Second Nature

Chapter 49

49 

Two midwife dolphins hovered near Gen. She spun lengthwise, uterine muscles contracting in powerful spasms. With each contraction, milk from her teats squirted into the water in white puffs, like cumulous clouds appearing in clear sky. Then the baby dolphin slid out tail first, in a billow of blood, and the umbilical cord snapped. 

A boy. A beautiful boy, with a black and gray body, sprinkled with silver and blue spots. Gen nudged his sleek little form to the surface and watched him take his first breath. He was adorable. She was in love. He floated alongside her at the surface and took another breath. Then he called to her, whistling the sweetest tune: Four notes, syncopated, covering an octave; starting and ending on the same note. By tradition, his original call to his mother would remain his signature whistle, his birth name, by which he could always be identified in the pod. She and the midwives whistled his name back, and he whistled his name again and again. It was the happiest music Gen had ever heard.  

Then he shoved his beak under her pectoral fin and suckled. The strength of his suckling amazed her. The milk flowed from swollen mammary glands, but it felt to her like it gushed straight out of her soul and into his. After a few minutes, he switched to her other teat and gulped milk until his belly bulged. What a hungry little calf. Satisfied at last, he swam around to face his mother and drank love from her eyes. 

Races-the-Waves and the other pod members gathered near to see the new baby. The father nuzzled his son's smooth body with his face and caressed Gen with his tail. The baby whistled his signature and each dolphin in the pod whistled it back to him several times. 

Gen couldn't take her eyes off her baby. It saddened her that she must leave him, very soon, but she knew absolutely that she was right to have birthed him. He would not be left an orphan. He had his loving father, and the nursemaid, Moon Catcher, would make a good mother. Plus, he could always rely on the extended family of his pod. 

Gen sensed only a day or two remained before her final metamorphosis. It was becoming harder to identify herself as human or dolphin, or to know herself as separate from the Abundance within her body. Gen was merging with the Abundance, and with all the life forms she had touched and recorded at the core of her being. She rode an unstoppable wave toward an ultimate transformation, when she would become the radical, new form that was her destiny.  

Even now, despite the joy of her new baby, it was easy to lose focus on the finite world of the pod and the sea. She sensed the planet itself floating in a pod of many living worlds, alive in a shoreless sea of stars. 

"Eyes-of-Sunrise, what name do you choose for our son?" Races-the-Waves whistled, breaking Gen's reverie. By custom, the mother bestows a formal name on her newborn, added to his signature whistle. 

She looked at her son and his bright eyes held her gaze; eyes as dazzlingly purple as her own. In the whistle language of dolphins, the word for purple also meant kelp and bitter-tasting. That wouldn't do; and there was no word for sapphire or amethyst. Then she thought of an adjective for the color that appears when the ruby rays of sunset saturate clear, blue water. 

"Deep-Sky-Water," she whistled. "Our son's name is Deep-Sky-Water."