"David Brin - Temptation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Temptation

a novella by David Brin
Copyright © 1998, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

Makanee
Jijo's ocean stroked her flank like a mother's nuzzling touch or a lover's caress. Though it
seemed a bit disloyal, Makanee felt this alien ocean had a silkier texture and finer taste than
the waters of Earth, the homeworld she had not seen in years.
With gentle beats of their powerful flukes, she and her companion kept easy pace beside a
tremendous throng of fishlike creatures -- red-finned, with violet gills and long translucent
tails that glittered in the slanted sunlight like plasma sparks behind a starship. The school
seemed to stretch forever, grazing on drifting clouds of plankton, moving in unison through
coastal shallows like the undulating body of a vast complacent serpent.
The creatures were beautiful... and delicious. Makanee performed an agile twist of her
sleek gray body, lunging to snatch one from the teeming mass, provoking only a slight ripple
from its nearest neighbors. Her casual style of predation must be new to Jijo, for the beasts
seemed quite oblivious toward the dolphins. The rubbery flesh tasted like exotic mackerel.
"I can't help feeling guilty," she commented in Underwater Anglic, a language of clicks and
squeals that was well-suited to a liquid realm where sound ruled over light.
Her companion rolled alongside the school, belly up, with ventral fins waving languidly as
he grabbed one of the local fish for himself.
"Why guilty?" Brookida asked, while the victim writhed between his narrow jaws. Its soft
struggle did not interfere with his train of word-glyphs, since a dolphin's mouth plays no role in
generating sound. Instead a rapid series of ratcheting sonar impulses emanated from his brow.
"Are you ashamed because you live? Because it feels good to be outside again, with a warm
sea rubbing your skin and the crash of waves singing in your dreams? Do you miss the stale
water and moldy air aboard ship? Or the dead echoes of your cramped stateroom?"
"Don't be absurd," she snapped back. After three years confined aboard the Terran survey
vessel, Streaker, Makanee had felt as cramped as an overdue fetus, straining at the womb.
Release from that purgatory was like being born anew.
"It's just that we're enjoying a tropical paradise while our crewmates --"
"-- must continue tearing across the cosmos in foul discomfort, chased by vile enemies,
facing death at every turn. Yes, I know."
Brookida let out an expressive sigh. The elderly geophysicist switched languages, to one
more suited for poignant irony.
* Winter's tempest spends
* All its force against the reef,
* Sparing the lagoon. *
The Trinary haiku was expressive and wry. At the same time though, Makanee could not
help making a physician's diagnosis. She found her old friend's sonic patterns rife with
undertones of Primal -- the natural cetacean demi-language used by wild Tursiops truncatus
dolphins back on Earth -- a dialect that members of the modern amicus breed were supposed
to avoid, lest their minds succumb to tempting ancient ways. Mental styles that lured with
rhythms of animal-like purity.
She found it worrisome to hear Primal from Brookida, one of her few companions with an
intact psyche. Most of the other dolphins on Jijo suffered to some degree from
stress-atavism. Having lost the cognitive focus needed by engineers and starfarers, they
could no longer help Streaker in its desperate flight across five galaxies. Planting this small
colony on Jijo had seemed a logical solution, leaving the regressed ones for Makanee to care