Book 2: "Temptation" by David Brin
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 20:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeGreat Dreamers! Tkett stared in awe and surprise at the object before them. It was unlike any starship he had ever seen before. Sleek metallic sides seemed to go on and on forever as the titanic machine trudged onward across the sea floor, churning up mud with thousands of shimmering, crystalline legs!
As if sensing their arrival, a mammoth hatch began irising open -- in benign welcome, he hoped.
No resurrected starship. Tkett began to suspect he had come upon something entirely different.
This novella takes place in the Uplift universe and follows on from the story in "Starship Rising". The Streaker has been on the run for so long that some of its mainly dolphin crew have suffered nervous breakdowns and regressed to a pre-sapient state and have been dropped off on the planet Jijo, along with a doctor and a few other healthy dolphins to look after them. The supposedly unoccupied planet is actually home to refugees from six galactic races who secretly live there in harmony with each other, but although the captain's idea was that the dolphins could set up a colony on Jijo, the doctor is worried that even it her patients do recover, it may not be possible for any of them to remain sentient in the long term, away from their human mentors and the technology of earth. The eccentric dolphin archeaologist Tkett is keen on finding an abandoned spaceship that can be adapted for use in salvaging the alien artefacts that the planet's previous inhabitants, an advanced race called the Buyur, dumped in an oceanic trench before leaving, but the sounds of machinery working deep under the sea, unknown to the planet's land-dwelling inhabitants, lead the dolphins to an unexpected discovery and a momentous choice.
As if sensing their arrival, a mammoth hatch began irising open -- in benign welcome, he hoped.
No resurrected starship. Tkett began to suspect he had come upon something entirely different.
This novella takes place in the Uplift universe and follows on from the story in "Starship Rising". The Streaker has been on the run for so long that some of its mainly dolphin crew have suffered nervous breakdowns and regressed to a pre-sapient state and have been dropped off on the planet Jijo, along with a doctor and a few other healthy dolphins to look after them. The supposedly unoccupied planet is actually home to refugees from six galactic races who secretly live there in harmony with each other, but although the captain's idea was that the dolphins could set up a colony on Jijo, the doctor is worried that even it her patients do recover, it may not be possible for any of them to remain sentient in the long term, away from their human mentors and the technology of earth. The eccentric dolphin archeaologist Tkett is keen on finding an abandoned spaceship that can be adapted for use in salvaging the alien artefacts that the planet's previous inhabitants, an advanced race called the Buyur, dumped in an oceanic trench before leaving, but the sounds of machinery working deep under the sea, unknown to the planet's land-dwelling inhabitants, lead the dolphins to an unexpected discovery and a momentous choice.
