Second Nature

Chapter 40

40 

On Gen's third night alone, the sun sank below the rim of the sea and darkness unfurled like a black velvet sail. Cancer the Crab skittered sideways up into the sky. To the east of the Crab, she saw the star Regulus, the Heart of the King, in the constellation Leo. The star made her think of Cade-the-Lion-Hearted. Everything else reminded her of Cade, too. Orion, the Hunter. The constellation Hercules.  

The moon was no longer full, and Gen's spirit had waned, too, since she'd left Cade. Far from her human friends and unable to rejoin her dolphin family, she felt terribly lost. 

She pinged a search pattern, but less regularly than before. She listened half-heartedly to the irrelevant noises and movements in the deep vault of her dark universe. A half-mile to the south, a school of hammerhead sharks swung back and forth, patrolling the blackness for schools of fish, or for loners, like herself. Fortunately, the sharks relied on their sense of smell and bio-electric fields, and could not see with long-range sonar. Otherwise, they would rush to tear her apart, like a wolf pack running down a straggler in a herd of caribou. 

She swam northward, away from the sharks. After a time, she closed one eye and drifted in a resting phase; allowing one hemisphere of her brain to pass into sleep. In her tiredness and despair, she thought of Cade. Sea and distance had not quenched her emotions for him. Would time be able to make her longing fade? 

Gen had stopped pinging and didn't notice the hammerheads circling, until they were almost upon her. 

She awoke with a jolt of fear, whipped her flukes, and tried to race away from the closing trap. A burst of pings returned a vivid sound-picture of more than a dozen large sharks, charging toward the center in a fast attack. Several sharks swam above and below the shrinking ring, to head off escape. Her heart thundered. No way out. 

I've got to be bigger, stronger, now!  

Water boiled around her body and a disorienting feeling of melting overtook her senses. In seconds, she'd transformed.  

The hammerheads had stopped their attack, backing off from the sphere of furiously bubbling water. When the bubbles cleared, the sharks could see that Gen was not a lone and vulnerable dolphin, but a mighty leviathan. They broke from their circling attack pattern and regrouped like a squadron of streamlined fighter jets, then moved swiftly off in the blackness to hunt less dangerous prey. 

Gen realized she had become a whale. She kicked her flukes and drove through the water, feeling strong and unafraid; a living mountain. In a moment, her human mind understood she was a blue whale; the largest animal ever to live on Earth. She remembered gathering the essence of the creature from a jaw bone on display at the zoo. 

Never underestimate what the Abundance can accomplish with its library of genes.  

Her whale heart boomed slow, heavy beats, louder in her ears than a kettle drum. Each contraction pumped tubs of blood through her two-hundred-ton body, a hundred feet from baleen to flukes. The dolphin she had been could swim through the aorta of the whale she had become, like a kid slipping through a tube-slide. 

In her whale-mind, she stored thousands of beautiful melodies, some stretching back to whale ancestors that swam in seas before man walked upright. She tried out her new voice and bellowed with delight as the ultra-deep notes resonated through her whole body as if she were a gigantic megaphone. She remembered that the low frequency notes of whale songs can travel hundreds of miles underwater, and that gave her an idea. 

The huge tongue of the blue whale was incapable of dolphin speech. Gen willed the muscle to change to a dolphin-like anatomy. After several adaptations she found she could belt out a distress whistle to her pod, many times louder than her dolphin body had managed. 

After an hour of trumpeting her message through the water with all the force of her whale lungs, Gen heard a distant reply. 

"Who is hailing in the name of Eyes-of-Sunrise? We approach the rising moon to meet you." 

Gen recognized the signature whistle of Races-the-Waves, leader of her pod. Her enormous whale heart filled like a bellows with emotion. "Yes! Eyes-of-Sunrise herself is hailing. I approach the sleeping sun." 

Gen kicked her stupendous flukes and surged forward through the water, creating a turbulent wake. Within minutes, she sensed other dolphins led by Races-the-Waves pinging her. The tremendous size of the sound-picture echoing back from her body confused and frightened them. 

"What Great Sister speaks our tongue? Who are you?" 

She morphed into dolphin form and blasted her signature whistle again and again. "I am Eyes-of-Sunrise. I am Eyes-of-Sunrise. I am Eyes-of-Sunrise." 

The dolphins closed the distance and Gen felt bursts of clicks ricocheting off her body from every dolphin in the pod. 

Little Squirt darted ahead of the pack, corkscrewing through the dark water with rapid power strokes from his flukes, cackling with intense joy. They rushed each other and nearly rammed, sliding skin to skin as they zoomed past, banking hard to come around for a second pass, still laughing and squawking.  

He drew alongside her and whistled the traditional greeting: "Eyes-of-Sunrise, share this pod; share this heart." Then he added, "Welcome home. I missed you so much!" Gen was amazed at how much Little Squirt had grown in the few weeks she'd been gone.  

"The great sister whale," Little Squirt whistled, "I watched it change into you. And I saw you become a two-legged when you left us." Streams of bubbles shot out of his blowhole as he whistled underwater. "They say you are the legendary Mother-of-Forms. Is it true?" 

"I am Eyes-of-Sunrise," she whistled, "your long-lost friend. That is all I want to be now." 

In seconds, the other dolphins arrived, swirling around in a chaos of happiness, touching Gen's flippers, all chattering at once. She counted twenty-three dolphins-all her old family members, plus two new ones: a foreign male gathered from a pod of bachelors; and a baby girl, Sparkleface, born two weeks ago to Moon Catcher, in the harem of Races-the-Waves. 

The baby nursed under its mother's protective flipper. In the dark, the baby pinged Gen, tracing the outline of her body with a feathery lightness. Gen laughed and with steady clicks, sculpted a mandala in the water between them. The baby darted out from its mother's flipper and knifed through the flower-like design, breaking the waveform of sounds into shattered stars. The baby giggled with delight, retreating to its mother. 

Races-the-Waves swam forward in the dark and hovered face-to-face with Gen, nuzzling her beak with his. "Eyes-of-Sunrise, I am overjoyed you came back to us. To me." 

It did feel like coming home. At least the dolphin part of her felt elated. She snuggled against the smooth barrel of the pod-leader's chest, sensing his masculine heart thumping under the dense layer of blubber and thick musculature.  

"Your new daughter whitens the sea with the milk of her beauty."  

"Yes, she does. But I want to fill the sea with our offspring."  

Typical alpha-male dolphin behavior. Erection and all. With his conical teeth he gently raked her back and rubbed a smooth flipper along her underside, nudging open her genital slit. Then he swam beneath her, pushed her to the surface and rotated his body under hers, belly to belly, to align their sex organs. She reminded herself it's what dolphins do. Eat and play and copulate. 

It was comforting. She felt safe and well-loved. 

The human part of her tried not to think of Cade.