to inhibit growth during the coming hot season—made him sour. In any event, the Holder’s enthusiasm for Alemi’s new adventure with dolphins was less than appreciative.