Chronicles of the Flying Dolphin

Chapter 1: Leaving Home

I only vaguely remember the wooden ship from my earliest boyhood. It had been a huge, rotting monstrosity of fibrous material that crumbled at the slightest touch. The Old Ones said that it had been made of great planks of wood; but that seemed an oxymoron to me, as the vegetation at Home never grew too large to be hauled to a fire by several children or one adult. The surf sailing craft our Young Ones enjoy are woven of plants, but they are small and would not float at all if not saturated and encased in the strong, light glass of which most of the towers and domes of Home are also constructed. Still, for one of our rooted relatives to mutate to such great proportions as the ship's builders must have required is a reality beyond my imagining. Xero has never lied, though, and he has told me that the ship was indeed made of wood. The rocks on the eastern shore of Home where the ship laid on its side for most of my life - and all of my childhood - are bare now, even it's memory has begun to grow dim.

What I remember most clearly is the way that the citizens of Home always gathered around the ship in times of trouble or confusion; and the silent reverence they showed the alien craft - as though it held some power they dared not address. Even the rowdiest temple girls showed a marked sobriety when they approached it. It was at such times that I felt most strange. To my adolescent mind the fear and confusion made it seem as if my friends and neighbors stood away when I approached the ship - or that the ship and I were closer somehow than the other humans and I were.

As a boy those feelings had been a source of bewilderment; but I am a man now, with ten full summers in my mind and I wish at times that it might be possible to unlearn somehow the things which I have come to know.

Death is no stranger to Home. I have had friends with no mother or no father, and not thought it strange. I have seen surfing buddies carried away by Sea Serpents on more than occasion. Old Ones are also known to regularly discorporate and start new lives in other realms. By mentioning the subject I break taboo, but you need to understand that the Old One I have known as both mother and father is neither. Xero has only recently explained some things to me and, as is often the case, the new knowledge has raised more questions than it has answered. On the other hand, it has made some things more clear than I had ever dared to expect them to be.

Although I (wrongly) assumed that Xero was my father, and that my mother has gone to the next world as others have, such is not reality. The mysterious craft that was thrown upon the rocks of Home's eastern shore those ten summers ago had borne a solitary passenger; an infant man-child of unknown origin, whom I now know to have been myself.

The Governor had made the alien child ward to Home's wisest resident. My life with the Wizard has been a well ordered process of learning myths and legends, arts and sciences, tales and spells, and love, respect and wonder for Home and the universes and realities which lay beyond Home's shores.

I have learned from Xero that all humans are kin and that beings with wings or fins or fur or roots are our relatives as well; that even stones and grains of sand and the molecules of the Surrounding Sea are part of the same family as humans, stars, and our island Home. I have always felt somehow separate and apart, though.

There is a purpose in every thing. If the citizens of Home could be said to have what some call a religion, this is what it would be. Without his having told me so, I know there is purpose also in the revelation my mentor has made to me. The origins of that strange and alien craft and of my self are to become the object of a quest.

No human has ever left Home before. As far as I know, there has been no reason or means to; but no human has ever come Home from anywhere else either... With but one known exception.

At first I was a little pissed off that all of the Old Ones were involved in what I saw as some sort of conspiracy to deprive me of the knowledge of the unusual - no, unique - way I came to be here. But the knowledge has come at the right time, and there is a purpose in every thing.

Not knowing how or when or where to, but knowing for certain that I will be leaving Home soon, and all of my life-long friends as well, a flood of memories has invaded and overtaken me.

Small again, I am standing behind the wise Old One I think of as my father. As I watch from behind his strong, lithe back he levitates a glowing bar of many layered metals above the forge's coals and sprinkles it with herbs which vaporize immediately. The ringing of his hammer on the blades has always been music to my mind. How often have I fallen asleep on the roof of our tower, where Xero's forge still stands, only to awaken in my own hammock on the middle floor?

As I grew I began to fetch firewood and coal for Xero's forge and to help him make the wine and mix the herbs he sells to supplement the meager income from his metallurgical arts. In my seventh summer I began to beat the metal myself.

Imitating the wiry old man, I beat and bent bars of ore from the eight corners of Home into an immeasurable number of dazzlingly patterned layers. As each new bar was beat into the whole I added the mysticated herbs and the pulverized gems which can weaken a blade if used improperly but which may make a blade unbreakable and endow it with magical powers if incorporated in the correct manner.

Files, then stones, then cloths, then skins I used to hone an edge finer than paper on the blade. Then, as Xero had taught me, I covered the center of the blade, that part which was not to be tempered, with layers of clay - scraping the clay from the edges in the sacred patterns of the five forms of matter - mountain, cloud, wave, flame and event horizon - before heating it to near transparency. A cup of wine from each of the eight corners of Home, five cups of water from the Surrounding Sea, three cups of water from the Lake at the center of Home, one full cup of my own life's blood and the other magic liquids required by science and tradition did I use to quench my ambitious work of art.

That fist blade of mine is now under glass in the governor's offices. Not because of it's beauty (it is actually asymmetrical and out of true, as one might expect from an apprentice's first attempt,) but because of the blade's tendency to act of it's own accord on behalf of it's maker.

As the fruit of my toil lay tempering in the sacred liquids I went downstairs and loaded a bowl of freshly dried buds from Xero's store of them. I was stepping out the back door to enjoy a smoke, congratulating myself on the many days of work having reached such a successful conclusion: I had no way of knowing that three young mates of mine had planned an harmless ambush - as young boys will for friends whose strengths they wish to test.

I remember a sack being thrown about my head and my being shoved roughly to the ground and, yes, I was afraid. I expected to be struck, The blows never came, though. I heard instead three shrieks of terror, and a baritone rumble that brought to mind the maniacal laughter of mythical demons feasting on the souls of the damned.

By the time I freed myself from the sack all was quiet. My childhood friends lay hideously butchered all around me. The newly made weapon hovered in the air, hilts before my eyes and blade thrusting toward the sun like a new flower, dripping gore.

Had the father of one of the boys not seen the blade act of it's own volition I would have been incarcerated or exiled - although neither has ever happened to anyone at Home before. As it turned out, the blade itself was encased in a bubble of charmed glass. And it was given a name;

Trauma

I wonder if I should ask the Governor for Trauma when I leave to go on my quest. Whenever... Wherever...

The question was but a heartbeat as the flood of flashbacks swept me along.

Even younger, I was nursing at the breast of my best friend Kristal's mother - Kristal herself working hungrily at the other nipple. In the coming years she and I would surf and sail the Surrounding Sea together, and explore the Great Grass which flows from the Lake at Home's center to the sandy southern shore.

As we grew it became clear that Kristal would be set apart as one of the temple girls. Before becoming a Goddess she would come to be taught all known subjects, and the theories of things unknown. She would become trained in all known skills, and learn to improvise and invent where experience had not led her teachers. In return, the citizenry of Home would meet her every need and desire out of respect for her great intelligence and beauty. Even among the temple girls, Kristal's mischievous inventiveness, fiery auburn hair and abnormally large breasts would come to set her apart.

I also remember the fear that had eaten at me like a Sea Serpent when she had been wounded by a sheet of ice one summer. It was when the Round Ones floated by. Only Xero's herbs and the strong summer sun had saved her life. That selfsame fear threatens me once again as I contemplate the solitude of the forthcoming Quest.

I have imagined traveling somehow to the unknown land of the Round Ones. Where do they come from, truly? Some summers they do not appear at all. Other summers they float near enough to Home that children can swim or surf or sail out to their floating cities of ice and break off pieces to bring Home. The ice is not bitter like the Surrounding Sea, but sweet as water from the Lake, and quite a delight to consume as it melts - which is as great an oddity as the Round Ones themselves.

The Round Ones reside only on the largest of the islands of ice that come in the summer, as befits their own great size. For they are huge. Fold upon fold of fatty tissue, so tremendously obese as to afford them great buoyancy - making them mighty swimmers. When their cities float near enough to Home they attack with a ferocity matched only by their ineptitude.

For once on land the Round Ones present no real danger. Such enormous weight makes them ungainly to the point of being tragically comedic. Younger children with sticks drive them back into the sea with taunts the Round Ones surely cannot understand. For they seem unable to truley communicate, even among themselves, their only vocalizations being grunts of exertion as they heave themselves about.

Sea Serpents, fish, birds, the Round Ones, the Dolphins and me. The only life forms alien to Home... Why might my forthcoming quest not lead me somehow to a great civilization of the Round Ones? What other phenomenon might I come across? A breeding pool for the Great Sea Serpents? Another Home? The same, only different? I can only speculate...

Laughter lifts my head from the familiar comfort of my hammock and I wonder, had my quest been but a dream? Cold water in my face cannot wash away what were surely real memories. In fresh kilt I follow the sounds to the roof, where Xero and the Governor stare out into space.

No, they are actually watching a silken sphere float away on the air. My gasp of astonishment turns their heads as one.

"Have you ever wished that you might fly?" Xero asks.

"Like a Dolphin?' I ask, failing to make a connection between the levitating sphere and the Wizard's unusual question.

But he holds another sphere of silk over the forge and bellows hot air into a small opening. There is a stone attached to the sphere near the hole to orient the opening downward. As the heated air fills it, the sphere rises into the air and floats away in pursuit of it's double. My tiny mind finally seems to grasp the idea being presented and I ask, "How many of those things would it take to enable a man to fly?"

And the two Old Ones laugh anew.

"Not, 'how many' would it take, but how big will one have to be!" answers Xero.

The Governor is laughing so hard she chokes and spits. She has obviously been into the seedless weed. My mind is already in contact with the supernatural realm, so I do not indulge. Instead, I examine the remaining sphere, sewn suspiciously into the size and shape of one of the governor's breasts. How big would one have to be, indeed? There is no doubt that the Old Ones have devised a means of travel for my forthcoming adventure.

"Quests are for great Heroes. There has never been a great Hero at Home - or the need for one - and no Quests have ever been undertaken outside of fables of ancient times, when the Dolphin tribes engaged in interspecies athletic competitions with the Goddesses of old; but the Wizard here says you should be the exception to that longstanding rule, so who am I to argue?"

Well, there were times when it seemed to me that all the Governor and Xero ever did was to argue and drink and argue and smoke and argue and make love and argue - but there was no way I was going to mention that now. I didn't have to, for the Governor had other things on her mind.

"Almost a third of Home is peopled with villages now; when I first became Governor there were half as many domes and towers built. In a few more generations people are going to be living on top of one another. If young Fractal here could find habitable land, that one problem will have been solved."

"There are other lands on this world of our's just as surely as there are other stars in the sky besides our own sun. The kid himself is proof of that - and proof, too, that at least one of those lands is already inhabited."

"I see what you're saying; we don't have any rights to other peoples lands. What about truly uninhabited lands, though? We could use them as wisely as our own Home... Couldn't we?"

"Let's see what comes of Fractal's quest before we start building a fleet of airships to colonize other worlds." Xero concluded.

After much debate, experimentation and barter we have designed a craft which should enable me to fly - or more specifically, to float - through the air with enough food and wine for a long journey. Three Dolphin tribes to the leeward of Home have guaranteed safety from Sea Serpents and contracts have been made for silk and for temple girls to weave and sew under Xero's supervision. Time seems at once to fly by and stand still as the sphere and the wicker hut it will carry are made to exacting designs.

The governor and Xero have been friends for as long as I can remember. She has never been a stranger in our home or shop. As the work on my sphere has gotten underway she has practically moved in with us. Enormous sheets of pale sky colored silk have been laid out on the lawn - the hue chosen to aid in unobtrusiveness - and ten of the temple girls are dividing their time almost equally between working the fabric and dancing about with scraps of it. Another three temple girls work forming the wicker hut which is to be my aerial home. These three work on the roof where Xero's forge stands.

I work on the roof also, burning cups of coal at the forge and measuring the rate of their burning and the volume of air that each cup heats. Every time I turn around Kristal is wagging her magnificent breasts in my face, for my childhood friend is one of the temple girls assigned the building of the sphere's hut. This is only Kristal' second summer at the temple. She will serve eight more before becoming a Goddess. After that she shall be free to choose any man (or men) she desires from all the citizens of Home. I wonder again where I will be in eight more summers.

Right now she is making it impossible for me to concentrate on my calculations.

In retrospect, I wish I had paid more attention to how much weight each cup of coal's burning would raise, and how much less weight would need to be lifted as the food and water and wine and coal itself were consumed.

Downstairs Xero sits upon a cask of wine and puffs a hose from the shop's ornate hookah. The governor leans in the door jamb with another hose all but forgotten in her hand. I take a third hose and toke deeply, the afterimage of Kristal's large dark areolae blurring my vision like the spots that remain before my eyes when I look directly at the sun. The two Old Ones are strangely quiet. After a couple of aborted attempts at conversation I head back up the stairs to the roof, but Xero stops me as he breaks his silence,

"I think you ought to tell him."

"Tell who what?" I thought he spoke to me. But it is the Governor who replies,

"You might very well find yourself in danger soon. More than a wild boar, or even a Sea Serpent. You could easily be placed in a situation where only a proven weapon of magical proportions might effect a means of preserving your very life..."

"Are you going to break the glass which holds Trauma?" I interrupt, knowing that this is what the Old One is trying to tell me.

"We wrestle with that question now," the Wizard intervenes, "Get back to your work."

"And keep your hands off Kristal' boobies!" the Governor teases.

The reality of time again seems to drag too slowly by and to fly too quickly. I find myself unprepared to leave Home, yet the sphere and it's hut are completed and assembled on the lawn. A giant bellows, made especially for the task, pumps heated air into the sphere. It seems as though all the citizens of Home have gathered 'round to watch.

I still don't know where I'm going, but I'm leaving now.

The Governor has indeed broken the glass and freed the blade named Trauma, and she makes a big deal out of presenting it to me before her gathered constituency. Kristal has made a sheath for it of lacquered blue Sea Serpent hide, and it is probably only my imagination, but I believe that I can hear the sword purring within. Friends, as bewildered as myself, parade by me presenting gifts of departure they think might be of value wherever it is they think I'm going to.

Polished stones and sea shells, a wooden flute, loaves of honey-nut bread, a silver flask of dream-wine, a lock of long red hair, a bone pipe, and other such signs of friendship and love are heaped upon me until the sphere - having been filled with heated air - remains firmly on the ground.

I am unwilling to discard any of my going - away gifts. Instead I set outboard a cask each of water and wine. And the sphere tugs the hut from the ground of Home. There are shrieks and laughter from the gathered crowd - and from within the hut as well. Quick investigation discovers one young temple girl in the cloak locker, and Kristal is wedged into the pantry. A team of men haul on the sphere's lines to bring the hut within a safe distance, and the younger, smaller girl jumps unceremoniously to the ground, landing nimbly. She becomes an instant celebrity.

At the sudden loss of even such a slight weight, the craft tears loose from the men holding the lines and the crowd chases it and me and Kristal toward the beach. Kristal is larger than I, and has always been the stronger of us. Now she has me in a hold I cannot break, and I am smothering between her mighty boobs. She demands the impossible,

"Go back, Fractal! Put this thing down, let me off!"

Freeing my head from her meaty chest, I reply, "You're going to have to jump! Wait until we're over the water. If I can ever find a way, I'll come back, Kristal, I promise."

"If you're not back in eight summers, I'm coming after you!"

As she made ready to dive into the surf below I did not doubt that if I could not find her, some day she would find me. But romance and sentiment went with her great ballast, for when she dove from the hut the sphere shot skyward so violently that I was almost thrown from it. By the time I regained my feet the people of Home were small figures spread out along the rapidly receding beach. They were waving their arms and seemed to be shouting, but their voices were already lost in the distance. Kristal was separate from the rest, out in the waves jumping up and down and waving both arms above her head, her wondrous breasts bouncing and swaying as if to bid me their own farewell.

The selfsame winds which broke the outlandish vessel of alien trees on the rocky eastern shore of Home those ten summers ago now bore that vessel's only passenger westward once again, in a craft perhaps even more strange. As I gained altitude the temperature fell uncomfortably low. I added a double kilt and quilted cloak to my costume and reduced the amount of coal in the brazier so that I might remain at a more temperate level of the sky.

As I follow the path of the wind I experience what must surely be the most unusual view of the Surrounding Sea and our world's atmosphere that anyone from Home has ever known. And I become hypnotized.

The sea below is a vortex, into which the sky and clouds and stars are being drawn. And as the universe collapses into it, my sphere and I remain stationary. Our relative position to the rest of the universe makes it seem as if we are rising. The chill of the upper atmosphere soon gives way to the icy cold of space, and I am wrenched from this hypnotic state shivering and gasping for air.

I lay awash, not in space, but in seawater on the floor of the hut, the sphere collapsing above me and the brazier cold. I simultaneously strip off my soaked clothes and feed coal into the metal chamber, beating sparks from my lighter and pumping the bellows as though my life depends on it. Swells alternately toss the hut into the air and threaten to drag it beneath the waves. I continue working the bellows and cursing myself for not following Xero's instructions to burn the coal at a constant rate. In my mind the cursing does as much good as the bellows work, and I soon have the waterlogged craft hovering a short distance above the hungry waves. I bite off an huge chunk of cheese and suck hard on a skin of wine before checking to see if my herbs and pipe are ruined. Miraculously the pipe is dry, as well as many choice buds, although some of what had been pipe weed now more closely resembles sea weed. I toke away through the night, and check on the fire-pot perhaps more often than is really necessary.

I awake to a far darker sky than I had ever seen in winter, and the most startling array of colors I have ever imagined. The entire cosmos is moving water, green and blue and black, tugging at a cloudless sky in which I sit suspended and alone.

Well, not entirely alone. A pod of whales ejaculate their steamy breath into the twilight in a silent chorus. Dolphins fly aimlessly about just above the waves. And even rat birds fly this far out to sea. I have always thought that the gulls live on garbage produced by the people of Home. Seeing them this far out has made me think that I am near some human population. But I have now come to learn that the rat birds, like their wingless kin, eat any kind of garbage, natural or man made. Not for the first time I marvel at their grace in flight. To someone unfamiliar with their eating habits they might indeed seem beautiful. As it is, I merely envy them their power of flight.

Sleep threatens to overtake me as the air about me becomes increasingly rarified. The very rays of the sun herself seem robbed of their power.

Below Round Ones sunned themselves on the ice and chased in the sea for fish to eat. Unnumbered throngs of them lay atop one another waiting for the glacier to break and facilitate their escape to warmer climes. Their land is at the edge of darkness - that border between the oceans warmed by the sun and teeming with life, and the vast plains and mountain ranges of desolate, frozen darkness I have discovered to encompass more than a third of our planet's surface, where the star that we orbit never shines.

The crashing waves in which they spend their miserable lives chasing the pale fish which sustain them has one merciful trait; it tears from the wasteland bergs to which they might cling, and transports them to the planet's temperate zones.

Although this occurs only during our planet's closest passes to it's star in it's elliptical orbit, they have no concept of season and no reason to venture into the darkness. So, they take what sun there is and await with patience borne of ignorance the thaw and break that signals escape from the harsh reality of our world's single icecap.

Beyond the knowledge or imagining of the Round Ones, deep within the interior of that icecap, lay the twisted wreckage of the probes.

For the wiser inhabitants of other worlds have endeavored to satiate their own curiosity regarding a world so near a star, yet so seemingly cold and dark. Obviously bereft of life.

According to my internal clock, I had been within the strange darkness for more than two days. At first I thought I had entered a storm system. But no foul weather had come. By the third day, I slowly began to realize that I am halfway around the world from Home. And just as there is never total darkness at Home, this side of our world never feels the kiss of the sun Goddess. But the air is clear, and stars shine.

They shine so brightly that my sphere cast a shadow on the grey dunes below. All my life, stars have only been a winter phenomena, appearing on the horizon as flashes of color. That they might radiate enough energy to cast shadows of a moving object is a reality I have never before considered.

It was while watching the shadow of the sphere follow the contours of the frozen landscape below me that I discovered the probes. I didn't know what they were at first, but I knew they were important.

I let out the lines and hooks, and vented hot air to land my craft at the edge of an huge crater. There are smaller, shallower craters nearby, and I have explored some of them first. In all of them there are the shells of craft formed entirely of metal. Some small, some not so small. And while the metal is not of the quality from which a fine sword might be made, it is uniform and wondrously wrought.

I had made up my mind to go down into the big hole. But first I had a case of the munchies to slay. I dragged a fresh cask of dreamwine, a large hamper of cheese and dried meat, and the remainder of my buds out of the hut and had a delightful picnic by starlight. All that was missing was Kristal.

After eating, I loaded a bowl and set off into the crater to see what remained of a craft so large as to have made this great an impression on the terrain. The inside slope of the rim had been packed hard by the wind of many winters, but the farther down I went, the more I had to scramble around and over loose talus.

Suddenly, there it was. I mean, it had been there all along, but it is a perfect sphere, and casts an 100% albedo so that it looks just like whatever is near it until you practically bump into it. I bumped into it. Then I sat on a rock and marveled at it over a smoke.

In it's mirrored surface, I watched my own craft - that fragile thing of silk and wicker built by temple girls at Home - reeling drunkenly through the icy air, it's contents spilling onto the snow as it gained altitude and left me half a world away from any chance to build another like it.

That was ten or thirteen days ago, as best I can estimate. It wasn't until yesterday that the Dolphins came and explained the spacecraft to me.

They flew in low over the hills - the Dolphins, not the spacecraft. They followed the contour of the land, about head high. The old priestess knew all about these strange craft. She even named some of the planets they came from. She also told me which other craters contained the servos, power units and controllers that were compatible with this pretty silver spherical craft, explaining in great detail how to build what she called,

"... a Quantum-Gravitational Entropy Stabilizer."

That's what I'm working on now. If I ever get it to operate, I'm going to call it, The Flying Dolphin.