Surfacing by Walter Jon Williams Page B

prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled under a violet sky.
    The other Dweller answered.
    Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.

    A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.
    The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had learned first. “I swim toward the island” was not a grammatical possibility: “I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one another” was the nearest possible approximation.
    The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings. Never approaching the surface— it was presumed they could not survive in a non-pressurized environment— they had no idea of the upper limit of their world. They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could consider themselves separate.
    A high-pitched whooping came over the speakers, and Anthony smiled as he listened. The singer was one of the humpbacks that he had imported to this planet, a male called The One with Two Notches on His Starboard Fluke.
    Two Notches was one of the brighter whales, and also the most playful. Anthony ordered his computer to translate the humpback speech.
    Anthony, I and a place of bad smells have found one another, but this has not deterred our hunger.
    The computer played back the message as it displayed the translation, and Anthony could understand more context from the sound of the original speech: that Two Notches was floating in a cold layer beneath the bad smell, and that the bad smell was methane or something like it— humans couldn’t smell methane, but whales could. The over-literal translation was an aid only, to remind Anthony of idioms he might have forgotten.
    Anthony’s name in humpback was actually He Who Has Brought Us to the Sea of Rich Strangeness, but the computer translated it simply. Anthony tapped his reply.
    What is it that stinks, Two Notches?
    Some kind of horrid jellyfish. Were they and I feeding, they and I would spit one another out. I/they will give them/me a name. I/they will give them a name: they/me are the jellyfish that smell like indigestion.
    That is a good name, Two Notches.
    I and a small boat discovered each other earlier today. We itched, so we scratched our back on the boat. The humans and I were startled. We had a good laugh together in spite of our hunger.
    Meaning that Two Notches had risen under the boat, scratched his back on it, and terrified the passengers witless. Anthony remembered the first time this had happened to him back on Earth, a vast female humpback rising up without warning, one long scalloped fin breaking the water to port, the rest of the whale to starboard, thrashing in cetacean delight as it rubbed itself against a boat half its length. Anthony had clung to the gunwale, horrified by what the whale could do to his boat, but still exhilarated, delighted at the sight of the creature and its glorious joy.
    Still, Two Notches ought not to play too many pranks on the tourists.
    We should he careful, Two Notches. Not all humans possess our sense of humor, especially if they are hungry.
    We were bored, Anthony. Mating is over, feeding has not begun. Also, it was Nick’s boat that got scratched. In our opinion Nick and I enjoyed ourselves, even though we were hungry.
    Hunger and food seemed to be the humpback subtheme of the day. Humpback songs, like the human, were made up of verse and chorus, the chorus repeating itself, with variations, through the message.
    I and Nick will ask each other and find out, as we feed .
    Anthony