The Message (5 page)

Jake leaned over the edge of the tank to stroke one of the dolphins. “Hi there. Do I know you from somewhere? Jake’s my name.”

The dolphin tossed his head back and forth like he was nodding “yes,” chattering in his high-pitched dolphin voice.

“Okay, now that was weird,” Rachel said. “It was like he was answering Jake.”

“Are you so sure he wasn’t?” I asked. “Dolphins are very intelligent. Not our kind of intelligence, but still, I guess they’re one of the two or three smartest animals around.”

“It will be strange morphing something so intelligent,” Rachel said.

“Yes,” I agreed. Strange, and … wrong, somehow. I felt a twisting in my stomach. “How is doing this any different than what the Yeerks do?”

Rachel looked surprised. “Yeerks take over humans,” she said. “Besides, they don’t
morph,
they infest. We don’t take over the actual animal, we just copy his DNA pattern, create a totally new animal, and then —”

“And then
control
the new animal,” I said.

“It’s not the same,” Rachel insisted. But she looked troubled.

“It’s something I’ll have to think about,” I said. “It’s kind of been bothering me.”

Jake joined Rachel and me. “We’d better do it.”

I nodded. “Yes, we should, before we run out of fish to feed these guys.” I leaned over the side of the tank and patted the head of the nearest dolphin. Her skin was rubbery, but not at all slimy. Just like a wet rubber ball.

She grinned up at me, fixing me with one eye as she cocked her head to see me.

I pushed away my doubts, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the dolphin. She became peaceful and calm, as animals always do during the acquiring process.

May I?
I asked her silently. But of course she couldn’t answer… .

T
hat night I dreamed again of the voice under the sea, calling for help. Only this time it sounded faint. Like a radio with the batteries growing weak. I wasn’t sure if it was just a regular dream this time. A dream of a memory that might or might not be real.

And I dreamed of the dolphin in her tank at the wildlife park. The one they called Monica, although who knew if she had a true name of her own? How long had she been in that tank? How long since she had been free in the open sea?

The next day was Friday. There was no school
because of some teacher conference, so we had a three-day weekend ahead of us.

I called Jake. “Hi, Jake. Are we going to the beach today like we planned?”

We were always very careful about anything we said over the telephone. Phone lines can be tapped. Besides, Tom, Jake’s brother, could listen in on an extension and overhear something we didn’t want him to hear.

“Actually, I was thinking the beach will be really crowded today,” Jake said, sounding very casual. “I was talking to Marco and he said maybe we should go down to the river instead.”

It was a good suggestion. We couldn’t exactly morph on a beach full of people.

“I’ll be there in two hours, okay? I have some chores to do.”

I ended up being a little late. They were all waiting for me.

It was an area I had been to before with my dad. It’s a little park near a bridge. A good place for fishing. About half a mile away, the river empties into the ocean. The river is lined with trees along most of its length. Here and there are homes and private docks, but the spot we’d chosen was hidden from the bridge and from any houses.

“Hi, Cassie,” Jake said, smiling at me.

“Hi, everyone,” I said. I spotted a movement in one of the tree branches. “Hey up there, Tobias. How’s it going?”

I laughed, pleased to hear that Tobias was learning to be at peace with the fact that, at least for a while, he was as much a hawk as he was a boy.

Tobias said.

I looked closer and saw a very small digital timer strapped to one of his legs.

he explained.

Jake said, “I figured we’d hide our clothes, then wade into the river a little way, then start morphing.”

“Sounds good,” Rachel said.

“Cassie? Will you go first?” Jake asked.

I nodded. “Sure.” For some reason everyone has decided that I am the best morpher. I think it’s mostly silly. We can all morph fine.

But the first time we morph a new animal it’s always kind of tense. You never know what it’s going
to be like. You never know how much the animal’s instincts and mind will resist you.

And this time there was a new fear, at least for me. What sort of mind would I find? Would it be just the dolphin instincts, or would I encounter a true dolphin mind, with thoughts and ideas of its own?

I shed my overalls and kicked off my shoes, leaving just the leotard that I thought of as my morphing outfit. See, it’s possible to morph some clothing along with you, but only something skintight. Anything bulky you try to morph just ends up as rags. And shoes? Forget shoes. We’ve all tried morphing shoes and it never works.

I stepped into the water. “Cold,” I reported. The current tugged at my ankles.

I waded in a little farther, up to my waist.

Then I focused on the dolphin that was now a part of me.

The first change was my skin. It lightened from brown to pale gray. It was like rubber, tough but springy.

That was good. I wanted to hang on to my legs as long as I could. I wanted to change as many other aspects as I could before I had to drop down into the water.

I felt the odd crunching sound you get sometimes when bones are stretched or compressed. And right
before my eyes—literally—my face bulged out and out and out still farther.

“Oh, man, that’s definitely
not
attractive,” Marco groaned from the shore. “Not a good look for you, Cassie.”

Morphing isn’t usually very pretty. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that, if you didn’t know it was going to be all right, would freak you out. I mean, I’ve watched while Rachel does her elephant morph, and I can tell you, it is the creepiest, scariest, most disgusting thing you’ll ever want to see. Let alone watching people go from human to fish. Truly gross.

I didn’t have a mirror, but I could guess how gross I looked. I had this huge, long bottlenose sticking out of my otherwise normal face. My skin was gray rubber. And when I felt behind me with my rapidly shriveling hands, I could feel the triangular blade of a dorsal fin rising out of my spine.

My arms were gone, replaced by two flat flippers, and I was now standing about ten feet tall, wobbling on my puny human-sized legs.

It was time to let the rest of the morph proceed. I surrendered my human legs. Instantly I fell face forward into the water.

I looked down and saw my tail. I was complete. The water was too shallow, though, and I was barely afloat. I kicked my tail, scraped across the sandy
bottom, and finally surged out into deeper water.

I waited for the moment when the dolphin brain would surface, full of instinct-driven need and hunger and fear. The way it had always been before.

But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like a squirrel or even a horse.

This mind was not filled with fear and need.

This mind was … I know this sounds strange, but it was like a little kid. I tried to listen to it, to understand its needs and wants. To prepare myself for a sudden onslaught of crude, primitive animal demands. Flee! Fight! Eat!

But that didn’t happen. I felt hunger, yes. But not the screaming, obsessive need that Jake felt when he morphed a lizard or when Rachel became a shrew.

There was no fear. None.

And fortunately, I did not find a true thinking, conscious mind. I breathed a sigh of relief. Just—again, I know it sounds strange—but I just found this feeling, like she wanted to play. Like a little kid who wants to play. I wanted to chase fish, catch them, and eat them, but that would be a game. I wanted to race across the surface of the sea, and that would be a game, too.

I heard Tobias’s thought-speech in my head.

Was I okay?
I asked myself.

I called to the others.

L
et’s go! Come on, you guys, let’s go!>

I didn’t like the river. I wanted the ocean. I could feel it close by. I could feel it in the way the current rushed me forward. I could feel it in some deep, hidden part of my dolphin being.

The ocean. I wanted it. It was my place. It was where I should be.

We swam in a school, the four of us, with Tobias flying overhead.

We raced the river’s current, and soon I could taste the salt. I could feel the salt water on my skin. It was as if I had opened the door of a toy store with
every toy on Earth, and I had all the time in the world to play.

I saw my friends around me, swift, pale shapes in the water. Sleek gray torpedoes as they rose to breathe.

I lived in both worlds—the sea and the air. I saw the blue-green of the ocean, the pale blue and white of the sky. I slipped back and forth through the bright barrier that separated them.

Jake went zipping by, shooting up from beneath me to explode into the air. I heard the slap of his belly as he landed. It was a game! I dove deep, down to where the sandy floor sloped toward depths even I could not explore. Then I powered my tail, steadied my flippers, and drove hard toward the surface. Above me I could see the shimmering, silver border between water and air.

Faster! Faster!
I was a missile.

I shattered the barrier of the sea and hurtled up into the sky. I felt warm wind on my skin, instead of cold water. I hung, poised in midair, almost floating above the surface of the water. Now the barrier was beneath me. I pointed my nose toward it and dropped from the sky.

The water wrapped around me, welcoming me back.

Marco laughed in my head.

I answered.

Rachel chimed in.

Jake said.

The four of us dove deep. The ocean floor was still far below us, rippling sand dotted with rocks and clumps of seaweed.

Near the ocean floor we leveled off, practically scraping our bellies on the bottom. And then, aiming at the silver barrier once again, we shot upward, racing each other, ecstatic from the joy of our own bodies’ strength.

We launched into the air like a well-trained team of acrobats.

We flew, side by side, exhaling and refilling our lungs with warm air.

Life was joy. Life was a game. I wanted to dance. I wanted to dance through the sea.

So I did.

There was nothing I could not do. There was nothing I could ask of my body that it would not give me. Racing, spinning, turning, diving, skimming the surface, flying up into the sky.

I wasn’t just
in
the sea. I
was
the sea.

It was
Tobias.

Minutes? I laughed. Who cared about minutes? Reason? What was that? Tobias said.

Yes, he was right. He was definitely right. But would it be fun? Would it be a game?

Rachel said.

Jake said instantly.

Marco said.

Tobias said.

But I was too distracted to care. I concentrated, and suddenly, from someplace in my forehead, came a series of loud, very rapid clicks, almost like loud static. Then, to my total surprise, I heard something in those clicks. It was weird. It was kind of like hearing, only not. The clicking noises had hit something, far off in deeper water. I sort of
felt
the sounds as
they came back to me, like scattered echoes.

There was a universe of information in that echo. Some of that information made me uneasy.

I said.

The others immediately began firing off the clicking noise that is the dolphin’s underwater radar. It’s called
echolocation.

Marco said.

I searched in my dolphin mind, deep down in the places where instinct had been hidden beneath layers of intelligence.

Then a picture just popped into my consciousness. I cried, as if I had just won a contest.

Suddenly we weren’t playing anymore. The others had all found the same instinct in themselves. The echolocation indicated that there was a large shark nearby.

And we knew one thing for sure. We didn’t like sharks.