Alien planet traveller ends up talking to marine biologist who talks to the "Dwellers" alien cetacea

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Psimon

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Hei, Alien planet traveller ends up talking to marine biologist who talks to the "Dwellers" alien cetaceans. I've read it years ago pre 2000 probably pre 1990 also in short story compilation book. I think it was possibly Philip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein. Can you help?

Kind regards

Psi
 
If they’re called “Deep Dwellers” then this is Walter Jon Williams’ “Surfacing” (1988) and can be found in his collection Facets, amongst others.
 
I found a story I have been searching for for YEARS, about a marine biologist who learns to communicate with alien (to humans) underwater dwellers. People call them dekabrachs, for the ten branched arms.

Just found it today. Well, they're not cetaceans. I had remembered it as decapods: not wrong, but making it harder to find the story I thought I'd never find.

It's why I bookmarked this question: being driven nutz by an unfound story in a world seemingly with collective ignorance or collective amnesia about it. And it seemed similar.

"The Gift of Gab" by Jack Vance has a nasty person poisoning the dekabrach by pouring acid in its water tank. It suffers but lives to tell the biologist "Man. Give. Hot. Water".

You don't forget a thing like that.
It is evocative of Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life"/film "Arrival" in that respect. It's got dekabrachs instead of heptapods.

Not cetaceans though! But it's anthologized enough to find it if it intrigues. (I can't bend my mind around the possibility of not being intrigued by it.)
 
Series of stories about a man who acquires a massive spaceship once part of the Ecological Service. He hires out to planets that need things changed. One is about a colony that's being attacked by sea creatures (I forget their type). They hire the ES to get rid of them. The man who owns the ship ends up talking to the sea creatures and negotiating a treaty between the humans on land and the creatures in the sea. Stories were collected in a book: "Tuf Voyaging" by George R R Martin. Haviland Tuf is the man who controls the Ecological Service ship.
 
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