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    Sundiver
    Sundiver
    Sundiver
    Ebook408 pages7 hours

    Sundiver

    By David Brin

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In all the universe, no species reached for the stars without “uplift” guidance, except possibly humankind. Did some cryptic patron race begin the job long ago, then abandon us? Or did we leap all by ourselves? That question burns, yet a greater mystery looms ahead, in the furnace of a star. Under the caverns of Mercury, Expedition Sundiver prepares for the most momentous voyage of our history – into the boiling inferno of the sun, seeking our destiny in the cosmic order of life.

    This freshly revised re-issue includes a substantial author's introduction about the personal and scientific journeys leading to his now-classic first novel.Sundiver is the first book in David Brin’s magnificent Uplift series, among the most thrilling and extraordinary science fiction ever written, comprising one of the most beloved sagas of all time. David Brin's other novels in the Uplift Series include: Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, and Heaven’s Reach.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Brin
    Release dateJul 10, 2020
    ISBN9781370179282
    Author

    David Brin

    David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international-bestselling novels include Earth, Existence, Startide Rising, and The Postman, which was adapted into a film in 1998. Brin serves on several advisory boards, including NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, and speaks or consults on topics ranging from AI, SETI, privacy, and invention to national security. His nonfiction book about the information age, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin’s latest nonfiction work is Polemical Judo. Visit him at www.davidbrin.com.

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    Reviews for Sundiver

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      Book preview

      Sundiver - David Brin

      Praise for David Brin’s Novels

      SUNDIVER

      Brin has done a superb job on all counts.

      –Science Fiction Times

      Brin has a fertile and well-developed imagination… coupled with a sinuous and rapid-paced style.

      –Heavy Metal

      EXISTENCE

      David Brin’s Existence makes you think deeply about the future and life’s most important issues. I found it fascinating and I could not put it down.

      –Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures

      THE UPLIFT WAR

      An exhilarating read that encompasses everything from breathless action to finely drawn moments of quiet intimacy. There is no way we can avoid coming back as many times as Brin wants us to, until his story is done.

      –Locus

      Shares all the properties that made Startide such a joy. The plot fizzes along… and there are the wonders of the Galactic civilizations (which have all the invention and excitement that SF used to have.)

      –Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

      STARTIDE RISING

      An extraordinary achievement, so full of fascinating ideas they would not crowd each other at twice its considerable length.

      –Poul Anderson

      "One hell of a novel… Startide Rising has what SF readers want these days; intelligence, action and an epic scale.

      –Baird Searles, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

      THE POSTMAN

      The Postman successfully and dramatically deepens Brin’s theme of responsibility in surprising and provocative ways.

      –Publisher’s Weekly

      One of ten science fiction books that changed the genre forever.

      –Omni

      THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

      New tech is handing society tough decisions to make anew about old issues of privacy and accountability. In opting for omni-directional openness, David Brin takes an unorthodox position, arguing knowledgeably and with exceptionally balanced perspective.

      –Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation

      As David Brin details the inevitability of ubiquitous surveillance, your instinct, as an individual facing this one-way mirror, is to hope that he is wrong about the facts. As you follow his argument (in The Transparent Society), you realize your only hope is that he is right.

      –George B. Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines

      Books by David Brin

      THE POSTMAN

      EARTH

      GLORY SEASON

      THE HEART OF THE COMET

      THE PRACTICE EFFECT

      STARTIDE RISING

      SUNDIVER

      THE UPLIFT WAR

      BRIGHTNESS REEF

      INFINITY’S SHORE

      HEAVEN’S REACH

      EXISTENCE

      THE RIVER OF TIME

      OTHERNESS

      INSISTENCE OF VISION

      Nonfiction

      THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

      POLEMICAL JUDO

      To my brothers Dan and Stan

      to Arglebargle the IVth…

      and to somebody else.

      And for Nathan, with love,

      We miss you.

      Contents

      Praise for David Brin’s Novels

      Books by David Brin

      Author’s introduction to the 2020 edition.

      PART I

      1 — Out of the Whale-Dream

      2 — Shirts and Skins

      3 — Gestalt

      PART II

      4 — Virtual Image

      5 — Refraction

      6 — Retardation and Diffraction

      PART III

      7 — Interference

      8 — Reflection

      9 — Remembering the Great Auk

      PART IV

      10 — Heat

      11 — Turbulence

      12 — Gravity

      13 — Under the Sun

      PART V

      14 — The Deepest Ocean

      15 — Of Life and Death

      16 — … and Apparitions

      PART VI

      17 — Shadow

      18 — Focus

      19 — In the Parlor

      20 — Modern Medicine

      PART VII

      21 — Déjà PENSÉ

      22 — Delegation

      PART VIII

      23 — An Excited State

      24 — Spontaneous Emission

      25 — A Trapped State

      PART IX

      26 — Tunneling

      27 — Excitation

      28 — Stimulated Emission

      29 — Absorption

      PART X

      30 — Opacity

      31 — Propagation

      About the Author

      sun-pics side view.jpgsun-pics top view.jpg

      Author’s introduction to the 2020 edition.

      Your first love, your first born, first job… first novel. All of them stand out, in memory, accompanied by every emotion from joy and gratitude to embarrassment, even regret. They helped make you what you are.

      Sundiver, my first published work of fiction, wasn’t the overnight sensation and career-maker that my second novel Startide Rising became, but was just as important, teaching me so many skills. Foremost: my pragmatic attitude toward criticism was forged by searing remarks scribbled on early drafts by my journalist brother, along with members of our La Jolla monthly workshop, including Pat Murphy, Michael Reaves, Richard Kadrey, and occasionally Kim Stanley Robinson. Some were kind, others acid, but all of them taught me hard truths about this art – this modern, industrial form of incantation magic. It led to an aphorism CITOKATE…

      …Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.

      I didn’t hurry toward authorship as a profession. Crafting one scene at a time while working at Hughes Aircraft (my only-ever real, paycheck job) and then during graduate school, I’d circulate a few chapters for feedback, re-write those, then add a couple more and circulate again. Corrections were made by cut-and-paste, with real scissors and glue on a manuscript that kept thickening as each page grew, sometimes with just one original line peering through sedimentary layers of scotch tape. The reduction Xeroxes I passed around – two pages per sheet (four when I went doublesided!) – were barely readable.

      (And yes, clearly I was born ready for the computer age. Startide was drafted on an Apple II with a serial number in just five digits – I dimly recall. How I adored that clunking machine.)

      For Sundiver, I was planning to hire a typist. Truly I was. I just wanted to eke out one more cycle with those cheapskate photocopies. When one of the stapled bundles sat for months with a reader who claimed New York publishing connections, I timidly made queries.

      Oh, I sent it on to Bantam Books, said Barbara Villaseñor, cheerfully. Barbara went on to become one of the most-respected freelance editors in the field. But at the time I mumbled: You did what? You sent that? Any New York pro who saw such a bizarre manuscript would obviously toss it… so I scratched Bantam off my prospect list.

      Well, I was wrong. (Always be ready to admit it.) Months later, I came home to a housemate’s note: Bantam Books called. Will call back. And well, how many ways could you interpret a message like that one?

      But let’s pause and talk science fiction for a bit.

      The science part

      Aside some fun little efforts in childhood, my first try at writing fiction was a sci fi spy thriller with a time travel twist that helped ease the intense pressures of freshman year at Caltech. Of course my skills were crap, though guys in the dorm seemed to enjoy it. I still have it somewhere; the core concept is still great! Sophomore year, my hobby-distraction scribble was better. Or good enough to later become notes for my third novel, The Practice Effect. Meanwhile seeds were being laid for bigger, hotter ideas.

      As an undergraduate, I spent three summers assisting solar astronomers – twice at Big Bear Observatory and once on Mount Wilson – fantastic summer jobs. And I was on duty when alarms went off, signifying first light from the Great Flare of 1972! Small surprise then, that I’d ponder the Sun’s vivid, three-dimensional immensities. Its blinding brilliance and colorful vistas began taking shape as a place. And possibly… a destination? But it wasn’t till after hard-won graduation that all those solar vistas began haunting me – feathery-fiery magnetic arches and sunspots far bigger than our Earth. Actinic flares that roiled my sleep and finally sent me stumbling to the old Hermes manual typewriter that my father gave me, tapping out the first draft of a tale about a voyage down to the furnace of a star… a journey that began with a dolphin in a whale-suit.

      As I plodded along, joining writer workshops when I could – working at Hughes while taking engineering courses at UC Irvine – someone told me Y’know, there’s a prof here who published some sci fi. I dropped in on the fellow – Gregory Benford by name, whose novel Deeper Than The Darkness had already impressed me. We chatted a while before I confessed to working on one of my own – a Vernean voyage extraordinaire about going to the Sun.

      Oh? Interesting, he commented, then asked How do you do that? Whereupon, after listening to me blather about anti-gravity and reflective force shields for a minute, he sighed in disappointment.

      Oh. Magic.

      Ouch! He needn’t say another word. I blanched… and vowed to ponder the problem with my then pre-doctorate knowledge of physics.

      How do you go to the Sun?

      At night, when it isn’t so hot.

      And lo. There came a eureka moment when I realized something about every kitchen you or I ever entered. At its heart is a fridge. It keeps food cold. It does that by pumping heat from inside the compartment to external coils that get hot enough to raise the temperature of the kitchen. In theory, you can do that anywhere, so long as you have a terrific energy source, efficient heat pumps and the equivalent of those kitchen coils. Diving into the sun, your emitter must be way hotter than the surrounding plasma gas! But… but we already have devices that can do that.

      And thus the refrigerator laser was born. I ran the idea past every physicist I could find, who had an audacious soul. Even the cynical ones couldn’t find any flaws, in principle. Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén – originator of plasma theory and at UCSD my boss for several years – acknowledged the method was likely valid. In theory, and if we suppose some not-impossible superior tech.

      Oh, I would still wind up invoking alien ‘magical’ technologies for the sake of plot. But the core notion – which later made me a mascot for solar probe missions in the 2010s – was the same as with your kitchen fridge. In order to keep one place cool, use energy to pump your excess heat somewhere else. Heat up a nearby patch of sun!

      We don’t have to go at night, after all. We can go in broad daylight.

      The Uplift Effect

      Among several concepts that bright young feller, my 1979 self, introduced in this book – and one I’m best known for today – is uplift. The idea that one sapient/technological species might feel compelled to enhance and raise others, giving them a needed boost, enabling them to speak, to create, to participate in culture, or to have bigtime adventures.

      The basic notion did not originate with me. Early versions of uplift might arguably go back to creation myths and the Bible. SF authors Pierre Boulle, H. G. Wells, Clifford Simak and Cordwainer Smith all portrayed humanity altering other beings, like apes or dogs, in order for them to be servants. In almost every case, the author’s goal was a morality play, preaching against injustice and slavery. A great lesson! I weave it throughout my own cosmologies. And yet…

      … I hate traversing well-trodden paths. It is because of warnings delivered by Planet of the Apes and other such moving dramas that it seems unlikely we’ll be quite so stupid. Or at least not stupid in exactly the same way. The best science fiction can aspire to alter destiny, as a self-preventing prophecy.

      No, what intrigued me about uplift was how it might go if, say, it were implemented by members of my own crackpot-liberal nation – California – where the objective would not be servitude, but diversity. A compulsion for inclusion of as many types and voices as possible. It sounds more noble, right? And yet, even if uplift begins with the very best intentions, won’t there be mistakes? Unexpected consequences? And pain?

      Wouldn’t uplifted chimps, or dolphins or dogs or… have interesting problems? (I depict early phases of uplift in another, later novel, Existence.) Exploring such possibilities is a top challenge of science fiction.

      That’s interesting, all by itself. Only then, there are the aliens.

      A simple extrapolation… gone wild

      A true SF writer can’t let go. If you start with just one innovation or introduced element of wonder, it never stops there. Ripples expand from the simplest tech or social change, provoking other changes. And more implications, further down the road. Hence I wondered:

      If humanity is on the verge of uplifting other Earth species, won’t the same thing likely happen elsewhere? If alien races – some of them far older than us – expanded across the cosmos, wouldn’t at least some of them do uplift, raising up clever candidates they discover?

      Indeed, once we make it out there, isn’t that how we’ll find most galactic species achieved sapience… as a gift from some predecessor, who got it, in turn, from yet an earlier star-faring race? At which point I laughed with chagrin, finding that I had cornered myself into making an argument for ‘ancient astronauts!’ Might aliens have possibly meddled with us, as portrayed in Erich Von Daniken’s fantastic scenario Chariots of the Gods? Okay, let’s go with it, just a bit. Hence the Danikenite movement portrayed in Sundiver.

      Oh, the implications of Uplift go on and on, many of them worked out in Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef and Infinity’s Shore. And other authors have taken up this topic, exploring further threads in novels and video games. And as you are reading this, some early experiments in real-life species alteration – both open and illicit – have begun. For better or worse. We have embarked on the uplift path.

      (For much more on this topic, visit davidbrin.com )

      It’s still about story!

      Whenever I teach fiction writing, I talk about incantatory magic and CITOKATE and countless specific skills. But one piece of advice surprises students. Make your first novel a murder mystery!

      Seriously. Every genre has quirks, attractions and disadvantages. In SF you must do all of the regular writerly things – plot, scene, character, dialogue, action, internal thoughts and so on – just as well as any mainstream literary author, while juggling at least a dozen other ingredients. So why my advice about starting with a mystery tale? Because central to your success will be the craft of suspense, keeping readers in a tense state of expectation. If they feel a real sense of payoff at the climax – better yet, several successive climaxes – they will buy your next book! And no genre teaches an author how to do this better than a whodunit.

      Sundiver was crafted to follow classic arcs of a murder-mystery… one where it’s hard to do an autopsy or CSI when the victim got dumped into the Sun! Our gumshoe must follow a very different set of clues, though still within the reader’s reach. That’s hard to do! But the best compliment I’ve received for Sundiver is how many folks report feeling that sense of surprise, yet logical justification, at just the right points.

      Okay then, about this edition. After 35 years under the same contract, I finally got the rights back from Bantam/Penguin (they didn’t want to let go, but had to, under time limits of the 1976 Copyright Act), at which point Cheryl and I gave the novel a look-over, surprised and pleased by how well it held together. We only had to tweak a couple of passages that, although well-intentioned for 1980, would now seem linguistically – well – dated. On the other hand, I was pleasantly reminded that my very first-ever male protagonist in fiction is half-African, a quarter Hispanic and one quarter Native American, while the female lead is one kickass lady. Sure, I’ll brag on all that.

      Less happily, I also note that Sundiver predicted an early 21st Century attempted putsch by world oligarchies, exactly what we are experiencing as I write this.

      And so back to the origins story. When folks ask how I had to struggle to become a writer – the classic trope about perseverance and climbing steadily over a mountain of rejection slips – I have to answer that my own tale is a wee bit different. Sundiver was the first work of fiction I ever completed. It got submitted to my first choice publisher by accident. And yes, that message when I got home was from that publisher, who later that day offered me a very nice deal.

      I got my first rejection slip about a year later, for a short story, and started persevering from there.

      May similar things happen to you, if you work hard, take crit well, develop skills and keep a song in your heart – a song you feel the world needs to hear.

      And always turn toward the sun.

      PART I

      … it is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

      A. S. Eddington, 1926

      1

      —

      Out of the Whale-Dream

      Makakai, are you ready?

      Jacob ignored the tiny whirrings of motors and valves in his metal cocoon. He lay still. Seawater lapped gently against the bulbous nose of his mechanical whale, as he waited for an answer.

      One more time he checked indicators on his helmet display. The radio was working. The occupant of the other waldo whale, lying half submerged a few meters away, had heard every word.

      The water seemed exceptionally clear today. Facing downward, he saw a leopard shark swim lazily past, a bit out of place here in the deeper water offshore.

      Makakai… are you ready?

      He tried not to sound impatient, or betray the tension building in the back of his neck as he waited. He closed his eyes and made delinquent muscles relax, one by one, waiting for his pupil to speak.

      Yesss… let’sss do it! came the warbling, squeaky voice, at last. The words sounded breathless, as if spoken grudgingly, in lieu of inhalation.

      A nice long speech for Makakai. He could see the young dolphin’s training machine next to his, its image reflected in mirrors that rimmed his faceplate. Its gray metal flukes lifted and fell slightly with the swell. Feebly, without their power, her artificial fins moved, sluggishly under the transient, serrated surface of the water.

      She’s as ready as she’ll ever be, he thought. If technology can wean a dolphin of the Whale-Dream, now’s the time we’ll find out.

      He chinned the microphone switch again. All right, Makakai. You know how the waldo works. It will amplify any action you make, but if you want the rockets to cut in, you’ll have to give the command in English. Just to be fair, I have to whistle in trinary to make mine work.

      Yesss! she hissed. Her waldo’s gray flukes thrashed up once and down with a boom and a spray of saltwater.

      With a half muttered prayer to the Dreamer, Jacob touched a switch releasing the amplifiers on both Makakai’s waldo and his own, then cautiously turned his arms to set the fins into motion. He flexed his legs, the massive flukes thrust back jerkily in response. His machine immediately rolled over and sank.

      Jacob tried to correct but overcompensated, making the waldo tumble even worse. The beating of his fins momentarily made the area around him a churning mass of bubbles, until patiently, by trial and error, he got himself righted.

      He pushed off again, carefully, to get some headway, then arched his back and kicked out. The waldo responded with a great tail-slashing leap into the air. The dolphin was almost a kilometer off. As he reached the top of his arc, Jacob saw her fall gracefully from a height of ten meters to slice smoothly into the swell below.

      He pointed his helmet beak at the water and the sea came at him like a green wall. Impact made his helmet ring as he tore through tendrils of floating kelp, sending a golden Garibaldi darting away in panic as he drove downwards.

      Too steep! He swore and kicked twice to straighten out. The machine’s massive metal flukes beat to the rhythmic push of his feet, each time sending a tremor up his spine, pressing him against the suit’s heavy padding. When the time seemed right, he arched and kicked again. The machine ripped out of the water.

      Sunlight flashed like a missile in his left window, its glare drowning the dim glow of his tiny instrument panel. The helmet computer chuckled softly as he twisted, beak down, to crash into the bright sea once again.

      As a school of tiny silver anchovies scattered before him, Jacob hooted out loud with exhilaration.

      His hands slipped along the controls to the rocket verniers, and at the top of his next arc he whistled a code in trinary. Motors hummed, as the exoskeleton extended winglets along its sides. Then boosters cut in with a savage burst, pressing the padded headpiece upward with sudden acceleration, pinching the back of his skull as ocean waves swept past, just below his hurtling craft.

      He came down near Makakai with a great splash. She whistled a shrill trinary welcome. Jacob let the rockets shut off automatically and resumed purely mechanical leaping beside her.

      For a time they moved in unison. With each leap Makakai grew more daring, performing twists and pirouettes during the long seconds before they struck the water. Once, in midair, she rattled off a dirty limerick in primal-dolphin, a low piece of doggerel, but Jacob hoped they recorded it back at the chase boat. He missed the punch line at the crashing end of the aerial cycle.

      The rest of the training team followed behind on a hovercraft. During each leap he caught sight of the large vessel, diminished, now, by distance, till impact cut off everything but the tumult of splitting water, Makakai’s sonar squeaking, and the rushing, phosphorescent blue-green past his windows.

      Jacob’s chronometer indicated that ten minutes had passed. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with Makakai for more than half an hour, no matter how much amplification he used. A man’s muscles and nervous system weren’t designed for this leap-and-crash routine.

      Makakai, it’s time to try the rockets. Let me know if you’re ready and we’ll use them on the following jump.

      They both came down into the sea and he worked his flukes in the frothy water to prepare for the next leap. They jumped again.

      Makakai, I’m serious now. Are you ready?

      They sailed high together. He could see her tiny eye behind a plastic window as her waldo-machine twisted before slicing into the water. He followed an instant later.

      Okay, Makakai. If you don’t answer me, we’ll just have to stop right now.

      Blue water swept past, along with a cloud of bubbles, as he pushed along beside his pupil.

      Makakai twisted around and dove down instead of rising for another leap. She chattered something almost too fast to follow in trinary… about how he shouldn’t be a spoilsport.

      Jacob let his machine rise slowly to the surface. Come dear, use the King’s English. You’ll need it if you ever want your children to go into space. And it’s so expressive! Come on. Tell Jacob what you think of him.

      There were a few seconds of silence. Then he saw something move very fast below him. It streaked upward and he heard Makakai’s voice shrilly taunt:

      Ch-chase me, ch-chump! I fly-y-y!

      With the last word, her mechanical flukes snapped back and she leaped from the water on a column of flame.

      Laughing, he dove to give himself headway and then launched into the air after her.

      Gloria handed him the strip chart as soon as he finished his second cup of coffee. Jacob tried to make his eyes focus on the squiggly lines, but they swam back and forth like ocean swells. He handed the chart back.

      I’ll look at the data later. Can you just give me a summary? And I’ll take one of those sandwiches now, too, if you’ll let me clean up.

      She tossed him a tuna on rye and sat on the countertop, her slim, strong hands on the edges, easily compensating for the sway of the boat.

      "I think we have the brainwave information we need now, Jacob. I don’t know how you did it, but Makakai’s attention span in English was at least twice normal. Manfred thinks he’s found enough associated synaptic clusters to give him a boost in the next set of experimental mutations. There are a couple of nodes that he wants to expand in the left cerebral lobe of Makakai’s offspring.

      My group is happy enough with the present. Makakai’s facility with the waldo-whale proves that the current generation can use sophisticated machines.

      Jacob sighed. If you’re hoping these results will persuade the Confederacy to cancel the next generation of mutations, don’t count on it. They’re running scared. They don’t want to have to rely forever on poetry and music to prove that dolphins are intelligent. They want a race of analytical tool users, and giving codewords to activate a rocket waldo just won’t qualify. Twenty to one Manfred gets to cut.

      Gloria reddened. Cutting! They’re people, a sophisticated people with a beautiful dream. We’ll carve them into engineers and lose a race of poets!

      Jacob put down the crust of his sandwich. He brushed crumbs away from his chest. Already he regretted having said anything.

      I know, I know. I wish things could go a little slower, too. But Earth is caught in a delicate situation. Anyway, look at it this way. Maybe fins’ll be able to put the Whale-Dream into words someday. We won’t need trinary to discuss the weather, or pidgin-primal to talk philosophy. They’ll be able to join the chimps, thumbing their metaphorical noses at the Galactics while we put on an act of being dignified adults.

      But…

      Jacob raised his hand to cut her off. Can we argue later? I’d better stretch out for a little while, then go down and visit with our girl.

      Gloria frowned for a moment, then smiled openly. I’m sorry, Jacob. You must be tired. But at least today, finally, everything worked.

      Jacob allowed himself to return her grin. On his broad face the toothy smile brought out lines around his mouth and eyes.

      Yeah, he said, rising to his feet. Today everything worked.

      Oh, by the way, while you were down, there was a call for you. It was an Eatee! Johnny was so excited about it that he barely remembered to take a message. I think it’s around here somewhere.

      She pushed aside the lunch dishes and plucked up a slip of paper.

      Jacob’s bushy eyebrows knotted together as he looked down at the message. His skin was taut and dark from a mixture of ancestry and exposure to sun and saltwater. Brown eyes tended to narrow to fine slits when he concentrated. He brought a calloused hand to the side of his pronounced, amerind nose and struggled with the comm-operator’s handwriting.

      I guess we all knew that you worked with Eatees, Gloria said. But I sure didn’t expect to get one on the horn out here! Especially one that looks like a giant broccoli sprout and talks like a Minister of Protocol!

      Jacob’s head jerked up.

      A Kanten called? Here? Did he leave his name?

      It should be down there. Is that what it was? A Kanten? I’m afraid I don’t know my aliens that well. I’d recognize a Cynthian or a Tymbrimi, but this one was new to me.

      Um… I have to call somebody. I’ll clean up the dishes later so don’t you touch them! Tell Manfred and Johnny I’ll be down in a little while to visit with Makakai. And thanks again. He smiled and touched her shoulder lightly, but as he turned his expression quickly lapsed to one of worried preoccupation.

      He passed on through the forward hatch, clutching the message. Gloria looked after him for a moment. She picked up the data charts and wished she knew what it would take to hold the man’s interest for more than an hour, or a night.

      Jacob’s cabin was barely a closet with a narrow fold-down bunk, but it offered enough privacy. He pulled out his pouch teli and set it on the bunk.

      There was no reason to assume that Fagin had called for any other purpose than to be sociable. He had, after all, a deep interest in the work with dolphins. There had been a few times, though, when the alien’s messages led to nothing but trouble. Jacob considered not returning the Kanten’s call.

      After a moment’s hesitation, he punched out a code on the face of the teli and settled back to compose himself. When you came right down to it, he couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk with an E.T., anywhere, anytime.

      A line of binary flashed on the screen, giving the location of the unit he was calling: the Baja E.T. Reserve. Makes sense, Jacob thought. That’s where the Library is. There was the standard warning against contact with aliens by Probationary Personalities. Jacob looked away with distaste. Bright points of static filled the space above the blankets and in front of the screen, then Fagin stood, en-replica, a few inches away.

      The E.T. did look somewhat like a giant sprout of broccoli. Rounded blue and green shoots formed symmetrical, spherical balls of growth around a gnarled, striated trunk. Here and there tiny crystalline flakes tipped a few of the branches, forming a cluster near the top around an invisible blowhole.

      The foliage swayed and the topmost crystals tinkled from the passage of exhaled air.

      Hello, Jacob, Fagin’s voice came tinnily out of midair. I greet you with gladness and gratitude and with the austere lack of formality upon which you so frequently and forcefully insist.

      Jacob fought back a laugh. Fagin reminded him of an ancient Mandarin, as much for the fluting quality of his accent as for the convoluted protocol he used with even his closest human friends.

      I greet you, Friend-Fagin, and wish you well with all respect. And now that that’s over, and before you say even a word, the answer is no.

      The crystals tinkled softly. "Jacob! You are so young and yet so perspicacious! I admire your insight

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