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and crawl
to the shallows and beach. I lay there coughing and retching the
last of the water from my lungs, too weak to cry properly, as I
felt my whole being flooding with tears of thankfulness, not only
that I was alive, but also for the revelation I had had and still
feel deeply now. And for you being a part of my life, Ada.
    I have started feeling confident that somehow
we can both have our careers and have each other.
    I have had a verse from a song by The
Incredible String Band, called Painting Box, in my head for a week
now. Would you like to hear it? OK then.
    ‘The purple sail above me catches all the
strength of Summer,
    Fishes stop and ask me where I’m bound.
    I smile and shake my head and say my little
ship is sinking,
    But I kind of like the sea that I’m on and I
don’t mind to drown.”
     
    Alex and Mariada are at The Heads in
Knysna.
    He finally tells her, “I heard from Earth 2
today. It’s hard to believe that I am telling you that I’m going
into deep space without you. When they asked me about that, about
you, I mean, I told them that you would make the same choice, to
go. So that’s that. But I will always love you, Ada.”
     
    A few weeks later, Mariada and Alex are at
Storms River Mouth, standing on the foot-bridge across the
river.
    She finally tells him with a huge grin, “I
also heard from Earth 2, today. And you won’t believe what they
asked me to do!”

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    It is 2044 and Alexander Zhivago, the 60 year
old Marine Bio-Linguist at Plettenberg Bay, is giving a talk to the
International Marine Institute at a conference in Cape Town, on
‘The history of decoding cetacean communication.’ Behind him, a
giant screen shows visuals relating to what he describes.
    “I have given many talks at schools recently,
and it’s very pleasing to see that children often ask questions
that are radical — they get to the root of the issue. And so today
I will start each section of information with a radical question or
two that children have asked.
    Are cetaceans as old as dinosaurs, and are
they as intelligent as humans? No, they are not quite as old, but
they came relatively soon after dinosaurs, and before humans. About
70 million years ago, the terrestrial ancestors of whales and
dolphins re-entered the ocean where life originally began. About 30
million years ago, cetaceans evolved brains the present size of the
human brain, which we have had for only about 100 000 years.
    The main conditions for human intelligence —
a large brain, a convoluted cerebral cortex, a complex system of
social interaction and communication — may be greatly exceeded by
cetaceans.
    How long do whales and dolphins live, do they
have families and how do they talk to each other?
    Whales form stable, matrilineal groups, some
offspring staying with their mothers for life, and live for 50 to
80 years, like humans do. Groupings of extended families form clans
or bands, with common calls, something like our dialects.
    Sounds, made in water and air, consist of a
blow, moan, growl, burp, wheeze, groan, bellow, grunt, yelp and
snort, amongst others. The male has ‘songs’, used for
communication, for fun, sometimes for mating, and probably also in
following migratory routes.
    Dolphins use mainly whistles and clicks, the
whistles using a narrow FM band of signals for communication, and
the clicks on a broad band of pulses for echo-location. They have
unique ‘signature’ whistles, seemingly to identify and call each
other, a slight variation of the mother’s call and is developed
early.
    Whales express bursts of air from as low as
20 Hz up to 9000 Hz in frequency, and at 100 to 180 dB in volume,
in their songs.
    The notes are in phrases which are repeated,
before the next phrase follows, a phrase sequence forming a theme,
and there being five to eight themes per song.
    They can repeat a song exactly, much later,
even when the song was more than half an hour long, and they can
change the song in methodical