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Fins had been making wisecracks about human beings for thousands of years. They had always found men funny. The fact that humanity recently meddled with their genes, and taught them engineering, didn’t change that attitude. Fins were still smart alecks.
Poor Homo sapiens! Their histories showed such suffering during those awkward millennia of adolescence before Contact, when they were ignorant and cut off from Galactic society. Meanwhile, Creideiki thought, dolphins had been in almost a state of grace, drifting in their corner of the Whale Dream. When humans finally achieved a type of adulthood, and started lifting the higher creatures of Earth to join them, dolphins of the amicus strain moved fairly easily from one honorable condition to another.
It had taken them five minutes or so to get started. They were barely under way before the tsunami hit. It was not a huge wave, merely the first of a series of ripples spreading from the point where a pebble had plunked into the sea. That pebble happened to be a spaceship half a kilometer long, plunking at supersonic speed, a mere fifty kilometers away.
He slid down the trunk and then found that, miraculously he was on his feet—first man to stand on the soil of Kithrup. Toshio stared dazedly at his surroundings, briefly not believing his survival. Then he hurriedly opened his faceplate, and became the first man to lose his breakfast on the soil of Kithrup.
paean
In missions for the Terragens Council he had learned a basic truth that the universe was dangerous and filled with disillusionment. Too few sophonts—even those equipped for it—ever got enough love.
You don’t have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch disaster unfold, when they take you literally.
On her screen, the man continued to taunt them. “Librarian!” she called. “I do not understand some of the man’s words. Find out what that phrase—Nyaahh nyaaah—means in their beastly wolfling tongue!”
“What about Charlie?” she asked Toshio. Toshio sighed. “He’s still embarrassed.” They had found the chimp a day after the great earthquakes, clinging to a floating tree trunk, sopping wet. He had been unable to speak for ten hours, and kept climbing the walls in the skiff’s tiny hold until he finally calmed down. Charlie finally admitted—he had scrambled to the top of a tall tree just before the island blew. It saved his life, but the stereotype mortified him.
