“There is something very peculiar about this semiconsciousness of hers.”
Chapter 9
“Who was Sosa?” Dr. Lawrence asked.
“She was a heroine of the sea people who lived a very long time ago,” I answered. “We call Madelaine by her name because Madelaine came to give us help.”
It was a little after midnight; the Diamond Lil had left her mooring during the day, and the Akbar was currently the only craft tied up at the little jetty. We could talk more freely than we usually could.
“You’ve mentioned the covenant several times,” Lawrence said. “Did the first Sosa have something to do with it?”
“With which covenant?”
Lawrence ran his hand over his hair. “I didn’t know there was more than one covenant. Tell me about the covenants, then, and what Sosa had to do with them.”
Ivry wriggled impatiently. He and I had gone looking for Djuna during the day, with the usual negative result, and he was in an impatient, irritable mood. “Why are you asking us so many questions, Dr. Lawrence? If you don’t remember the covenant yourself, there is not much use in trying to tell you about it. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m asking because I’m not satisfied with our position or our prospects,” Lawrence replied. “We’re unarmed, Sven’s gone, and if the navy decides I was telling the truth, they’ll try to hunt down every dolphin in the ocean. I’m trying to get a line on what we should do next.”
It sounded reasonable enough to me, and, I suppose, to Pettrus, but Ivry was not convinced. “How do we know what use you’ll make of what we tell you? You say our position’s bad. Yes, it is, but it could be worse.”
“Um. Madelaine—”
“Madelaine! Why is she unconscious so much of the time, Dr. Lawrence?”
“I wish I knew,” Lawrence answered ruefully.
“I think you do know,” Ivry honked excitedly. “I think you’re drugging her.”
Lawrence sighed. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious of me. But why the devil should I be drugging Madelaine? This is silly. What would my motive be?”
“To make a—a cat’s-paw out of her. When you finally let her come back to consciousness, you’ll have weakened her so she’ll do whatever you say. Then you can use her—our poor Moonlight—to lead us all into a trap.”
There was a slight pause. “Well, I’m not drugging her,” Lawrence answered finally. “You don’t know much about drugs. You were here yourself yesterday when she was talking to the naval intelligence man. There isn’t a drug in the pharmacopoeia that would affect a woman like that.”
If we had not been so intent on what Lawrence was saying, I think we would have heard the noises within the cabin. As it was, we were all taken by surprise when the deckhouse door opened and Madelaine came out on deck.
She was indefinably changed. For a moment I did not recognize her at all, and then I wondered whether Ivry were right in his suspicions that Lawrence was drugging her.
She came over to the boat’s railing and looked down at us. “You waited for me,” she said smilingly, “Dear Amtor, dear Ivry and Pettrus. There were dreams I had to have; it took time. But I think I’m done dreaming now.”
“What were you dreaming of?” Ivry asked, still suspicious. “Did he make you dream?”
“No. My dreams were like your dreams, Ivry, very strange for a Split.
“But never mind about my dreams. The doctor is right to want to know about the covenant. Tell him what he wants to know. It might help.”
I was still not ready to trust Lawrence completely. “You mean about how the covenant was drawn up and signed?” I asked. This was a trap; I thought that if Madelaine had been drugged, she would fall into it.
“Drawn up and signed!” She laughed. “You know as well as I do that the covenant was something lived.”
“It will be hard to make him understand,” I answered.
“Why?” Lawrence asked practically.
“The minds of Splits are very different from ours.”
“I don’t doubt that,” replied the doctor. “But a basic communication should be possible. After all, both species are mammals.”
“Yes. But by now the gulf between us is exceedingly wide and deep.”
“Try anyhow,” Lawrence said.
“Very well,” I answered. “What do you want to know?” He sighed with exasperation. “Tell me what the covenant is.”
“It is a poem,” I said. “What!”
“Yes, a poem. Do you not understand, Dr. Lawrence? We are the people of the word. We have enormous verbal memories. Our culture is based on speech. I can recite the genealogies straight back to the beginning, almost a million years.”
“You mean that you can recite the pedigrees of—of dolphins, I suppose—going back a million years?” Lawrence still sounded jarred. “That’s impossible.”
“No, it is not. I can do it. Of course, it takes a very long time for me to say them all.”
“Well, go on. You say the covenant is a poem. Maddy said it was something lived. The ideas seem a little incompatible, to me.”
“No, not really,” Madelaine answered. “In a sense there were three covenants, Dr. Lawrence. All of them could be said to be lived. The first one, the one Amtor called a poem, was made nearly a million years ago.”
“Between dolphins and human beings?” the doctor said keenly. “There weren’t any human beings—Homo sapiens—on earth a million years ago.”
“No, not between Splits and the sea people. Mankind is older than Splits think. But it did not originate on earth.”
Before the doctor could comment on what I had said, we heard the sound of a boat’s engine. It was coming nearer.
“We can’t talk any more tonight,” Sosa said softly. “It’s the Diamond Lil. Good night, my sea darlings.”
“Good night, Sosa, good night.”
Next day Ivry and Pettrus went looking for Djuna, and I stayed behind. I could hear the sound of voices in the deckhouse now and then, and the noise of the radio playing. About noon Lawrence went ashore and came back with a newspaper and groceries. Madelaine—I could tell from her lighter footsteps—cooked the lunch.
In the afternoon she came out on deck and sat in the sunlight for a little while. Her tan had faded, and she was as fair as she had been when we first nicknamed her Moonlight. Yet there was a change in her, and I couldn’t define it. I was glad when, before she went back into the deckhouse, she leaned over the railing and dabbled her hands in. the water. I nuzzled her fingers and knew that she was still Madelaine.
Ivry and Pettrus came back from their search with the news that they had found a faint faint trace of Djuna’s smell in the water near Pescadero. They had tried to follow the trace but failed; the water had been too turbulent. But that they had found a trace at all meant that Djuna was still alive, and the news heartened us.
When it got dark and the people on the Diamond Lil had gone to bed, the doctor and Madelaine came out of the cabin and we prepared to resume our attempt to make him understand the nature of the covenant.
“What did you mean when you said, ‘Mankind did not originate on earth’?” Lawrence asked without preamble. “I thought you meant that terrestrial life had originated in, say, spores that came from outside the solar system. But Maddy says that’s not it.”
“No,” I answered, “most terrestrial life is native to this planet. But men and dolphins have a common a ncestor—”
“Go on.”
“—and this ancestor—these ancestors—were not natives on earth.
“Splits and the sea people are the descendants of colonists who came to earth almost a million years ago from a planet of the star you call Altair. The colonists—we call them the Old Ones—were mammals, and they were humanoid. They looked quite a bit more like you and Sosa than like us sea people today. But they were amphibious.”