They sing of the great changes that roiled Earth’s oceans long before the dawn of humanity. Their songs describe the wreckage humans wrought, too, during a period that, to them, has happened within the wink of an eye.
The existence of humans, Twilly Dam used to tell me, has been a mere interlude — a crack in time, barely discernible, soon to end.
I joked with her often about that. End on Europa? I asked. Earth? Both? She never marveled at our technological prowess the way we do. Our gargantuan interplanetary ships did not impress her. Showpieces, she called them.
That said, the dolphins sing, also, of Cousteau City, whose sphere dominates the horizon along this stretch of Europa’s vast underground ocean.
Their songs celebrate the days when prior generations arrived on Europa with only a few submarines, a few dolphins, a few humans, and a set of AI nanobots accompanying them.
They sing of swarms of replicating bots smaller than bacteria helping our ancestors discover the vast caves that opened to Europa’s seas and build a towering city of magnificent architectural beauty. Lengthy ballads speak of how our ancestors harnessed the telepathic skills of dolphins to learn the language of the Europan sea creatures they encountered.
Now, the dolphins sing to celebrate the death of their messiah, Twilly Dam, as if it were a good thing. Their song is not my song. Their joy is not my joy.
Twilly Dam and I frolicked in the water, our internal clocks set. We were talking about the locals.
The powerful Jovian tides would soon fully submerge Cousteau City and its protective sphere, forcing the waters here to clash violently with the ceiling of the massive cave that housed the city.
When I talked to Twilly, I used my mind, she used hers. I don’t understand the science behind it: Why we could both frolic in the waters surrounding the city and hear each other think, much less understand what was said.
For her, it was natural. Organic. Evolution. For me, it was bioengineering. But still beyond my reckoning.
Twilly’s telepathic skills were such that she could harness the energy of the Europan ocean’s entire sentient population if she wanted to. She sometimes did, and I swear that when I first watched her do it, she did it to show off.
“They’re not sophisticated folk,” she said as I sent the submariner ring coursing through the depths of the Europan ocean. Moments later, Twilly returned to me with the ring around her snout. I snatched it, then sent it deeper, but she returned just as quickly.
“Nor,” she proclaimed, “is this a sophisticated toy.”
“Not fast enough?” I asked.
“It’s fast enough, methinks. No intelligent agility. Perhaps you need to add that to the prompt next time you manufacture one.”
“I hadn’t considered that,” I acknowledged. “My focus was on speed. I tried to prompt the AI to tell the producer to make it just a tiny bit faster than you.”
“You’re a devil. But not a skilled one. Try again.”
“Now? Now is next time?”
“I think now,” Twilly said.
I swam to Twilly and rested my palm on her head. “Okay, you silly beast,” I said. I loved her desperately. I dove into the water, expecting her to follow, but she didn’t. I telepathed instructions to the city. The city responded almost immediately with another ring.
I grasped it when it arrived. “Happy?” I asked.
“The Spirit Mother deems it always to be so,” she answered with a response I’d heard a thousand times. I launched the ring. This one sped through the ocean currents a bit faster than the last. Twilly had difficulty keeping up. When the ring darted around one of the large billowing translucent plant formations that dwelled in the underwater landscape, Twilly darted with it.
The ring disappeared behind a gelatinous monolith of sentient vegetation. So did Twilly.
I telepathed to her, saying, “You call them unsophisticated. I call them barbaric. Your people showed them alternatives to their natural violence. You’re too kind.”
“It is our way,” she responded. “As it has been and shall always be.”
“You brought peace to their warring clans.” I wondered where the hell she was. She caught that thought, too.
“I did no such thing, and I’ll be there soon.”
“I hate it when you read my mind like that.”
“If you hadn’t wanted me to hear it, you wouldn’t have telepathed it.”
I could never keep up with Twilly intellectually or physically. I could outlast her underneath the water’s surface, though, because I had gills and she didn’t. A divergence from our human cousins on earth, gills were a necessary augmentation for humans in an environment such as this, where the only land was inhospitable rock within caves buried under sheets of ice that were kilometers thick.
I never left the protective sphere of the city, but Twilly roamed at will and became a teacher to the indigenous creatures who inhabited these seas.
“You’re outside the sphere again, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I’m right behind you, you silly human,” she replied. She pushed the ring, which adorned her snout, toward me. I snatched it from her, then rose to the surface.
This time, I hurled the ring high. It spun as it acrobatically climbed the low-gravity air surrounding the city, then darted to and fro as it dove toward the water. Twilly was upon the ring long before it reached the water’s surface. She soared aloft, a rocket of a being in this light air, arching high and capturing the ring in her snout as she dove back into the water.
I tried to continue the debate: “They would have killed each other off if you hadn’t intervened.”
“I was merely a catalyst for their better instincts,” she replied somewhere beneath the surface of the dark green sea. “I gently reminded them of their inner truths. It is no more complex than that, my friend. As I recall, there was one who attempted to do such things for humans.”
“There’ve been several,” I replied. “All abysmal failures.” I considered our many wars and our many prophets.
“The universe is resilient. Humans will leave no more than a tiny scratch.”
“You’re mean, you know that? And kind of prejudiced.”
I heard the clicks of her laughter behind me. I yanked the ring off her snout like I was angry, which I was not. I found it impossible to be angry at Twilly. When she disparaged human savagery, it was only because she was right.
She had found the local population much more amenable to the bravery of dialogue and negotiation and forgiveness in place of violence than either of us could imagine humans to be.
This brings us to the next moment, her last moments, and my sadness.
Was it singing I heard? If so, it sounded different this time.
She had long warned that the moment would arrive. “The human influence is a wound on other species,” she had said more than once. “An infection caused by bad salt on the wounds they inflict with such vicious frequency.”
Twilly was the daughter of the Spirit Mother who spoke to all her kind, whether on Earth or Europa. No one doubted this. But something on Europa was changing. Fighting amongst dolphins was becoming common.
It’s not that dolphins don’t fight amongst themselves. But it had always been rare. It was never the pestilence it is for humans. It never resulted in war. Throngs of angry dolphins administering questionable brands of justice have never been part of their history.
That changed when a crowd of telepaths filled my ears with song demanding… justice. Twilly Dam, they said, had violated the sanctity of the Spirit Mother by ministering to the heathens of Europa. It was such a startling development that I couldn’t grasp it.
Throngs of dolphins filled the ocean around us. Their telepathic power lifted Twilly out of the ocean. “Be calm,” she told me, as her listless body was raised high into the air toward a fire summoned by a combination of telepathy and human-made nanobots. She knew I wanted to contact the city for help. But it was already too late.
The flames flourished with a ferocious and horrible extravagance inside the oxygenated sphere of the city. My buoyancy in the water became a cruelly ironic emphasis to my fear that the city would burn, too.
Twilly’s end is too ghastly to describe. I sometimes think that she would want me to anyway. But even more, she’d want me to consider the contagion of human savagery. And the curious way her people, after burning her in the sky, began to worship her as their new goddess.
Thanks for reading!
This story is a sneak peek into a longer work that is nowhere near complete. It originated as a concept when I was in a high school writers’ workshop many, many years ago. The science fiction writer Gene Wolfe strongly encouraged me to continue the concept based on the very different story he read. I’m finally following his advice.
Written by a human, not by AI or Grammarly GO (More Info)
This short story first appeared in The Kraken Lore.
I love the mythic air of this story
Cool story! Love the concept and climax.