The Dolphin
Copyright© 2017 by Colin Barrett
Chapter 23
Maggie tells me others will come to see me and talk with me. But she is not easy when she tells me this. I ask her are these important humans to her. She says they are not important to her but that other humans think what they do is important.
I do not understand this. What they do is important or it is not important. To hunt well is important. To be leader is important. All know these things. How is it that some may believe a thing is important but others do not believe so?
When I ask Maggie what it is that these humans do she says that they work to guard. That is important. In the pod it is that one or two must guard always so that evil mouths do not come upon us when we do not know it. It is when there are none others to guard that the evil mouth comes upon Mother.
I say this to Maggie. There is confusion because she does not know evil mouth. When I tell of evil mouth she says the human name is “shark.” I say it is important for us to guard against shark. I ask against what do humans guard.
She says that these guard against other humans! I ask how it is that guard must watch for other humans. Then I think of the one whose mind is clouded by shadow who hurts Kitik. Is it against such as that one that these must guard, I ask.
Yes, she says, but it is more complicated than that.
I ask why do some humans not think guarding is important.
She tells that all humans know guarding is important, but some believe there is too much guarding. She says guards are too careful and give warnings and make things happen when there is no need for warnings or for things to happen. She says guards consider all other humans as threat even when there is no threat in the now.
If a guard among us were to always give alert when no shark is near that would not be good. We would tire of unneeded alerts and might not heed when an alert is given for a shark that is near us.
But why is it that guards will come to see Kitik and me? Is it that they may see us as threat?
That is why guards are not always good, Maggie says. She says they see all things as maybe threat and will come to us to learn if we can be threat. She says it is foolishness.
It is the same kind of shadow that seems to me to command so many doings of humans. For us threat exists or it does not, shark is there or is not there, is hungry or is not hungry. Shark may come at any time, that is true, but it is not useful to have concern for what may be or may not be in the time after the now. If one were to always think of the bad things that may come one could not live well in the now.
I ask Kitik does he concern himself with threat that may come later.
“This is foolish!” he says. “Why am I to trouble me with such shadow?”
“Humans do this,” I tell him. I speak of the guards that Maggie says will come.
“This is why I have no wish to talk with humans,” he says. “It is shadow talk, they live only in shadow.”
I tell him that Maggie and Jason live in the now with us.
“They are in the now when they are with us, but their talk is still of shadow,” he says. “I think shadow is too much with all humans.”
I do not know if he is right or not.
“Maggie, this is Mike Holmes and John Watson. Gentlemen, Dr. Maggie Russell.”
Jerry had made the introductions with a completely straight face. In her irritation Maggie paid little attention, but Jason, who had come over with her, burst out laughing.
“Holmes and Watson?” he said. “How original.”
“Oh, it’s better than that,” said the one called Holmes, a tallish man in his mid-40s who conveyed a good deal of self-assurance. “My driver’s license, a perfectly good one I might add, shows my first name as Mycroft. Sherlock’s brother in the stories. The people who prepare our papers have, I think, a sense of humor. And you are—?”
“Jason Vreelander,” he said. “I work with Maggie, Dr. Russell. Why the cloak-and-dagger about names?”
“Nothing all that dramatic, Jason— may I call you Jason?” he said with a smile. “We tend to use, well, adopted names for our travels.”
The one called Watson, somewhat younger and with an earnest air about him, cleared his throat. “I wonder if you could excuse us, Mr. Vreelander,” he said in a slightly officious tone. “We’re here on business and I don’t think we need to take up any more of your time.”
Maggie wasn’t having any of that. “Jason’s with me,” she said flatly. “We do the presentation you came to see. OK?” She and Jason had discussed it the night before, and she’d told him to stay with her—”right with me, babe, I’m going to want some support.”
Jerry looked at her curiously—Jason hadn’t been a major part of his previous visits—but kept silent. “Watson,” though, wasn’t finished. “A matter of security,” he said. “Mr. Vreelander isn’t cleared—”
“Let it go, Cy.” Watching Maggie’s face and seeing the incipient stormclouds, “Holmes” cut him off with authority. “That’ll be fine, Dr. Russell. We won’t trouble you for long, in any event. We’ve just been hearing some reports that have a possible interest for our agency.”
“What have you heard?” asked Maggie, only partly mollified.
“Perhaps it might be easiest if you simply brought us up to speed,” said Holmes. “Gave us an overview of your project and where it currently stands.”
“Well, the basic purpose is interspecies communication,” she began. “We’ve made major strides with one of the dolphins here, her name is Minacou. She’s speaking English now. And before you get the wrong idea, I mean really speaking, not just saying words and phrases like a parrot or something. She knows the meaning of what she says to me and what I say to her; it’s no different from when you and I talk.”
Maggie took them briefly through the approach she’d adopted and how Minacou had abruptly begun responding, and the rapid growth of the dolphin’s vocabulary and her ability to convey and receive complex ideas. “Her grammar and her sentence structure are still fairly primitive,” she concluded, “but that hasn’t been our focus. And leaving that aside, we’re communicating on a pretty high level now.”
“Don’t I see two dolphins down there?” Watson interjected. “How about the other one?”
“The other is Kitik, her mate,” Maggie explained. “He’s— well, we’re not so far along with him. He can speak a little, and I think he understands a good deal more, but we’ve been working mainly with Minacou so far.” She forbore from telling them that Kitik had expressed no interest in the kind of communication she was having with his mate. “She’s the one you’ll be seeing this afternoon.
“OK, I’m going to take you down now, but a couple of things first. Number one is her voice. She can only speak our words by modulating her blowhole, and there are some limits to the tone she can produce. She sounds— well, I’m afraid she speaks kind of like Donald Duck.”
Watson laughed.
“Do your laughing now,” she admonished, “but not when we start talking to her. She doesn’t like being an object of fun, and she’ll know if she is.”
“Point taken,” Holmes said politely. “Pay attention, Cy. And the second thing?”
“Don’t let the voice, or the grammar or the sentence structure for that matter, fool you. I can’t really be sure yet, but I think she’s probably at least as intelligent as any of us here, maybe more so. Talk to her straight, the way you would to me or between yourselves, and you’ll get some responses that I think you’ll find pretty impressive. Talk down to her, act like she’s just some dumb animal making noises at you, well, that’s a good way to get a quick shower; it pisses her off and she’s apt to spray water up at you. If I see it coming I’ll warn you, but dive for cover quick, she’s fast. But it won’t happen if you just treat her like the intelligent creature she is.”
Watson looked dubious, but Holmes was nodding. “I think I can manage that,” he said. “Although I hope she’s aware that it isn’t easy to simply converse with—”
“She’s not unreasonable. She’ll put up with a little surprise at first, ask Jerry, I sprang her on him with no warning.” She looked at Jerry as she spoke, and he nodded rueful acknowledgment. “OK, then, let’s go.”
She didn’t even have to summon Minacou when they reached the verge of the apron; the dolphin, who’d been lazing on the surface near the center of the lagoon, swam up as they arrived. She introduced her visitors.
If there’d been any doubt about her claims Minacou’s first words dispelled them.
“Mike, John,” she said. “Each one sound. Not names us. This not Mike before. Why same name?”
Watson was gawking, but Holmes seemed to take it in stride and only looked questioningly at Maggie. “Someone else was here the other day named Mike,” she explained briefly to him.
“We have only a limited number of names, and there are many of us so the names are sometimes the same,” he said directly to the dolphin. “My whole name is Mycroft, is that better?”
“My-croft,” she echoed. “Two sound. Better, yes. You male?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, picking up her point instantly. “Does two sounds mean the name of a male?”
“Yes. Female, three sound. Min-a-cou. Mar-ga-ret. I say Maggie, but is name. Human different us in names.”
“I think we’re different in very many ways,” he said.
It was more than an hour before they were done. Unlike Jerry, who’d been largely content to watch Maggie’s interaction with the dolphins with only minimal participation, Holmes dominated the human side from the beginning while Watson, very evidently his junior in status as well as age, was almost entirely mute. His manner remained calm and engaging, as it had when he spoke with Maggie and Jason; the smooth charm he exuded completely escaped the dolphin, but she clearly was pleased with his willingness to talk to her on a level without the condescension she’d experienced from other humans.
For the most part the interview, as Maggie privately thought of it, stayed on an abstract plane in the same way as Maggie’s own sessions with Minacou. Toward the end, however, Holmes turned the conversation to international human politics by introducing the concepts of country and patriotism. When the dolphin clearly didn’t understand he elaborated.
“A country, Minacou, is an area of land. There is only so much land in the world, and we, we humans, divide it up. In one country the people, the humans, who live there do things alike. We accept the same leadership, we agree on goals, the things we work for, we follow the same way. It is like a pod with you.”
He paused, but the dolphin offered nothing.
“In this country, this pod, we let everyone, all of us who live in this area of land, speak freely. All have a say in what we do, how we will live. We must agree before we do something. Being a patriot means to approve of this way of doing, to want to continue in this way with everyone, every human, a part of making decisions.”
Minacou’s silence was becoming deafening; it was increasingly clear that most of this was going over her head. Holmes briefly turned their talk back to other, more mundane matters before concluding the session.
As they walked back Holmes stopped. “I’d like to speak with Dr. Russell privately, if I may,” he said as urbanely as ever. “Would the rest of you mind excusing us? Dr. Russell, perhaps you have somewhere we might go.”
Jason looked at her pointedly, but when she nodded to him he joined Watson and Jerry in moving away.
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