Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 45
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    CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

    Hanging for a moment behind the Moon on a standing wave in the flow of space, the ghost of the Culminate looked down to see that Tarni had indeed reached Sand where he lay. Then swinging with sure skill on just one local partial, the ghost came around the Moon.
    The thaw was on the open ocean. As the Earth slowly turned its northern hemisphere from the arctic night, to bow its balding head to the coming sun, tiny signs of spring glistened in the myriads of ice crystals, which winter had splattered and trapped above the water line of the plantation.
    The surface never froze solid at these latitudes, to form the massive layers of ice that weighed down the waters further north, and blocked out what sunlight managed to angle its way above the arctic circle. But still the ice-cracked fiberglass and rusted steel piers of the plantation showed the strain of survival in the northern Atlantic.
    The plantation, what had been man's gift to the whales, would not last for many years, unattended and deserted by those who had built it. Around the central landing strip the huge circles, which once had held such richness of food and life, were already starting to decay in the relentless chopping of the waves.
    Down below the cold sparse air and sunlight, one small dolphin glistened and glided through the icy water. A thermos bottle of blubber enveloping the warmth of a mammal. Around him was the world he loved, which he could never share with those dust-breathing, big-eared animals from land.
    Against the diffuse shimmering which streaked down from the surface, the dolphin could make out the floating forms of the plantation. Swimming upwards and starting to circle, he could see the nipples had all been sealed. There would be no searching for leaks this spring, no watching the strange plastic become heavy with green food. The farms had been left to die.
    The decision to abandon them had not been difficult, although man would have a hard time understanding why the whales deserted an idea with such promise.
    Most of man's ideas had been good. They worked. Man's control of nature had been exquisite. He had given generously of his hands and of his mind. He had opened up a whole new universe of things to understand, of ways to understand, and finally of ways to build new minds with even greater capabilities. But something inside man prevented him from using all this for more than building up a world around himself, about himself.
    Man's fate weighed heavily upon the whales. But there was no helping him now. More had to be learned. There were things that man had missed, things essential to find out. With new knowledge and skills, the whales were already at work. The time might come when their dreams were realized. Not man's dreams, of the plastic fields covering the oceans, and nomad species coalesced into a new society. The whales had no desire for such a world.
    Their's was a different dream. One where they swam in the open as they always had, and used their abilities as a means of translation, so that understanding could spread from every mind to every other, without pride or jealousy.
    This was their dream.
    But not now. Now was a time for survival, for swimming deep beneath the storm. The dream would last however many generations it would take.
    The brown circles stood out clearly in the water. Kaleidoscoped and multifaceted, images rippled through the circuitry of the fragile silvery craft, as the Culminate's ghost descended to the garden it had planted so long ago.

    ~ ~ ~ THE END ~ ~ ~
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