"Brookida switched to Anglic. Though somewhat shrill and stuttered, it was better than Toshio's Trinary. Dolphins, after all, had been modified by generations of genetic engineering to take up human styles, not the other way around." Part 1, Buoyancy, Chapter 1, pgs. 7-8.

"Once upon a time the Tursiops, or bottlenose dolphin, had been about the least likely cetacean to beach himself. But genetic engineering had upset the balance somewhere. As the genes of other species were spliced onto the basic Tursiops model, a few things had been thrown out of kilter. For three generations human geneticists had been working on the problem. But for now the fins swam along a knife edge, where irrationality was a perpetual danger." Part 1, Buoyancy, Chapter 7, pgs. 39-40.

"That the ship was still in one piece was amazing. In its Mach five meeting with the ocean, it had caromed off at least two small...