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

Despite sharing the same culture and a common ancestry as Earth mammals, dolphins and
humans looked at many things differently. Peepoe felt more annoyed at being kidnapped than
violated. More pissed-off than traumatized. She wasn't able to stymie their lust completely,
but with various tricks -- playing on their mutual jealousy and feigning illness as often as she
could -- Peepoe staved off unwelcome attentions for long stretches.
But if I find out they murdered Kaa, I'll have their entrails for lunch.
Days passed and her impatience grew. Peepoe's real time limit was fast approaching. My
contraception implant will expire. Zhaki and his pal have fantasies about populating Jijo with
their descendants, but I like this planet far too much to curse it that way.
She vowed to make a break for it. But how?
Sometimes she would swim to a channel between the two remote islands where her
kidnappers had brought her, and drift languidly, listening. Once, Peepoe thought she made out
something faintly familiar -- a clicking murmur, like a distant crowd of dolphins. But it passed,
and she dismissed it as wishful thinking. Zhaki and Mopol had driven the sled at top speed for
days on end with her strapped to the back, before they halted by this strange archipelago
and removed her sonar-proof blindfold. She had no idea how to find her way back to the old
coastline where Makanee's group had settled.
When I do escape these two idiots, I may be consigning myself to a solitary existence for
the rest of my days.
Oh well, you wanted the life of an explorer. There could be worse fates than swimming all
the way around this beautiful world, eating exotic fish when you're hungry, riding strange
tides and listening to rhythms no dolphin ever heard before.
The fantasy had a poignant beauty -- though ultimately, it made her lonely and sad.

The ocean echoed with anger, engines, and strange noise.
Of course it was all a matter of perspective. On noisy Earth, this would have seemed eerily
quiet. Terran seas buzzed with a cacophony of traffic, much of it caused by her own kind as
neo-dolphins gradually took over managing seventy percent of the home planet's surface. In
mining the depths, or tending fisheries, or caring for those sacredly complex simpletons called
whales, more and more responsibilities fell to uplifted 'fins using boats, subs and other
equipment. Despite continuing efforts to reduce the racket, home was still a raucous place.
In comparison, Jijo appeared as silent as a nursery. Natural sound-carrying thermal layers
reported waves crashing on distant shorelines and intermittent groaning as minor quakes
rattled the ocean floor. A myriad buzzes, clicks and whistles came from Jijo's own subsurface
fauna -- fishy creatures that evolved here, or were introduced by colonizing leaseholders like
the Buyur, long ago. Some distant rumbles even hinted at large entities, moving slowly,
languidly across the deep... perhaps pondering long, slow thoughts.
As days stretched to weeks, Peepoe learned to distinguish Jijo's organic rhythms...
punctuated by a grating din whenever one of the boys took the sled for a joy ride, stampeding
schools of fish, or careening along with the load indicator showing red. At this rate the
machine wouldn't stand up much longer, though Peepoe kept hoping one of them would break
his fool neck first.
With or without the sled, Zhaki and Mopol could track her down if she just swam away.
Even when they left piles of dead fish to ferment atop some floating reeds, and got drunk on
the foul carcasses, the two never let their guard down long enough to let her steal the sled.
It seemed that one or the other was always sprawled across the saddle. Since dolphins sleep
only one brain hemisphere at a time, it was impossible to take them completely by surprise.

Then, after two months of captivity, she detected signs of something drawing near.