Author Laline Paull scored a hit with her 2015 debut The Bees, dubbed “The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games,” but with bees as its characters. Her latest, Pod, dives into a different aspect of the natural world—the ocean—by introducing an adventurous dolphin who follows an unconventional path. io9 has an excerpt to share today from this intriguing new novel.
Here’s a description of Pod’s story, followed by its cover, prologue, and first three chapters.
Ea has always felt like an outsider. As a spinner dolphin who has recently come of age, she’s now expected to join in the elaborate rituals that unite her pod. But Ea suffers from a type of deafness that prevents her from mastering the art of spinning. When catastrophe befalls her family and Ea knows she is partly to blame, she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave the pod.
As Ea ventures into the vast, she discovers dangers everywhere, from lurking predators to strange objects floating in the water. Not to mention the ocean itself seems to be changing; creatures are mutating, demonic noises pierce the depths, whole species of fish disappear into the sky above. Just as she is coming to terms with her solitude, a chance encounter with a group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably alter the course of her life.
Here’s the full cover; credit goes to Faceout Studios, Molly Von Borstel.
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i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a
shark home is the barrel of the
gun and no one would leave
home
unless home chased you to the shore
- Warsan Shire, ‘Home’
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Half-dreaming at the surface, Ea wakes in an instant, her reflexes always on high alert. But it is only a wild and lusty chase. The young couple leap, splash back down and then, twirling in their bubbles, join together belly to belly. Ea admires their dance. Some things never change.
Others do. Within three generations, this pod has racially blended into a new tribe that mixes spinner grace with bottlenose strength. Like all the old, Ea finds the young more beautiful every day, but she would not go back. Time goes so fast now anyway, calves barely weaned and now mating, dusks and dawns racing each other as if the whole ocean has accelerated to a new rhythm. She does not mind, because it means reunion comes closer, with the ocean and with one whose heart still beats in hers. Since the seasons blurred, the moons lost their meaning and it is not for her to dictate the spawning of fish or coral. It is odd, at this time of her life, to miss the rituals she so resisted when she was young. Perhaps none of this would have happened if she had not. Everything broke apart, but Ea no longer blames herself. What happened was bigger than any fault of hers.
Ea watches the amorous young couple, now drawing an excited throng. If she and her dwindling cohort of elders find the younger generations shallow and lacking in curiosity, they keep it to themselves. They avoid nostalgia and unless some rare youngster makes reference to it, they even forget they are of different races. Ea is the last spinner dolphin of the remote and peaceful Longi tribe. The other elders are bottlenose dolphins, of the once notorious Tursiops megapod. Hard to believe how once they clung to those identities.
Ea tries to live in the moment, knowing each peaceful day is a gift. Even if she can never quite relax. Some nebulous feeling, some old vigilance wakes her in the deep of the afternoon, when the rest of the pod is asleep. Then she listens to the ocean with all her attention, but there is nothing unusual to hear. No grinding horrors, no cries of pain. Sometimes one of her fellow elders wakes shrieking, dreaming in red water. Ea is glad to be there to give comfort. It is over. This is a different place.
Sometimes Ea wants to share her story so that people know what it cost to be here. But kind and respectful to the elders as they are, the young dislike their painful tales. Ea understands. She was once the same.
The truth is hard to believe, harder to bear.
Just below the equator, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, is a curving archipelago almost four hundred miles long. The biggest and most easterly island starts the chain which dwindles to the west, terminating in three tiny atolls. There is a gap in the chain where, in the latter part of the twentieth century, one atoll was completely vaporised during nuclear testing.
These troubled waters shelter broken nations, refugees and ghosts, but this is the story of two estranged cetacean tribes, cousins with a painful past. The first are the Longi people, a tiny pod of Stenella longirostris, or spinner dolphins. The second is the megapod of common bottlenose dolphins, or Tursiops truncatus, who drove the Longi from their home and took it for themselves.
Each pod has pride and virtue, each feels above the other. They do not know they share one fatal flaw: they think they know this ocean.
The glow of dawn marked sea from sky as the silver Longi pod streamed back from another successful night hunt. Young Ea was ready to put her plan into action, edging out of the throng coming up the wide channel back into the safety of the lagoon homewater. As soon as she was in she peeled off to the side, subtly so she would not be seen leaving the group, but determined not to get caught up again in the daily lovemaking. Ea was indignant and upset that because she rejected every suitor, she was the one considered to have the problem. She was neither tired nor unwell, she just did not want to have sex and she did not care how healthy a pastime it was. Coming of age was something she had secretly looked forward to for quite another reason, and it was a colossal and bitter disappointment. Her hearing did not improve, the music of the ocean did not miraculously burst into her mind. Instead, the ugly frightening sounds continued that even her own mother suggested might be in her imagination. Ea alone suffered them, furious and ashamed that somehow she might have brought that pain and fear on herself.
She knew she was valued for being a good hunter, but what Ea craved was to be normal. To spin like everyone else was the key to fitting in, and if she could only hear the music of the ocean like everyone else, she too would be able to tune in and do it. She was fast, healthy and wanted so badly to succeed – but she had never heard the music. Spinning was the Longi’s art form, it was dance, athleticism, most commonly just for entertainment and sport, but it also held a spiritual element. It was union with the ocean itself and everyone who experienced that state even once, shone with authentic Longi joy. Calves learned by puberty, but by maturity, Ea knew her attempts were empty technique with graceless result. There was no explanation for Ea’s peculiar acoustic disability, which caused her to suddenly start in fear at disturbing noises in the water. Perhaps she was too sensitive, even by Longi standards. The sounds came unpredictably, straight into her sonar melon and painful enough to send her whirling off course to avoid them. At those times people encouraged Ea to spin to transcend her fear, but that only resulted in her greater frustration and headaches that lasted for days.
Obsessed and envious about other people’s spinning, not a day passed when Ea did not secretly try, one last time, to hear that healing music – but the ocean continued to withold that gift. Anger became her way of coping. If she could not have it, she did not want it. She could hunt, that would have to be enough. She was an outsider with a reputation for being difficult, and only her mother knew how badly she grieved, and how much she hated pity.
Sexual maturity was a disappointment and a shock. Disappointment that her hearing did not improve, and shock that, despite her awk- wardness, she was inundated with suitors. Ea assumed that her ugly inner world of bad thoughts and cravings and resentments meant her outer self would match – but that was far from the case. All the Longi people were beautiful, but she was exceptional. In Ea, the grace of her people was exaggerated, from the long black lines around her eyes, to the flashing pearly belly marked with long glittery dashes increasing the impression of her considerable speed. The Longi had exquisitely shaped pectoral fins and tail flukes and in this Ea was no different, but her face set her apart. Her long rostrum, or beak, was slightly more elongated than usual, and the rounding of the bone above the eyes, a little wider. Her eyes were more precisely slanted in the outer corners, and the black line around them, a little thicker. To swim with her on the hunt was to experience her natural grace in motion, and it was very hard to believe that she could not spin. That was why even though people knew about her hearing, they still infuriated her by urging her to keep trying.
There was no music. That part of life was not for her. Ea practised acceptance.
Now she was out of the throng, swimming silently across the lagoon, slow enough not to cause a wake and draw attention to herself, but fast enough to get beyond where they would spot her and call her back. She was going to her refuge, the black coral wall where lived an ancient moray colony. It was a dark forbidding place where the water had a different texture, and Ea was the only person who ever went there. The adult Longi respected the morays but could not help their aversion to their unattractive faces, while the calves shuddered at t Source: Gizmodo