After The Facts

The Matriarch and King Julian floated across from each other in the Matriarch’s office, sipping at their respective drinks. Julian was sucking through a pressure straw inserted into a coconut in an H2n0! bubble. The Matriarch had allowed herself a rare treat (under the circumstances) and was gurgling a cocktail of freshly squeezed anchovies with a twist of tuna oil. 

“Now tell me,” the Matriarch said, after swallowing the delicious mixture. “How exactly do you propose to get the entire sentient population of this planet to safety in less than one hundred of your years?”

Julian leaned back and swirled his coconut around. “We can’t, but that’s not a surprise to you, is it?”

It wasn’t, still the Matriarch had fantasised that the apes had developed some sort of secret space drive that could propel them away from extinction. In reality they could put five chimpanzees on the Red Planet, giving the astroapes enough time to watch their home planet combust before quickly joining it. “No, I suppose not. But you do have an idea, I can tell.”

Julian smiled. “Do you know me so well, my Queen Under the Sea?” Obviously not expecting an answer he slurped the dregs of the milk, then tossed the coconut away. “The orcas will have a safari on the savannah, but it seems to us there’s only one way out of this. We need to contact the orb’s descendants, assuming they’re still around, and plead for help. If they took the humans, then surely they’ll take us; we’re much more civilised after all.”

The Matriarch had expected something like this. “Please tell me you have discovered some communications device that will facilitate this call for aid?”

Julian shrugged. “Nope, but I understand you’ve got the planet’s resident expert on Human Studies in your family, and we have the technical know-how. If we pool our resources, pun intended, we might be able to figure out how the humans managed to flag this orb down.”

“What makes you think the orb didn’t make contact on its own?”

“Oh simple statistical probability. The chances of one intelligent species making contact with another inside our galaxy are…well, they’re very small indeed. No, we think it more likely the humans accidentally put a lure in the water and got a statistically improbable bite. But how they did it, that’s the question we need to answer.” He kicked at the coconut, which had drifted to within range of his boot. “Look, even an entry-grade university ape knows that we’re smarter now than the humans were when they quit our planet. So if we can just figure out how they did it, we should have no problem replicating the process and hopefully getting assistance. Planetary evacuation on the scale we’re talking about should be impossible, but no existing archaeological record shows any evidence of the humans annihilation; they just vanished.”

This was something the Matriarch knew, having discussed the subject with her daughter on occasion. Now, it was the puzzle that needed solving in order to save all sentient life on the planet. “Very well, you will have at your disposal all the resources of the Aquatic Realm.” She used the formal title because she felt it was necessary for such an important task. 

Julian seemed taken aback, but recovered quickly and responded equally solemnly. “And Terra Firma stands with you.”

“Done then. I will have my daughter and her mate contact Lord Arbor without delay. He can brief them.”

Julian looked surprised. “You prefer not to tell her yourself?”

The Matriarch looked away, unable to meet his eyes. “No,” she said to the wall. “She’s a scientist, and it will be less painful coming from one of her own. I am her leader, but I am also her mother.” She returned to meet his gaze. “I will have to inform the rest of the Sentients, but at least I spare myself the pain of this telling.”

Julian shrugged, and rose to leave. “Then I take my parting from you and hope that when we meet again, there will be more positive news to discuss.”

“I hope so too,” said the Matriarch.

Breaking the formality, Julian grinned then did a neat backflip and comfortably ejected himself from the office’s portal. The Matriarch laughed and reflected, not for the first time, on what a grand Alpha Male he would have been - were he blessed to have been born a dolphin of course. 

Questions. They burned in her mind like the lava which spewed out of the famous deep-ocean fissures of the Wide Basin. Questions she had aplenty, but the answers were not there to reassure her. A leader should have answers, she thought. The Sentients looked to her to guide them. She was responsible for millions of intelligent, social beings and now each of them would look into her eyes and know that she had no answer to the annihilation they all faced. The ‘lucky’ ones, herself included, would live out their lives; but what sort of life was it when you knew your children would not live much longer past its end.

Sadness infused the Matriarch, and she supposed that it was a state of mind that suited the occasion. She could do nothing but inform the Sentients of the peril they faced, and let each leader decide how best to shepherd their charges at this fragile time. She knew the whales would take their solace individually, as they usually did, then come together in their cavalcades and sing a song to the sea which would echo around the depths until it gradually died out, or became exterminated by the approaching catastrophe.

 The Matriarch had considered writing a formal speech to broadcast but, in the end, had decided against it. They deserved to hear it well and hear it true, which meant speaking from the heart. This was something she was not commonly known to do. In fact her children would probably say she was ‘dry’, a common aquatic joke. 

She wondered if the cube, trapped inside its solar prison, was even now aware that its sentence was coming to an end. What consequences would transpire when its release occurred, as it must at some time in her daughter’s lifespan? That the intelligences of the planet would only live long enough to see it emerge before being vaporised, was perhaps something the cube might relish. Would it even acknowledge their sacrifice?

The Matriarch spent the next sixty waves accessing her tertiary cortical memory unit and thinking about the births of her children. That included little Gamma, who had died so soon after feeling the sea’s warm embrace replace that of her mother’s womb. Epsilon had been the hardest, but the oceans had smiled and granted her the gift of life. Now they needed that miracle to fluoresce and grant life to all intelligence on the planet. They had one chance, so tiny and faint that it appeared to the Matriarch to be more a whisper.

The echo of her mother’s dying words appeared like ghosts to haunt her memory. “Help them swim forward together” her mother had said to her, and the Matriarch had strived to achieve this at every turn of the tide. Now everything seemed to be lost unless her daughter, and the mate the Matriarch privately had not found it in her heart to support, could solve a riddle so old it had almost evaporated like seawater on a sun-drenched beach. Almost evaporated, but not quite. A memory carved into the wall of a remote ice cave contained a tendril of hope projected turns into the future. The ‘ifs’ required to save any of the Sentients were so fantastic that no intelligent being should contemplate them. Still, the Universe had shown itself to be capricious, and there seemed little doubt that the humans had somehow made contact with this orb. What other explanation was there for their disappearance?

The Matriarch’s thoughts were interrupted by a chime from her desk. Her executive assistant wanted to talk to her. She finned her communications slate. “Yes?”

“The broadcast channels are ready Alpha,” came the voice of the young female bottlenose, the Beta daughter of the Matriarch of Pod3. 

“Very well, you may open the channel in ten ripples.” She had a few moments to gather her thoughts and think about life; her life; the life of her daughter, soon to be her way with Tube to a secret facility near the Volcano Islands where they would attempt the impossible; the lives of all the dolphins, whales and apes that had passed; and of those who were living now, but would not be in the future. It was all so terribly sad.

A bright green light flashed several times on the communications slate indicating that the broadcast channels to the entire Sentient world would open momentarily. The Matriarch rose to her full height, and held her flippers open in the time-honoured supplication of openness and respect. The light stopped flashing and turned a steady green. As she always did when making an important announcement, the Matriarch imagined that all her children were in front of her; she spoke to them in the soft, resplendent voice only a mother could use when giving bad news to her offspring.

“My dear friends,” she began. “This tide we are all one.”