Ripple

by Tui Allen

  ‘He’s losing control,’ thought Maram. ‘This could be trouble.’

  Cosmo moved into an incorrect position. It forced Zoid to change course at the last moment to avoid collision. Even so, he brushed against Cosmo in passing. Cosmo snapped his teeth and whirled, sending sheets of white water sky-high. He lunged at Zoid like a shark at its prey.

  Maram saw what was coming. He darted between them in time to deflect the heavy blow Cosmo had intended.

  He corralled Cosmo away from Zoid.

  ‘Cosmo, back away! Breathe!’ he ordered. ‘Relax and breathe!’

  Cosmo did not obey. He drove at Zoid from a new direction. Again Maram blocked him.

  Maram continued acting as Zoid’s protector until Cosmo began to weaken through lack of oxygen. The attacks slowed.

  ‘Breathe Cosmo!’ said Maram again. He arrowed the thought straight into the breathing zones of Cosmo’s brain.

  It worked at last. Cosmo dragged in a tortured breath. The scars faded and the attacks faltered.

  It’s over now, thought Maram. He apologised to a confused Zoid for removing his working partner, and gained the teacher’s permission to take Cosmo out of class.

  Away from the excitement of the class the younger dolphin quickly calmed.

  Maram repeated the same move they’d been practising in class. He kept Cosmo at it, always in slo-mo, for an entire hour. Only then did Maram allow a slight increase in speed.

  Throughout the afternoon the speed of their practice moves increased so gradually that Cosmo was hardly aware of it. By working with Cosmo in this way for the whole afternoon, Maram ensured that he finally reached the level his classmates had in a single one-hour session, but without the anger re-surfacing.

  We are lucky, he thought grimly. Few his age would have the perseverance to stay on task as he did today but few would’ve lost their initial focus on such slight provocation either. Much patience may be required of his teachers if he is to become a useful fighter, unless we can find a solution to this problem.

  Maram became Cosmo’s special teacher for all physical aspects of the study of fighting. This didn’t mean that Cosmo always worked without classmates of his own level, but it did mean that Maram was always close beside him when he did.

  Over the next few weeks, whenever the irrational rage re-surfaced in practice combat, as it did from time to time, Maram withdrew Cosmo immediately and gave him however many hours of patient one on one coaching it took to overcome the problem. He designed his coaching programmes to focus on Cosmo’s unique need to separate his developing fighting intellect from the dangerous rage that sometimes possessed him during conflict. Maram thus protected Cosmo’s classmates and allowed Cosmo to keep up with them in a branch of his education that would otherwise have been impossible to pursue.

  Maram, recalling the suggestion of the elders, also decided to take Cosmo along to Alcyone, the mind adept.

  ~~~

  The thoughtstream arrived suddenly from quite close by.

  ‘Alcyone! Alcyone!’

  She rolled smoothly above the surface and down again. Who was calling her? Alcyone separated herself from her group and turned to meet the newcomer.

  It was Maram.

  Her muscles tensed, almost to the point of rigidity. She postponed a breath she had been about to take, then sank in the water to gather her thoughts.

  Has his time come, she thought? Already? He is still too young, surely? But why else would he need me? She veiled these thoughts so Maram would not catch them and calmed herself before surfacing to greet him.

  Maram was not alone.

  Who is that even younger one in his slipstream, she wondered?

  Her visitors arrived.

  ‘Cosmo here has a problem,’ explained Maram.

  The tension flowed out of Alcyone’s muscles and she took the breath she’d been delaying.

  ‘He cannot control his own anger,’ said Maram, ‘It slows his training as a fighter.’

  Alcyone looked harder at Cosmo, who skipped about nervously under her scrutiny. Then she saw the livid triple scar on the youngster’s left side.

  ‘Is this Kismet’s child, the one who was orphaned by the shark?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ~~~

  When Cosmo first began to spend time with Alcyone it was only because Maram asked him to. Those early visits were short and usually in the evening.

  Alcyone’s last child had left her side a year ago, leaving her plenty of time to devote to troubled ones like Cosmo. When he visited, she would ask about his day and something he said would always trigger memories from long ago. She’d tell him a story about it. Often they were funny stories. He began to look forward to his visits and he spent more and more time with Alcyone. Sometimes they even hunted together.

  When he learnt a new attack move, or saw a sperm whale fighting off a pack of blackfin, he’d think, ‘I’ll tell Alcyone about that when I see her.’

  One night, a month after his first visit, Cosmo visited Alcyone during a series of westerly squalls, which sent banks of cloud charging across the sky, leaving wide expanses of starry sky between them. Cosmo opened his mouth above the surface and felt the wind blowing right down his throat.

  ‘Where’s my mother now?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘She’s with your father, up there among the stars.’

  He lifted his eyes above the waves and took a good look at the stars. They were calling to him. He was sure of it. He could not take his eyes off them.

  ‘What are those stars?’

  ‘They’re great burning balls of gas far away in space. If you wish to learn more of them you should attend classes with Zenith, the astronomy teacher.’

  There were thousands of stars but they were all too far away. He leapt but came no closer. He leapt again and again, higher and higher.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ asked Alcyone.

  ‘I’m trying to reach the stars.’

  He continued leaping until he could leap no more. How could he ever cover such distances? He yearned for the westerly to drag him closer to them where he could feel their heat.

  ‘Why did my parents go there?’ He flung the question out among the flying foam of an icy squall. ‘Why couldn’t I go with them?’

  ‘They’re dead Cosmo. You’re alive.’

  ‘Can live dolphins go out among the stars?’

  ‘Dolphins can do anything they wish,’ she said.

  ‘Then one day, I’ll go to the stars.’

  ~~~

  In view of the traumas the child had so recently endured, Sterne and I were delighted to witness such positivity and decisiveness on his part and looked forward to observing him in action closer to our own environment in the future.

  ~~~

  Alcyone’s knowledge of the troubled minds of the traumatised allowed her to quickly diagnose the scars across Cosmo’s psyche. Once the trust between them was established she introduced her vocational skills to their friendship. She did this so skilfully and openly that he saw it only as a new and higher level to their alliance.

  She took him travelling inside himself. Such journeys could not entirely banish a rage which was now a part of him, but she used them to teach him how to recognise his anger by the reddish colours that swirled in the mist they generated. She swam through that mist with him until he recognised the colours flowing through it; the gleams of rusty crimson, the streaks of burnt copper and the hot sparks of poison carmine. She immersed him in those colours until he could smell the smoke of them and taste their acrid tang and they became signals pointing to the onset of rage.

  Then she taught him how to breathe and work his lungs to control the swirling mists inside him and harness the colours to his own purposes; mixing them with other colours, creating what he wished, whether it be perfect calm, rational thought, lethal attack, or all three.

  ~~~

  ‘How well did you know my parents,’ Cosmo asked Alcyone one day.


  Alcyone had been waiting for such a question. ‘I knew them both well,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me about my mother.’

  She gave him her memories of Mimosa as a girl; her birth and naming, her childhood playing with her sisters, making mischief on her brothers, tossing seaweed, befriending seabirds, learning to hunt, making friends. She described Mimosa absorbing her lessons, choosing and building her vocation as an adept of Azure’s internal planetary forces. Finally, Alcyone described the memories that hurt her the most: Mimosa in love with the young weather adept Kismet and her excitement at discovering the presence of Cosmo.

  She coaxed him to share his own memories of Mimosa, though she saw how difficult it was for him. Most of his memories of her were from before his birth – impressions of love, laughter, and reassurance. All he remembered of her after his birth was the taste of her milk, her sky-blue colour with its magenta highlights and her terrible death.

  Alcyone noticed he did not mention Kismet at all.

  One day she asked, ‘Do you have any memories of your father?’

  He was silent. She knew that he wanted to swim away. But he stayed.

  ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘it’s blank.’

  He slowed and looked at her sideways.

  He’s afraid of my reaction, she thought.

  ‘No baby the age you were has had time to build impressions of a father, Cosmo.’

  They swam on for several minutes in silence. She sensed one of his thickest inner clouds evaporating and she knew he would ask her about Kismet within the day.

  ‘Tell me about my father,’ said Cosmo a few hours later.

  ‘I feel his strength flowing through your veins; sometimes you seem like his ghost swimming beside me. But his spirit was as sunlit as yours is overcast.’

  Tortured, she thought, privately.

  Alcyone then sent Cosmo a detailed mental picture of Kismet showing the power in his flukes, the open friendship in his eye, as well as each scar and blemish on his body and the way the golden colour of his skin flowed to emerald on his flukes and fins. Over the next few days she gave him every Kismet detail she could find, just as she’d done with Mimosa.

  ‘Like you he looked upwards to the skies but unlike you his interests lay more within the atmosphere than beyond it.’ She told him of weather events that Kismet had predicted and described the ways his vocational activities had helped the school. She continued until she’d ensured that Cosmo knew his father as though he’d lived with him for years.

  Thus she allowed the sunlight of his departed father to shine between the storm-clouds of Cosmo’s spirit and reach him.

  ~~~

  Just as Alcyone helped Cosmo to recognise and control his rage, the combat training taught him how to wield it as a weapon. The rage which had held him back now contributed to his swift development into a fighter of passion and power. Maram was soon able to leave Cosmo to his fighting lessons without any further concerns.

  The elders of the school were well pleased with Maram’s handling of the Cosmo case.

  The other young dolphins lost their fear of Cosmo and once again included him with confidence in their games.

  ~~~

  Cosmo’s interest in the stars grew stronger with every passing day, so Alcyone arranged for him to attend classes with Zenith. He became the most motivated and capable of all Zenith’s students.

  ~~~

  Read on, or if desired . . .

  Return to Table of Contents

  Chapter 7: Unreachable

  Ripple’s search continued. She still had no idea what she sought and because it stayed hidden, she thought of it as a secret. But she found clues to the secret in everything she heard, everything she tasted, in every smell, and even in things she saw with her eyes.

  There were clues that frightened her. Was she seeking something fearful? But there were so many more clues among the beauties of the ocean, that she was re-assured.

  In steep-sided Cascade Cove a small waterfall tumbled over a cliff into the sea. The waterfall was alive with clues. She swam near it often, listening, and tasting the strange sparkle of the salt-free water.

  ‘What is it?’ she wondered for the millionth time. ‘Where is it? I almost have it. I must think. I must listen.’

  Sometimes the secret seemed close around her, pounding her from every side but still eluding her. She strained her spirit upwards towards the clouds and stars, downwards to the deep, even shore-wards to the dry islands – searching, seeking but never finding, except in whispers that came to her in dreams. She sometimes awoke feeling certain she’d found it, overcome with echoes ringing through her soul, but always within moments it would fade and she would reach out again with her spirit and try to retrieve it.

  It was like trying to capture a moonbeam; impossible, though it glimmers from every particle of moonlit spray. She thought of her secret as a private moonbeam.

  ~~~

  One morning Ripple found herself swimming through mist. There was no breath of wind; the heaving surface gleamed like living mother-of-pearl.

  Sterne and I drifted invisibly observing her responses to her changed surroundings.

  Her visual world had shrunk; she could see just a few body-lengths in every direction. Beyond that, the air thickened into dense white.

  Creamy, like Mother’s milk. I wonder what it tastes like over there where it’s thicker.

  She swam as fast as she could, her speed leaving a wake trimmed with white lace on the surface behind. But wherever she arrived she found the opaque whiteness was always a few metres away. Sometimes the clear air around her closed in a little and sometimes it expanded, but the clearest space was always close to her.

  Wherever I go, I can never reach the milkiness, because it isn’t really there. Could it be the same for my secret? Perhaps, like this mist, my moonbeam is unreachable.

  She dived below the cheating mist and stared into the black abyss that yawned below. She soon returned to the silver light but the abyss stayed with her until Pearl came looming near, ethereal in the mist.

  ‘Mother! What’s this whiteness? Is it real? It’s like . . . nothing!’

  Pearl presented Ripple with the one truth in the world that she most needed at that moment.

  ‘This is a cloud sitting down on the sea and we’re inside it,’ said Pearl.

  I’m in the middle of a cloud! Mother says so. Clouds are real. They blow about and change shape and make rain.

  She played and chased among the shifting veils of mist until the sun had licked the last wisps from the face of the sea.

  Sometimes, rainsqualls strafed the waves. Clouds covered and uncovered the sun allowing gleams of sunlight to reach the water, changing its colour by the moment, from blue to grey to green and back again. Ripple saw a rainbow on the sea and swam towards it, desperate to touch it, sure that such beauty might hold the key to her secret, but the further she swam, the further away lay the end of the rainbow. Ripple wept. Finally, she knew that like the mist, its solidity was an illusion. She would never touch it, never hear its vibrations. It would not yield to her the key.

  To Ripple it seemed that the secret was like all the other unreachable things in her world.

  Thoughts of those things spun through her brain. She swam in ever-diminishing circles. The only outcome was a poem:

  The cool rainbow slides away

  the nearer I approach.

  The creamy fog will never stay

  for me to taste and touch.

  ~~~

  When I watch the moonlight

  Light the flying spray,

  I try to catch a moonbeam

  But the moonbeam skips away.

  ~~~

  The line between the sea and sky

  is always distant from the eye,

  and if I swim to it all day

  the line will only move away.

  She giggled to think of herself swimming round and round the world endlessly trying to reach the horizon.

>   ~~~

  By now Ripple was hunting most of her own food, although she still sometimes took milk from Pearl. She even searched for her elusive goal in the taste of the fish she consumed. When she was hungry, squid was like a prize you might search for all your life; the texture clean and firm, the taste sweet and delicate, the nourishment complete. It was not the same as unveiling her secret, but it was fine consolation.

  One day when Ripple was eight months old, she watched the older dolphin children in their gymnastics class as they worked on new techniques in hydro-dynamic wave-skipping. She memorised their moves and then practiced by herself for two solid hours, far longer than the class had spent at the task.

  She only stopped when she noticed how hungry she was. Her first thought was to find Pearl and take milk but then she remembered a nearby reef where squid sometimes swam even in daytime, so she went there instead and began to hunt. Here and there along the reef other dolphins were also hunting including a few from the class she’d been watching. After a little searching, she located a squid about the length of her own flipper.

  The perfect meal.

  She stalked it carefully, anticipating the moment her teeth would sink into the succulent flesh. She was closing in for the kill when a sleek shape swam up from below and chased the squid into a crevice in the reef, completely out of reach. It was Rev, back to his sister-baiting game.

  She squealed and flashed towards him, lunging hard into his body. It would have been a nasty hit if he hadn’t evaded her. He scurried off, but she followed, charging at him again and again as if to bash him to pieces. It took all his speed and skill to reach a safe distance, finally escaping into the protective zone of his mother. Even so, Ripple had to be restrained by Pearl from harming her brother. Seeing the bruises already inflicted, Pearl became thoughtful.

  Rev never teased Ripple in food-depriving ways again, although with Squelch’s help there were other methods almost as annoying.

  When Ripple had calmed down and had time to satisfy her hunger by hunting in peace, Pearl took her aside and spoke to her.

  ‘Ripple, I know he provoked you, but you’ve left him with bruises. This is not how dolphins treat one another. Whatever made you behave in such a way?’