Dragon Song

Chapter 2

TWO

Eva found her research assistants, Axel and Jose, in her lab discussing their plan for the day. Eva had chosen Axel, a famous European electronica DJ who had won an international Name That Tune contest, to be her intern long ago, and he had become her full-time research associate. Jose had been with her nearly as long. Eva had found the youth washing windshields at the sole traffic light on the island, and she’d taken him to work with her—a hunch that had paid off for all of them. Both assistants were geniuses when it came to sound. Jose could organize wires and recognize whistle patterns, and he was very good with Chico. Axel could set up and fix sound equipment with ease, and as a side benefit, he could DJ at the rare party.

Right now, Axel seemed pretty adamant about wrapping up a project they’d been doing with Taffy, parsing out the meanings of different adverbs. At the rate they were cataloging adverbs, she might publish a new dolphin communication tome soon.

But Jose was by far the more inflexible of the two, and he insisted on a different agenda. “Cleo. Friend. Talk.”

Eva watched the two with her arms crossed. She’d learned to pay close attention to Jose when he talked, as he usually said very little, and when he did it was usually important.

“Jose,” she said, “do you think that Cleo’s friend Romeo has something to tell us?”

Axel laughed. “Ja, boss, so you’ve named him Romeo?”

Eva ignored him, waiting on Jose’s reply.

“Yes,” Jose said, making rare eye contact with her.

“That settles it then. Let’s get Romeo in the research booth. We might start with Cleo though, so she can show him what to do.”

Soon enough, Cleo had shown Romeo the ropes, and her admirer was in the research booth as if eager to please his girlfriend as well as Eva. Axel had the hydrophone in the water to record any whistles or clicks. They did some basic sound checks, then started putting common objects into the view-box—things Romeo might see in his everyday environment, like seagrass, bleached coral, and a few fish from Cleo’s cooler. Jose checked Romeo’s resulting whistles to see how well they matched the other dolphins’ whistles for these same objects. They would need to be reasonably similar for the Delphi Imago program to work.

Jose pointed out slight variations in the whistles on the spectrogram—as if Romeo had a different dialect, or perhaps an accent—but Delphi Imago read all the whistles correctly, and so did Jose.

Eva then addressed Cleo. “Cleo, ask Romeo to talk,” she said, pairing it with the hand signal for talk.

Cleo didn’t wait for Delphi Imago to complete the translation into dolphin whistles; she understood Eva from her voice alone. The dolphin turned to Romeo and began chattering away.

Eva shook her head, ever amazed at the dolphins’ ability to understand spoken human language. Really, the Delphi Imago program’s translation capabilities were needed by people, not by dolphins.

Romeo listened closely to Cleo, then repeated her whistles back to her. Finally he bobbed his head up and down as if he understood, then oriented himself toward the hydrophone. He began a long succession of whistles and clicks.

The whistles, Eva now knew, communicated the dolphin equivalent of words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The clicks, however, were mimicry of echolocation clicks; they produced an image from the dolphin’s mind’s eye. Someone who didn’t understand the science behind it might think it was almost a form of telepathy, although Eva hesitated to say that. Delphi Imago wouldn’t be able to translate the clicks; they would need to be taken to the lab and run through the Cymascope to get the images Romeo was conveying.

Taffy, Finn, and Chico gathered to listen to what Romeo had to say. The usually boisterous family was suddenly silent. Rascal even stopped his cavorting in the water and stood on the dock beside Eva. He began to whine and leaned on her leg for support. It was as if the cattle dog understood enough of the dolphin language to know what Romeo was saying—or perhaps Rascal just sensed the somber mood that seemed to have spread through the group.

When Romeo finished whistling and clicking, he turned to Cleo for confirmation that he’d done what he was supposed to. Cleo just stared back at him. For once she wasn’t smiling. She looked very sad.

Axel hit translate on the Delphi Imago program, and it began its rough monotone replay of Romeo’s discourse. But Eva already knew the horror it would recount. So did the rest of them. For within Romeo’s speech was one whistle she knew well, one that he’d repeated over and over. One that struck fear in Eva’s heart.

Lusca.

As much as Romeo seemed to like Cleo, he explained that he wasn’t here only to find a mate. He’d come to RIMS to find a pod. Because his family—the wild dolphins that had helped Finn not so long ago and then had later shown up to help with Romina’s rescue—were gone.

They’d been killed by the tylosaurs. The monsters were still out there in the Caribbean. They’d been there all along.

An icy chill traveled up Eva’s spine. Recently she’d been leaving the sea gates to the enclosures open all the time, allowing the dolphins to go into the open ocean at will. Now she realized the danger she had put them in. At any time, those monsters could have returned to pick off one of her dolphins.

They’d already attacked Romeo’s pod. Eva’s dolphins might be next.

Without hesitation, she turned to her assistants. “Axel, Jose, close the sea gates. Now!”