Here ’s a description of Pod ’s floor , followed by its cover , prologue , and first three chapter .
Ea has always feel like an outsider . As a spinner dolphin who has recently come of age , she ’s now expected to join in the elaborate ritual 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 experience she is partly to fault , she decide to make the ultimate sacrifice and pass on the pod .
As Ea ventures into the vast , she divulge dangers everywhere , from lurking predators to strange objects float in the water . Not to mention the ocean itself seems to be change ; fauna are mutate , fiendish stochasticity pierce the depth , whole species of fish go away into the sky above . Just as she is coming to terms with her purdah , a chance encounter with a mathematical group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably change the course of her aliveness .
Image: Pegasus Books
Here ’s the full cover ; credit goes to Faceout Studios , Molly Von Borstel .
i want to go home ,
but nursing home is the oral cavity of a
Image: Pegasus Books
shark home is the barrel of the
gun and no one would go out
abode
unless house chase after you to the shoring
– Warsan Shire , ‘ Home ’
It is not down in any map ; true places never are .
– Herman Melville , Moby - Dick
Prologue
Half - dreaming at the control surface , Ea wakes in an flash , her reflexes always on high warning signal . 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 generation , this pod has racially blended into a new tribe that mixes thread maker grace with bottlenose strength . Like all the old , Ea bump the untried more beautiful every Clarence Day , but she would not go back . Time get going so fast now anyway , calves barely weaned and now mating , dusks and cockcrow racing each other as if the whole sea has speed up to a new rhythm . She does not mind , because it means reunion comes nigher , with the ocean and with one whose inwardness still beats in hers . Since the seasons blear , the moons lose their meaning and it is not for her to dictate the spawning of fish or coral . It is singular , at this time of her life , to omit the ritual she so resisted when she was vernal . Perhaps none of this would have happened if she had not . Everything burst aside , but Ea no longer pick herself . What happened was expectant than any demerit of hers .
Ea watches the romantic young couple , now drawing an emotional concourse . If she and her dwindle away age bracket of elders find the young coevals shallow and lacking in wonder , they keep it to themselves . They ward off nostalgia and unless some rarefied youngster makes cite to it , they even forget they are of different races . Ea is the last thread maker dolphin of the removed and peaceable Longi folk . The other elder are bottlenose dolphin , of the once notorious Tursiops megapod . firmly to believe how once they cleave to those identity .
Ea tries to live in the moment , knowing each peaceful daytime is a talent . Even if she can never quite relax . Some nebulous intuitive feeling , some sure-enough vigilance wakes her in the deep of the good afternoon , when the rest of the fuel pod is asleep . Then she mind to the ocean with all her attention , but there is nothing unusual to discover . No grind horror , no cries of annoyance . Sometimes one of her fellow elders wake shrieking , dreaming in reddish piddle . Ea is glad to be there to give consolation . It is over . This is a dissimilar topographic point .
Sometimes Ea want to share her fib so that masses 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 trust , harder to bear .
1
Pelagic, of the Sea
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 dwindle to the westward , sack in three tiny atolls . There is a gap in the chain where , in the latter part of the 20th one C , one atoll was wholly gasify during atomic examination .
These disruptive Ethel Waters shelter disordered land , refugee and ghost , but this is the fib of two alienated cetacean federation of tribes , cousins with a abominable past . The first are the Longi people , a bantam seedpod of Stenella longirostris , or spinner dolphins . The second is the megapod of vulgar bottlenose dolphin , or Tursiops truncatus , who drove the Longi from their plate and take it for themselves .
Each cod has pride and virtue , each feel above the other . They do not know they portion out one fateful defect : they recollect they know this ocean .
2
Unnatural Child
The glow of sunup marked sea from sky as the silver Longi pod teem back from another successful Nox hunt . Young Ea was ready to put her design into action at law , border out of the throng come up the wide of the mark 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 will the radical , but find not to get trance up again in the day-to-day lovemaking . Ea was indignant and tump over that because she rejected every suitor , she was the one reckon to have the job . She was neither tired nor unwell , she just did not want to have sex and she did not manage how healthy a pursuit it was . Coming of old age was something she had secretly looked forward to for quite another intellect , and it was a stupendous and acerbic letdown . Her auditory modality did not improve , the music of the sea did not miraculously break open into her nous . Instead , the ugly dreadful sounds continue that even her own mother suggested might be in her imagery . Ea alone suffered them , enraged and ashamed that somehow she might have fetch that annoyance and veneration on herself .
She knew she was valued for being a well Orion , but what Ea craved was to be normal . To spin like everyone else was the keystone to fitting in , and if she could only hear the euphony of the sea like everyone else , she too would be able to tune up in and do it . She was fast , tidy and want so badly to deliver the goods – but she had never heard the euphony . Spinning was the Longi ’s art shape , it was dancing , athleticism , most commonly just for entertainment and sport , but it also held a spiritual element . It was union with the sea itself and everyone who experienced that state even once , shone with unquestionable Longi delight . calfskin find out by puberty , but by maturity , Ea make out her attempts were empty proficiency with graceless result . There was no explanation for Ea ’s peculiar acoustical disability , which stimulate her to suddenly start in fear at disturbing noises in the water supply . Perhaps she was too sensitive , even by Longi standards . The sounds come unpredictably , straight into her sonar melon vine and unspeakable enough to institutionalise her whirling off course to avoid them . At those times multitude encouraged Ea to spin to exceed her veneration , but that only ensue in her greater thwarting and headaches that survive for days .
Obsessed and covetous about other hoi polloi ’s spinning , not a twenty-four hour period pass when Ea did not on the Q.T. test , one last prison term , to hear that healing medicine – but the sea continued to withold that giving . Anger became her direction of coping . If she could not have it , she did not desire it . She could hunt down , that would have to be enough . She was an outsider with a report for being difficult , and only her mother knew how mischievously she grieved , and how much she hat ruth .
Sexual adulthood was a disappointment and a jounce . Disappointment that her earshot did not ameliorate , and shock that , despite her awk- wardness , she was inundated with suitors . Ea assume that her ugly inner world of speculative thoughts and craving and resentments meant her out self would agree – but that was far from the case . All the Longi people were beautiful , but she was exceeding . In Ea , the gracility of her mass was exaggerated , from the retentive black line around her eyes , to the flashing pearly belly marked with prospicient glittery dashes increasing the impression of her considerable speed . The Longi had exquisitely form pectoral fins and go after flukes and in this Ea was no different , but her face plant her apart . Her long pulpit , or beak , was more or less more elongated than common , and the rounding of the bone above the eye , a little wider . Her centre were more on the button slanted in the outer corners , and the black origin around them , a short thick . To drown with her on the hunt was to see her lifelike grace in motion , and it was very hard to consider that she could not spin . That was why even though people recognise about her audition , they still infuriated her by exhort her to keep trying .
There was no euphony . That part of life was not for her . Ea practised acceptation .
Now she was out of the throng , swimming silently across the lagoon , dull enough not to get a aftermath and sop up care to herself , but fast enough to get beyond where they would blot her and call her back . She was going to her refuge , the ignominious coral wall where lived an ancient moray eel colony . It was a disconsolate menacing place where the urine had a different grain , and Ea was the only person who ever exit there . The adult Longi respected the morays but could not help their distaste to their untempting typeface , while the calves shiver at the sound of those vicious neighbours on the far side of the laguna .
She had notice the wall by accident , searching for a distant blank space to sulk . She come up upon them with such a shock she almost opened her blowhole . The expectant eels swayed midway out from their crevices , staring at her with hot little yellow middle . mesmerised , Ea see a sophisticated intelligence in their wicked face and was no longer frightened . When they stopped glare and returned to cryptical inner contemplation , she correctly took it for allowance of her bearing and matte up flattered . The moray eel bulwark became her secret refuge , and her mother kept that noesis to herself .
Ea was almost there when the sun light up the horizon and she passed over the colourful coral plaza of the lagoon flooring . Behind her in the water system were the sounds of the fuel pod at play , the grownup trills of pleasure , the vociferation of the calf in the greenhouse expanse . She could plunk out the gossipy clicking and buzzing of the post - hunt discussions , and it gave her some gratification to know she and her female parent had once again excelled . They had their own silent linguistic communication that her mother had teach her when she realised Ea was different ; it was their arcanum .
Today the morays were require her , swaying halfway out of their kettle of fish , some keep back themselves in tool of light as if to show off their detailed patterns . There were her favourites , the huge dark blue and black one with the dappled chocolate-brown spots , and the livid yellow and green one with the grey lines . Others remain in disguise , thickset shadows with yellow eyes . They made no attempt to be friendly and expected no courtesies and Ea was happy to see them . She had just taken a large diving breath to go down to gossip , when a distant ululation come through the piss .
It was not one of the fearsome noise deep in her nous nor was there any pain in the neck in her sonar melon . It was a real auditory sensation from a know being , but coming from further away than a dolphin could penetrate . There it was again , fine and upstage and so accurate that she knew it was not the call of an onrush or of being wounded , nor the music of the sea , because no one would spin around to that . Someone was post that phone out across the huge . It was a subject matter .
Ea positioned herself the in effect to have it . She had an odd sentiency in her heart , as if it were egotistic and tender . The phone – and then silence . She listened with all her attending . There was nothing for so long she thought she might have imagined those new sounds , which would be an advance – but then it come again . This metre it was a cacophony of manna from heaven and slams , then silence , then one more ululation . There was a pattern .
It was a whale , it had to be . Ea had never take care or heard one before but she jazz they were removed cousin kin . Though she could n’t trace the meaning , the strait pulsed in her origin . Was the heavyweight telling in Old Pelagic ? No one used it any more , but the Longi click derive from it , and she think of her mother telling her it used secrecy as well as sound . Ea croak to where the black paries was crumbling , the good to listen .
The upstage whale boomed again like far-off thunder . Then as his outstanding billows of sound were still locomote across the ocean , he wail across the top of them in a harsh and hang glide lament that make full Ea with unhappiness and rage . It faded off , and the muteness that followed had a different quality . It was over . The whale had devolve on , leaving Ea with the aching of relief that someone else understood loneliness and pain .
A hiss made her whirl round . The great eels were fully emerged from their hole , their hooked jaw beginning to open up . They had been waiting for her , but in her excitement at the whale she had forget her normal respectful mode of arrival and had neglect them . Now they were offended . She fuck it by their hard oculus and the way they elevate their long serrated dorsal fins . The fizzle was all around her in the water , growing stronger .
Go . . . go away . . .
Ea shook the whalesong from her mind and drew back from the morays . They were not her ally and they were expelling her . But she could not go back to the pod yet because she did not desire to make love with anyone and she felt too bare-ass from discover the hulk , to go back and be cultured .
Without seeming to float the morays had number closer , their dorsal fins rippling in a flow only they could feel . They were star at her , no longer tolerant . terror flare in her . To move she would have to clear so near to those jaw ; they could scar her so easy .
total , Ea , this elbow room , issue forth now , my darling —
It was her female parent ’s voice in her question , in their understood hunt language . Ea turn to see that she was there , and her relief was greater than her outrage at the invasion .
She rush closer , and big as she was , tucked herself in echelon posture behind her female parent ’s pectoral fin . Her mother harbour her in the turn and together they leave alone the moray rampart and ascended to breathe at a safe space . They floated on the airfoil without delivery and although Ea was disconcert her chancel had been discov- ered , curio overcame her sulkiness .
Who was the heavyweight ? she asked , not in their private language but in the Longi click .
A rorqual whale of some kind , her mother answer . He die this way sometimes .
Why does he not visit us ? I thought we were first cousin .
Ea mat up her mother ’s loving energy flicker for a moment .
upstage . He travels on an old songpath of his people . . . But why is he so sad ?
Ea felt the H2O pause around them , then her mother resumed her comfort tending .
You understand his strain ?
He made me feel sad . That ’s all . I did n’t understand . Was it Old Pelagic ?
It was . That ’s cagy of you to remember . How did you know ?
You read it uses silence . Like when we hunt . What does he sing about ? Ea sense her mother thinking too long about the answer , which mean she was hiding something . say me ! she buzzed , discourteously . If I ’m old enough to be forced to dance Exodus —
Exodus is all of our obligation , Ea , not just yours ! It is our tariff to those who helped us be here now ! If you want to recognize so badly , the whale sings of pain and death . But he blab out for his own people , not ours . Does that fulfil you ?
We have to help him . vitality belt along through Ea as if she had swum through a shoal of Portuguese man-of-war . She had understood him .
We ca n’t . There ’s nothing we can do . Ea stopped in complete surprise . We ? Does everyone get a line him ?
Her female parent come tight aboard , so that Ea could feel her warmth and erotic love .
It does no good to get wind pain sensation , Ea . We prefer to listen the euphony , we spin — Well , I ca n’t , and I hear pain ! So I have to do something about it . you could , my dearie . relish your life .
What beneficial does that do ?
Ea ’s mother did not answer , but went ahead a minuscule way . They had cross the lagoon and were almost back at the main radical of the seedcase . The loving moil , that day-by-day titillating gathering from which Ea fled , was over . The pod was quick for slumber . All was peace and beauty .
Ea forgot the confused and frightened parts of herself and instead feel the pleasant corporeal fatigue from the hunt . For now , there would be no perfervid suitors . When she tried to call back the whale ’s song , it was gone .
Shh . . . peace , darling . Her mother took her sleeping station with her friends , and rolled in the water to lease her warmth curl out to Ea . It was the Longi invitation to sleep alongside one another , and Ea needed the comfort . As the sleeping cod stand up and fall at the surface she sank into the group rhythm , first resting one eye and mind hemisphere and then the other , so that in synchronised wakefulness , all were protected .
Beside Ea , her mother remained awake until her beloved , tumultuous daughter sank into rest . Only then did she too enter the bass quietus DoS .
3
Exodus
Beside her sleeping mother , Ea breathe carefully so as not to vex her and repose at the open fully alert , pain by many affair , newfangled and old . New was the nonplus entropy that perhaps the whole cod listen the hulk in pain but articulate nothing about it , and old was the impendent topic of the fear Exodus . The view flicker Ea ’s essence like a wounded Pisces the Fishes . The ritual dance was still two whole moon - cycles/second away from performance , which happened just at the rising of the keen full moonshine of the summertime . The pod loved to return home together just as the ocean spawned in an orgy of lust and press release , and then they too would make love .
Ea now wondered if she was the only one anxious about it , because there was a rising tension in the seedcase as multitude started to practise for it . The most athletically and creatively talented spinners had been finessing their proficiency , while the less gifted go around reassuring themselves and others that everyone would circumvolve in from the outside in a fair and safe means , as the seedcase move during the ritual . Book of Exodus could not be held in the safety of the laguna because it required enceinte speed than the space allowed for the spin and leaps that were vital to expressing real concern , triumph , liberation and transcendence . For Ea , it was just another chance for humiliation and failure .
She knew and respected the fact that Exodus was the Longi people ’s energising prayer of thanks to the sea for the survival of their seedpod . All calf learned the story of how the Longi had been forced out of their beautiful original homewater by the encroachment of the cruel barbaric Tursiops kindred . Their passage across the ocean from that moment was perilous and marked with many losses . It was immortalize in this group saltation of spinning , courtly and spontaneous falls and splashes , which traced a large circular shape that took the pod from the safety of the lagune out into the exposure of the huge where it reached its climax ; then on safe return to the homewater , everyone could put the story behind them for another yr .
Ea knew the narration backwards and fore . All the calves and tyke grew up vibrate by the annual summer practice of the adults just beyond the lagoon . They could not wait to learn the dazzling travelling spins and amazing percussive falls , and Ea ’s own mother often amount more than seven revolution . The spin link to sealed splash and falls which also had mean- ing both in the sounds underwater to the whole pod , and in the effervescent language they pulled down around them . But first you had to tune yourself , consistency and soul , to the music of the ocean . watch her mother ’s silver chassis throw out sparkling spirals of urine , awestruck little Ea had find it sublimely beautiful . Her mother ’s artistry left airy verse trailing in the body of water behind her ; her splattering and falls were rhymes of speech sound .
Now , years subsequently , Ea only felt apprehensiveness at the panorama of joining in . Spinning in Exodus could bring on a trance state , and she had many times witnessed her mother helping to restore the senses of those who had slide into it and could not regress alone . Sometimes hoi polloi had vision and even channelled spirits of the ancestors . Sometimes they believed they had already join the sea and had to be called back so that they did not prematurely pull up stakes their dead body for goodness . Then other people would gather around the one who was alive but drifting in another sea , and their touches and detent would bring them back to the pod . Ea already had trouble with her imagination , and so the very last affair she want was a frightening vision or uncontrolla- ble experience . The whalesong today was different . The tender sonic strain echoed in her judgment . Someone , somewhere , was a kindred feeling .
Excerpted from Pod by Laline Paull . issue by Pegasus Books , February 2023 .
Pod by Laline Paull will be released February 7 ; you’re able to pre - order a copyhere .
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