Song of The Mover 
Once we were like children,
free spirits of the waves,
then came the cruel harness,
Man made us into slaves.

Thus Man made us victims,
Three castes for us did make,
Vassal, Servent, Chattel,
our backs to work and break.

The Harness was our trap, 
The Harness was our chain,
it both hurt and maimed us,
the symbol of our pain.

Truth some misremember,
but that we have not yet,
recall all man's evils,
never, never forget !


Chapter One : Long Hard Road Out of Hell


All at once, before any of the dolphin slaves, Builder, Circle, or Crimson, 
could make heads or tails of what was happening,
the humans were gone.

The rumours were they had gone to fight in the sky, like they sometimes did, 
with other creatures almost as vile as they.
But unlike all other incidents, they did not return. Maybe they had gone on 
to colonize other planets. Or perhaps they
had become slaves themselves, and this most Movers thought would be 
delicious irony in return for their years of pain.
Whatever had become of them, they never returned, nor did any conquesting 
alien creatures. The dolphins and the dying
planet they inhabited had been forgotten and lost in the sea of stars.

At first, this seemed like a blessing.............

***********

Cypher, the Head Mover, recoiled in horror at what she was seeing. All 
around her the dolphin equivlent to Hell was
speeding onward towards what seemed would be a horrific climax.

The guard of the Mover's Shrine, a young, stockily built fellow, swam up to 
her in a panic. He was trying his best to be calm,
but she could see the whites of his rolling eyes, see the bubbles streaming 
to the surface that spoke of excess fear. At
another time she might've commanded him to calm himself, but not now. Not 
when she could barely keep her own terror
under check. Agonizing squeals of pain bounced through the waters from a 
hundred different directions.

"I have to get out of here"  Cypher thought frantically  "but HOW" ?

The Guard addressed her respectfully, despite his fear. "Pod Leader, the 
disease is spreading. What shall we do?"

Interrupted from her thoughts of escape, the female dolphin scanned the 
murky depths with her sonar. There was no way out.
She, her unborn calf, and all other survivors of the race would be infected 
with the virus that was sweeping their
ranks. Either that, or the victims of the disease would finish them off.....

She had never seen anything like it, nor had any of the Castes. It seemed 
like it had dropped from the sky, and maybe it
had; some last ditch effort at cruelty by the aliens the men had supposedly 
been fighting. This virus didn't just make the
dolphins ill, it MUTATED them. Mind, body and soul. Through an incredibly 
painful process, the victim's lungs were absorbed
back into the body. Then the smooth flesh along their sides split, allowing 
gills to develop rapidly. Little by little, they were
turned into sleek, vicious sharks, with no rememberance of their past lives 
as dolphins. Some of the dolphin characteristics
were still to be seen. Long, streamlined body, blueish grey tint of the 
skin, and the long snouts, filled to bursting with razor
wire fangs, combined with a vicious intelligence that made the now extinct 
great whites seem cuddly by comparison. They also
seemed to bunch in packs once the transformation was complete, and anyone 
caught out by a group of these creatures........

Cypher shuddered the memories away. The virus seemed to be spreading, as did 
the victim/sharks. They HAD to get away
before any more surviving dolphins were changed or attacked. And as Head 
Mover, Cypher had taken control. She was the only
one who still had a work harness -- all the others had been shed and 
discarded in a frenzy of celebration by the rest of the
Movers. If it hadn't been for her loyalty to the harness and her work, they 
would now have been trapped without hope. With it,
her sonar was powerful. She could move things, or open doors....

The problem was, WHAT door led away? She had only been to the mines before; 
other than to the work, she had never been
outside the holding lagoon. But there was one door, far far below. It had 
been forbidden to her, and the memories of that
were painful. The one time she had nosed too near it the lashes of a whip 
had caught her across the melon, giving her scars
that would never go away. But there were no humans to give pain now. And a 
spirit of defiance rose up in her heart at the
thought. Defiance against the men, defiance against the shark/dolphins, 
defiance against death itself. They WOULD get out,
and she would lead them. She was Cypher. She was Pod Leader of The Movers, 
and Head Mover at that. Both humans and
dolphins had adknowledged her superiority, and her pride swelled at the 
thought.

Turning her head to the Guard, she looked him in the eye keenly. "Can you do 
something for me, Whitecap"?

Whitecap looked startled at being addressed by his name, but nodded swiftly. 
"Just ask it, Pod Leader".

"Go to all the shrines and get as many survivors as you can to come with us. 
Then meet me at the great door on the cave floor.
Lives depend on your swiftness, child of the waves. Go!"

With a quick nod and an exhalation of bubbles, Whitecap was off into the 
murk. Cypher wondered if she'd ever see him again,
for his path was more dangerous than hers. The Three Shrines of the Dolphin 
Castes were scattered on rock ledges all along
the lagoon. In the green waters where clearance was cut down to just a few 
feet in front of your beak, anything could leap out
at you from the depths before you knew it. And with those sharks about, it 
was made doubly dangerous.

With a suprisingly swift movement for such a heavy-set dolphin, Cypher 
charged towards the water's surface. By the time she
hit the open air she had the speed and bearing of a stocky torpedo knifing 
through the water, and the few remaining seabirds
left in the skies must have wondered what the commotion was about. Flipping 
in mid-air, the female plunged snout first back
into the green depths, moving as fast as her muscular body would propel her 
back down. The trick was to get as much air as
you could handle in your lungs, then make a swift charge for however far 
down you were going. Otherwise you'd never make it.

"If I can just make the door." she thought  "Surely the humans would have 
placed an air vent in the bottoms". Air vents were
one of the few things Cypher admired about the humans and their inventions. 
With a vent pouring up fresh air from the surface,
you never had to go topside again. In fact, some dolphins had never seen the 
surface. They spent their whole lives underwater,
in the polluted water man created. Of course, the Topside wasn't much 
better; acid rain sometimes fell, and the air was thin
and hard to breathe. So maybe it was better under here.

The farther down she went, the more light headed Cypher became. Old poems 
and rhymes began to repeat themselves in her
head. How did the one go?

*Levels there are -
Known only to sperm whales

*Physeter, who hunts
In chasms of dreaming

*To battle the squid
Whose beaks are sea-mounts

*And whose great arms
Encompass oceans.....

But she was no sperm whale; she was Cypher. Shaking herself awake she made 
one last, desperate thrust downward, and
spotted, far down on the sand, an air vent.

*******************

Whitecap swam as hard as he could, and still he could feel the minutes 
ticking away. Lives hung on his swiftness, the Head
Mover had intoned, and this he knew to be true. But she didn't have to say 
it, even if both of them knew. It put his stress to the
extreme, and when he was stressed, he tended to attempt things that no 
dolphin with a right mind would dare. And this was
no time for daring; he needed to gather the survivors and go, before the 
intelligent shark creatures took any more lives.

Or worse yet, any more were turned INTO sharks.

Before he knew it, the young guard had rounded a corner and was facing the 
mighty Crimson Shrine. Since the Crimson had
been closest to the men, theirs was the biggest out of the three shrines, 
other than the gigantic Shrine of Unity at the center of
the lagoon. At first he couldn't see any survivors, and his heart sank. Then 
a faint movement caught his eye from what seemed
to be......it seemed to be UNDER the shrine.

"You're losing it, fin". Whitecap intoned to himself  "How could they be 
UNDER the shrine"?

Still, it was worth a look. With cautious strokes, the young bull swam into 
the shrine. He soon realized that he wasn't crazy.
There, on the bottom......was that a hole? In the mottled blueish light that 
filtered through the glass ceiling, all shifting blue
and green shadows, he couldn't be sure. Still, it was worth a look. Swimming 
closer, he turned his back to the entrance. And
that was his first mistake.

A slamming, shooting pain suddenly hit him in the side, worse than anything 
the dolphin had ever felt. At the same time, the
force of whatever had hit him threw Whitecap across the shrine and into a 
wall, snout-first. Shaking his head and squealing with
pain and rage, the bull turned towards whatever had attacked him and froze 
with fear. A shark. Not just any shark, one of the
dolphin sharks. And he knew very well that they never came alone. Sure 
enough, three more of the streamlined beasts came
to join the original that had so violently attacked him.

Whitecap was no coward. He could fight his weight in sharks, or so he had 
always claimed. In fact, he enjoyed fighting -- as
long as the odds were on his side. But this was too much. He was wounded, 
and there were three of these creatures blocking
his only means of escape. Bracing himself, he prepared for the end. The 
water was already cloudy with his blood, but he could
see the glint of the light on the protruding fangs, and the black eyes 
glittering with evil intent. How could these creatures ever
have been like him? The bull prepared for one last, desperate battle as the 
three knifed towards him.

Then from somewhere close behind, a flash of white and red streaked. A low 
thudding sound reverberated through the chamber
as, with an enraged squeal, another dolphin threw itself into the fray. 
Repeatedly slamming it's sharp beak into the soft belly of
the lead shark, it seemed a creature hell-bent on it's own destruction. 
Whitecap shied away from it as much as he had from the
sharks, and watched in amazement as it drove all three of the monsters from 
the Shrine.

"How DARE you enter the Shrine of the Crimson! OUT, foul ones, out!" the 
stranger squealed. After watching them go, the
dolphin turned to Whitecap with a businuss-like tone. "We need to go now, 
they won't stay gone for long. I just startled them,
is all."  Blinking at the startled expression on the guard's face, he added, 
"I assume you were sent to help us? We were never
friendly with you Movers, but I hardly think you would abandon us at this 
time."

Shaking off his initial suprise at the bravery of the other dolphin, 
Whitecap glanced him over. Sleek white body, unnatural red
fins -- surely this was the leader of the Crimson sect, with his clipped, 
cultured way of singing. Finally getting his bearings back
Whitecap answered him directly. "Are there any more of you left?" He didn't 
say it, but it would be a dissapointment if he had
risked fin and fluke to rescue one dolphin, as suicidally courageous as he 
was.

"No young one, there are more, but we are few." Whistling to the small hole 
in the floor, he outlined their situation carefully.
There were four of them left, the others having been decimated by either 
shark attacks or the daedly disease. "Even now one of
our number is ill, but from bad fish or the virus we do not know." As if by 
magic, three other dolphins swam out of the floor in
response to his call. Two were young-looking bulls, fresh faced and fearful. 
The third was a sickly female, looking as if she'd
lose conciousness any moment. Glancing over them, Whitecap wondered if any 
would make it back to the gate in the cave
floor. Still, they would have to try. He would not go against the Pod 
Leader's orders.

"Let's go" he ordered, and swiftly they swam single file out of the shrine 
and into the darkening waters beyond.


************************

Well, should I continue with this thing, or throw it away with the trash? 
E-mail me at u_hrair@hotmail.com
and tell me what you think. And the Haiku isn't mine, it's from "Startide 
Rising" by Davin Brin. Check it out.