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  “We diving again next week?” Yui asked.

  “Sure,” Doc said. “I have weekends free for quite some time.”

  “I can’t,” Terry said. Yui and Doc both looked at him in surprise.

  “Work with your parents?” Doc wondered.

  “No.” Terry tried to think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t be as hard as it felt. He couldn’t think of one. “Mom, Dad, and some of the scientists are going on an expedition to contact wild humpback whales. They’re hoping to validate theories about cetacean society.” He looked at Yui. “I have to go to the mainland and stay with an aunt until they get back.”

  “How long will it be?” she asked. Her eyes were wide with surprise and hurt.

  “I’ll be back in time for school next fall.”

  “Oh,” she said. Yui got up and went down below, into the trawler’s cabin.

  Doc looked after her, then at Terry, who was looking off into the distance toward Molokai. Rain began to fall as they motored toward home.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 9

  The Queen’s Medical Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, Earth

  August 2nd, 2036

  Terry watched out of the robotic taxi’s wide window as it turned off H1 and onto Ward Avenue. He was full of conflicted emotions and unable to concentrate. Twenty-four hours ago he was having lunch with his aunt at Café Du Monde in New Orleans. Warm hot chocolate and beignets. His phone had beeped a text message. His father was on the way back from the arctic, and there was a ticket waiting for him to catch the next flight to Hawaii. His mother. He couldn’t think.

  The cab turned onto South Beretania Street. The multiple towers of the Queen’s Medical Center came into view, and the cab beeped an announcement that the destination was less than a minute away. He grabbed his bag. Most of his stuff was still in New Orleans. His aunt had packed an overnight bag and a few things, and got him to the flight just in time.

  The cab turned into the hospital drop off. Dad was waiting as the door swung open. “Mom?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  “She’s alive,” his father said.

  Terry grabbed him around the waist, hugging him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried for any reason other than pain. Emotions overwhelmed him, and the tears came. “Dad,” he bawled.

  “It’s okay, Terry,” he said, stroking Terry’s hair. The cab beeped for attention. “Just a second,” he said and gently detached. “I need to pay the cab.”

  Terry let go and stood on the sidewalk, shaking and trying to control his emotions. He wiped snot away with his sleeve as his father used his new ID card to pay the fare. The cab closed its door and rolled away. His father turned back to him. He tried to smile, but it didn’t really work. He held out a hand. “Come on, Son, let’s go.”

  Terry took his hand, and his father picked up the daypack. They went into the massive hospital.

  Inside, there were hundreds of people, all doing their own thing. Adult visitors moved about on unknown missions. Occasionally children accompanied them. A few looked at him. Sometimes they were curious, sometimes they looked afraid.

  His dad took him to an elevator, and they went up to the 22nd floor. Terry noticed the floor was labeled Intensive Care. The elevator rose in what seemed like slow motion to him. When the doors opened on the 22nd floor, he felt as if he was in a dream, walking along the white halls and black floor, holding his father’s hand.

  “You’ve gotten taller,” his father said almost idly.

  “Aunt Wilma said over a centimeter,” Terry replied robotically.

  They reached the end of the hall, where a nurse’s station was.

  “Here to see Madison Clark,” his father said.

  “Family?” asked the woman, a nurse dressed in a red uniform.

  “Yes, I’m Matthew Clark, her husband. This is Terrence...I mean Terry, our son.” He held out the new ID card.

  The nurse examined the card—his Universal Account Access Card, which everyone called a Yack—and handed it back. She reached into her desk and gave him two yellow cards with clips. He gave one to Terry and clipped the other to his shirt. The card said, “Visitor.” Terry mechanically clipped his on as well.

  “This way, sir.” Another nurse had arrived and was holding open a door with “Authorized Personnel Only” written on it in red. His dad took his hand again, and they followed the nurse.

  This hallway was lined with windows and doors. Each window showed a small room on the other side, and machines, but Terry was too short to see more than occasional people or doctors standing in the room. It was all just images to him. He was walking in a nightmare.

  They turned into a room about halfway down the corridor. The door closed behind them. There was a bed inside, and on it was his mom, though it was almost impossible to see her under all the hoses, wires, and other apparatus. Machines stood on metallic stands, others were mounted to the walls, and all were hooked to her body. Rhythmic beeping was audible constantly, and bellows moved up and down, reminding him of the old film villain, Darth Vader.

  His dad stopped next to the bed. A woman stood there, a tablet computer in her hand. She was examining one of the machines and making notes. “Any change, Doctor?” he asked.

  “No, Dr. Clark,” she said, shaking her head. “No better, but no worse, either.”

  Terry let go of his dad’s hand and reached over to touch his mother’s. There was a needle in the back of her hand, with clear fluid running through it into her body from a bag suspended on a hangar. Some kind of machine beeped there, adding to the endless cacophony of beeps, whirs, and buzzes. The hand was cool to the touch, cooler than he thought it should be.

  “Momma?” he asked.

  The doctor and his dad looked down at him, and he began to cry again.

  * * *

  The room was private, like an office, but there was just a small table with several chairs around it. The doctor he’d seen was sitting on one side of the table; Terry and his dad were on the other side.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” the doctor said to Terry. “However, I’ll leave the details to your father for explanation. I just wanted to tell you we’re doing everything we can.”

  “Will she wake up?” Terry asked.

  “We don’t know,” the doctor admitted. “Her brain is injured. We’re giving her the best treatment we can. It will be another week or so before we can see if she’ll regain consciousness.”

  The doctor went on for another minute with more technical details for his dad. Terry listened with half an ear until the meeting was over. He knew a little about the accident from the conversation with his father.

  On the way to the airport, his father had gotten through to Terry on the phone, and they’d talked for five minutes. There’d been an accident while they were diving in the arctic. His mother had been hurt, badly. He was with her in Honolulu, and Terry was to fly back immediately. An hour later he was getting on the plane at New Orleans International Airport.

  They were back in the intensive care waiting room. It was smaller than the big ones Terry saw in hospitals. Only a few people were sitting in the chairs and couches. Nearby a woman was sleeping, a young girl using her lap as a pillow to sleep, as well.

  “Okay,” his dad said once they’d found a quiet place. “Let me tell you what happened.”

  He spoke in quiet words so nobody could hear or be disturbed by what they might overhear. “We set up operations in the arctic with a previously identified pod of humpback whales. Your mom and I were both in the water, swimming in specially-made drysuits for the arctic water. We were attached to a submersible, cruising along next to the bull male whale. We’d been trying to talk to him for weeks.

  “Over and over again we dove with the pod, following along behind the manned submersible like being towed behind an airplane. We tried everything we could think of. The translator was working perfectly, communicating in the humpbacks’ language of moans, clicks, and wails. Only they wouldn’t r
espond.

  “Finally, we had staff at the institute talk to the bottlenoses and ask them to send a message. Bottlenose dolphins had been seen with humpbacks, though rarely. Maybe it would work? We didn’t know. The dolphins called the humpbacks “Dreamers.” They did as they were asked.

  “So we played the dolphins’ message. First in the humpbacks’ language, and then, when nothing happened, in dolphin. The bull looked directly at us for the first time. Your mom and I were surprised, of course. It was a breakthrough. Then the bull turned suddenly and sped away. When it did, the whale’s flukes slammed into the submersible, shattering the hull.”

  His dad paused, looking down and taking a couple of breaths. Terry’s eyes widened as he tried to imagine the huge whale smashing a submarine like a toy. Then he remembered his mother and father had been tethered to the sub. His father was taking again.

  “It was an accident, everyone agrees. Your mom wouldn’t want the blame to fall on the whale. He merely wanted to get away from us. When you’re 20 meters long and weigh more than 60,000 pounds, anything as small as a Human submersible is almost too tiny to notice.”

  He paused again before continuing, “Two people died in the submersible, probably instantly. The crushed sub was sinking. We’d been connected to the submersible by tethers and our air supply. Mine were cut by the impact. Sheer luck. I was knocked silly, but I floated to the surface. I don’t remember, but the support ship picked me up immediately.”

  “What about mom?” Terry asked.

  “She was pulled down with the sinking sub. The rescue divers got her loose, but not until she’d been without oxygen for nine minutes.”

  Doc had taught Yui and him a lot about what happened when you were without oxygen for just a few minutes. Nine minutes was a long time. The world record was something like 20 minutes, but his mother wasn’t a trained athlete. She’d been unconscious. He’d also learned as little as 6 minutes could cause brain damage.

  There wasn’t much more to talk about. They sat in the waiting room for a time. Terry saw a reporter on TV talking about his mother. They had a picture of her, along with the rest of the family. It was a celebration at the institute several years earlier. The caption said, “Marine Scientist Injured, Several Dead.”

  Eventually his dad stood and stretched. “Let’s get you home,” he said.

  “I want to stay here,” Terry insisted.

  “The doctor said it could be days.” Terry stared at him. “You can come back tomorrow.”

  Terry thought about being defiant, then despite himself, he yawned. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go home.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 10

  PCRI, Molokai, Hawaii, Earth

  August 17th, 2036

  Terry looked up from his cart to see Yui standing by the main door. He was excited to see her, but she seemed uncertain and looked like she’d been about to leave. “Yui?”

  “Hi, Terry. I just found out you were home,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry about your mom.”

  “I wanted to see you, but I’ve been spending a lot of time at the hospital.” And I was afraid to call you after the way you were the last time I saw you.

  “Is she better?” Yui walked over to him and glanced at the cart full of fish. Since it was Sunday, the institute was essentially empty.

  “The doctors say her brain activity is increasing.” He shrugged. After two weeks, he wasn’t feeling the same sense of loss he’d felt when he’d first arrived at the hospital. He was still worried about his mother, of course. It just felt different, and he hated himself a bit because of it. He’d been back there every day, for an hour in the morning, and another hour at night. The staff encouraged family to come and talk to her, saying it helped people in a coma to hear familiar voices. Yesterday, he’d skipped the evening visit.

  They talked about nothing as Terry pushed the cart into the orca tank and got the feeding pole ready. An orca surfaced next to the edge of the pool. He immediately knew it was a female by the small, straight dorsal fin, then he saw the tiny, almost nonexistent eye patch, and knew it was Maka.

  “Hi, Terry,” Maka said.

  “Hi, Maka, hungry?”

  “Fish?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  She made a snorting-burp sound from her blowhole. “Fine.” Terry fixed a fish to his pole and held it out for her. The orca took it in a less than enthusiastic manner.

  “Why doesn’t she like the fish?” Yui asked. “I thought all orcas ate fish.”

  “She’s a Transient,” he explained. “One of the Wandering Pod. They’re hunters and specialize in eating seals and other whales.”

  “Oh, wow,” Yui said.

  “Yeah, the first orcas anyone saw were probably Transients, and that’s the reason they were called killer whales.” Maka tossed her head and opened her mouth above the surface, so Terry gave her another.

  “Why don’t you give them meat?” Yui asked. “Lions and tigers get meat.”

  “I don’t know,” Terry admitted.

  “Want meat, yes.”

  Another orca swam over and pushed Maka out of the way. Terry knew it was Uila, the dominant female of the Wandering Pod. “Sorry, Uila,” Terry said. “Fish?”

  “Give,” Uila said.

  Terry was a little taken aback by her attitude. He’d noticed since coming home that the orcas weren’t as deferential as they’d been before he went to New Orleans. Uila’s attitude toward him was surprising. The female orca’s attitude verged on rude.

  Nobody had asked him to do the chores; his father was too busy running the institute by himself. He’d decided to do it because he was bored. Thinking about his mother all the time had kept him from realizing how differently the orcas were acting. School was scheduled to start on Monday, and he was looking forward to it. The distraction from his mother’s condition was welcome.

  “Let me,” Yui said, and Terry let her take the pole and give Uila a fish. The dominant female took the fish and disappeared below the surface without a word.

  “They’re kinda weird now, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “Something’s changed.”

  None of the other Wandering Pod came out for food, and someone else had already fed the Shore Pod. They stopped in the prep area, and got more fish in the cart, then into the bottlenose habitat. He was greeted by the customary, “Terry, Terry!” cheer from the dolphins. Several leaped from the water in graceful single or even double somersaults. Despite his mother, Terry smiled.

  “Hi, Sunrise Pod!” Terry yelled. They responded with more dolphin-quality applause, several riding their tails out of the water and across the habitat. Dr. Hernandez was sitting on a bench tapping away on a computer. He tossed a wave toward Terry and went back to what he was doing.

  “Terry!”

  He looked toward the voice and saw Ihu. Despite it being months ago, he immediately remembered her asking about Yui and felt his blood run cold. “Hi, Ihu,” he said and swallowed.

  “That Yui?”

  “You remember me?” Yui asked, obviously delighted.

  Oh, sure she does, Terry thought, here we go.

  “I remember,” Ihu said. She rolled on her side and looked at Terry, then at Yui, then back to Terry.

  Oh, crap.

  “Like Terry?” Ihu asked.

  “Me? Yeah, I like Terry a lot.”

  “Terry like you.”

  “Oh, that’s good to know.” Yui glanced at Terry, who was looking decidedly green.

  “Terry like lot.”

  “Hi, Terry.” Dr. Hernandez had walked over while he was distracted. “Ihu, please leave us alone.”

  Ihu threw her head twice, gave a chirp of assent, and left.

  “Thanks,” Terry said. “Really, thanks.” Hernandez grinned and gave him a little wink.

  “What was that all about?” Yui asked.

  “The bottlenoses get out in left field from time to time,” Dr. Hernandez expla
ined. “They don’t entirely understand Human relationships.” Yui looked at Terry and blushed. Hernandez had a hint of a grin on his face as he went back to his tablet.

  “Hey, is that a slate?” Terry asked. It was a chance to change the subject, and he was genuinely curious.

  “Yeah, sure is,” Hernandez said.

  Terry and Yui crowded in closer and looked. The alien-manufactured computer was about the size of an average Human tablet, but that was where the resemblance ended. They were less than five millimeters thick, while looking like they were made of a sheet of plastic, yet still as tough as bulletproof glass. Each possessed the computing power of a modest supercomputer, operated on a power supply nobody quite understood, and could be infinitely networked. They were so expensive, currently only mercenaries, government, and rich people possessed them.

  “Can I see?” Terry asked. The doctor smiled and handed it over. The two young people spent a minute examining the machine. Even though it looked transparent, the material could be opaque selectively, depending on what angle you chose to use it.

  “It has a built in Tri-V, too,” the doctor explained.

  “No way!” Yui exclaimed. Hernandez reached over and tapped the screen, causing a three-dimensional image of a bottlenose dolphin to appear. It swam back and forth a dozen centimeters above the slate, rendered so realistically Terry thought he could touch it.

  Three-dimensional images had been around for decades, sort of. The best Earth science had managed was projected into mist, or was done by fooling the eye with slightly offset images in each eye through goggles. The alien Tri-V tech was perfect in every way Terry could see.

  “Those a lot more expensive than the regular ones?” Terry asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Hernandez said.

  “Hey,” Terry said, “where did you get one of these? They’re like a couple hundred credits, right?”

  The doctor shrugged. “I think this model was 75 credits each. Your father got a deal on a case of 20.”