Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Page 20

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

A Whaley Death

Nate was five more days alone in the apartment before they came for him. It started at dawn on the sixth day, when he noticed a group of whaley boys gathering around below his window. There had been humans out on the streets since the day he'd told Cielle about the Colonel's plan, but Gooville hadn't quite returned to normal (given that normal in Gooville was still extraordinarily weird to begin with). He could tell that the humans and whaley boys alike were on edge. Today there were no humans in the streets, and all the whaley boys were emitting a shrill call that he was sure he'd heard before, but strangely enough it hadn't been in the city under the sea. Hearing the hunting call in these circumstances made him shudder.

He watch them gather, rubbing up against one another as if to strengthen the bond among them, milling around in small walking pods as if working off nervous energy, each of them raising his head occasionally and letting go the hunting call  -  flashing teeth, jaws snapping like bear traps. He knew they were coming.

Nate was dressed and waiting for them when they came through the door. Four of them took him, lifted him in the air by his legs and shoulders, and carried him over their heads down the stairs to the street, then on into the passageways. The whole crowd moved into the passageways, their calls becoming more frequent and deafeningly shrill in the smaller confines.

Even as his captors' long fingers dug into his flesh, a calm resolve came over Nate  -  an almost trancelike state, the acceptance that it was all going to be over soon. He looked to either side, only to have mouthfuls of teeth snarl at him, and even among the frenzy, here and there he heard the characteristic hissing snicker of a whaley-boy laugh. Well, they do know how to have a good time, he thought.

He soon recognized the path they were taking him down. He could hear the calls of hundreds of them echoing through the caverns from the mother-of-pearl amphitheater. Maybe the entire whaley-boy population was waiting there.

As they entered the amphitheater and the calls reached a crescendo, Nate stretched his neck and saw two big killer-whale-colored females holding the Colonel in the middle of the floor. The whaley boys holding Nate lowered him to his feet, and then two of them pulled him back against the benches to watch with the others.

One of the big females holding the Colonel shrieked a long, high call, and the crowd calmed down, not quite silent, but the hunting calls stopped. The Colonel's eyes were wide, and Nate wouldn't have been surprised if the old man had started to bark and foam at the mouth. When things quieted down enough for him to be heard, he started shouting. The big female who was holding him clamped a hand over his mouth. Nate could see the Colonel fighting for breath, and he struggled against his own captors in empathy. Then the female started to speak  -  in their whistling, clicking language  -  and the crowd stopped even snickering. Their eyes bulged, and they turned their heads to the side to better hear her.

Nate couldn't understand much of what she was saying, but you didn't have to know the language to understand what she was doing. She was listing the Colonel's crimes and pronouncing a sentence. It was no small irony, Nate thought, that the whaley boys who saw to justice were colored like the killer whales, the most intelligent, most organized, most glorious and horrible of all the marine mammals. The only animal other than man that had exhibited both cruelty and mercy, for one was not possible without potential for the other. Maybe memes were triumphing over genes after all.

When she finished speaking, she handed the Colonel's arm to the other female, so that he was bent over forward, his hands held together high behind him. Then the female let out another extended shrill call, and the whole ceiling of the amphitheater dimmed until it was completely dark. When she finished her call, the light came back up again. The Colonel was screaming at the top of his lungs, random curses and mad pronouncements  -  calling the whaley boys abominations, monsters, freaks, railing like some mad prophet, his brain fried by God's fingerprint. But when the light was full again, he caught Nate's eye, just for a second, and he was quiet. There was something there, the depth and wisdom that Nate had once known the man to possess, or maybe it was just sadness, but before Nate could decide, the big female bent over and bit off the Colonel's head.

Nate felt himself start to pass out. His vision tunneled down to a pinpoint and he fought to stay conscious, to concentrate on his breathing, which he realized had stopped momentarily. His vision came back, as did his breath, harsh and panicked through his gritted teeth as he watched.

The killer spit the head across the amphitheater to a group of whaley kids, who picked it up and tore at it with their teeth. Then the female started tearing great chunks of meat out of the Colonel's body with her teeth, even as it twitched in the hands of her cohort  -  throwing the chunks to the crowd, who shrilled the hunting calls even more frantically than before.

Nate couldn't tell how long it went on, but when it was finally done, and the Colonel was gone, there was a large red circle in the middle of the amphitheater floor, and all around him he saw bloody teeth flashing in whaley grins. Even the two whaley boys who held Nate's arms had partaken in the communion, grabbing chunks of meat and eating them with their free hands. One had hissed and sprayed blood in Nate's face. Then they dragged Nate to the middle of the amphitheater.

He felt faint, the pulse banging away in his ears, drowning out all other sound. Everywhere he looked, he saw bloody teeth and bulging eyes, but he felt strangely detached. As the big female began another oration, he remembered a thought he'd had right after the humpback whale had eaten him. It came through to him like a malicious d¨¦j¨¤ vu: What an incredibly stupid way to die.

Then there was another long, whistling call and Nate closed his eyes, waiting for the death blow, but it didn't come. The crowd had gone quiet again. He squinted through one eyelid, almost regretful that the moment had been delayed, and he saw teeth before him, but not the bloody teeth of the killers.

The shrill whistle went on and on, made by the mottled blue whaley-boy female that had come out of the passageway and was striding across the amphitheater toward Nate. At her side was a very determined, petite brunette with unnatural maroon highlights, wearing hiking shorts and a tank top. The whaley boys holding Nate seemed confused. The female who had killed the Colonel was looking for some sort of guidance from the one holding Nate when Amy pulled the stun gun from her pocket and blasted her in the chest, knocking her back five feet to convulse on the bloody floor.

"Let him go," Amy commanded the one who was holding Nate, and for some reason, maybe just because it sounded so definitive, she let go of Nate's arms, and he fell, at which time Amy pulled up a second stun gun and pressed it to the big killer's chest, knocking her to the floor to twitch with her companion. Through it all, Emily 7 had continued to whistle.

"You okay?" Amy asked Nate. He looked around at the situation, not sure at all if he was okay, but he nodded.

"Okay, Em," Amy said, and Emily stopped whistling.

Before the crowd could react or a murmur of whaleyspeak start, Amy shouted, "Hey, shut up!"

And they did.

"Nate didn't do anything," she continued. "The whole thing was the Colonel's idea, and none of us knew anything about it. He brought Nate here to help him destroy our city, and Nate said no. That's all you need to know. You all know me. This is my home, too. You know me. I wouldn't lie to you."

Just then the first big female started to recover, and Amy leaped in front of Nate to stand over the killer. "You get up, bitch, I'll knock you on your ass again. Your choice." The female froze. "Oh, fuck it," Amy said, and she zapped the big female on the nose with both stun guns at once, then wheeled on the other one, who was getting up but quickly dropped and played dead under Amy's gaze. "Good," Amy said.

"So we clear?" Amy shouted to the crowd.

There was whaleyspeak murmuring, and Amy screamed, "Are we fucking clear, people?"

"Yeah, clear," came a dozen little mashed-elf voices in English.

"Sure, sure, sure, you know it," said one little voice.

"Clear as a window," came another.

"Just kidding," said an elf-on-helium voice.

"Good," Amy said. "Let's go, Nate."

Nate was still trying to find his feet. His knees had gone a little rubbery when he thought his head was going to be bitten off. Emily 7 caught him by the arm and steadied him. Amy started to lead them out of the amphitheater, then stopped. "Just a second."

She went back to where the lead killer female was just climbing to her feet and zapped her in the chest with the stun gun, which knocked her flat on her back again.

As Amy strutted past Nate and Emily 7, she said, "Okay, now we can go."

"Where are we going?" Nate asked.

"Em says you slept with her."

Nate looked at Emily 7, who grinned, big and toothy, and snickered.

"Yeah, slept. Just slept. That's all. Tell her, Emily."

Emily whistled, actually a tune this time, and rolled her eyes.

"Really," Nate said.

"I know," Amy said.

"Oh." Nate heard squeaks coming from behind them in the corridor. "Wasn't that a little risky, taking on a thousand whaley boys with a couple of stun guns?"

"I love these things," Amy said, clicking the buttons to make miniature blue lightning arc across the contacts. "No, I didn't take on a thousand whaley boys, I took on one  -  an alpha female. Know what that makes me?" She smiled and then, without even breaking stride, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. "And never forget it."

"I won't." Then that last week's anxiety about losing her came tumbling back over him. "Hey, where did you go? I thought the Colonel had taken you."

"I went out on my mother's ship to send a message."

"What message?"

"I was calling our ride. All the whaley boys had been put on notice: No pilot was going to take his ship out of here with you on board, still won't. But I could go, so I went out with my mother to pick up some supplies. And I called a ride."

"What, Emily 7 can't pilot a ship?"

"Uh-uh," squeaked Emily 7.

"Only pilots can pilot a ship, duh. Anyway"  -  Amy checked her watch  -  "your ride should be in the harbor soon. I have to go by my place and grab something I want to take."

An hour later they stood at the water's edge in the harbor, and Amy was checking her watch again. "I am so pissed," she said, tapping her foot frantically.

It seemed as if every thirty seconds they had been cornered by some human resident of Gooville, and Amy had to tell the story again. Emily 7 was the only one of the whaley boys, other than the crew of Amy's mother's ship, that was still in the grotto.

"You think they'll revolt, hurt humans?" Nate asked.

"No, they'll be fine. That was a first. It's not every day you find out that your messiah is plotting to kill you. Give 'em a day or two to get over the embarrassment  -  everything will be back to normal."

"I guess it's just as well that we're getting out of here. You don't want to face those two females you zapped."

"Bring it on," Amy said, patting the pockets of her shorts. "Besides, I'm sort of special here, Nate. I don't want to sound egotistical, but they really all do know me, know who I am, what I am. No one will bother me."

Just then Nate spotted a light coming from deep in the mirror-calm water.

"That's him," Amy said.

"Him?"

"Clay, coming to take you home."

"Me? You mean us."

"Em, can I get a minute?" Amy said.

" 'Kay," said Emily 7, skulking away from the shore toward town.

When Emily was out of hearing range, Amy put her arms around Nate and leaned back to look at him. "I can't go with you, Nate. I'm staying."

"What do you mean? Why?"

"I can't go. There's something about me you don't know. Something I should have told you before, but I thought you wouldn't... well, you know  -  I thought you wouldn't love me."

"Please, Amy, please don't tell me you're a lesbian. Because I've been through that once, and I don't think I could survive it again. Please."

"No, nothing like that. It's about my parents... well, my father really."

"The navigator?"

"Uh, no, not really. Actually, Nate, this is my father. She pulled a small specimen jar out of her pocket and held it up. There was a pink, jellylike substance in it.

"That looks like  - »

"It is, Nate. It's the Goo. My mother was never intimate with her navigator, or with anyone in the first three years she was here, but one morning she woke up pregnant."

"And you're sure it was the Goo, not just that she had way too many mai-tais at the Gooville cabana club?"

"She knows it, and I know it, Nate. I'm sort of not normal."

"You feel normal." He pulled her closer.

"I'm not. For one thing, I don't just look a lot younger than I really am, but I'm also a lot stronger than I look, especially as a swimmer. Remember that day I found the humpback ship by sound? I really can hear directional sound underwater. And my muscle tissue is different. It stores oxygen the way a whale's tissue does, I can stay underwater without breathing for over an hour, longer if I don't exert myself. I'm the only one like me, Nate. I'm not really, you know... human."

Nate listened, trying to weigh what it really meant in the bigger picture, but he couldn't think of anything except that he wanted her to go with him, wanted her to be with him, no matter what she said she was. "I don't care, Amy. It doesn't matter. Look, I got over all this"  -  he gestured to all that  -  "and the fact that you're sixty-four years old and your mother is a famous dead aviatrix. As long as you don't start liking girls, I'll be fine."

"That's not the point, Nate. I can't leave here, not for long anyway. None of us can. Even the ones who weren't born here. The Goo becomes part of you. It takes care of you, but you become attached to it, almost literally. Like an addiction. It gets in your tissues by contact. That's how my mother had me. I've been gone a lot already this year. If I left now, or if I left for longer that a few months at a time, I'd get sick. I'd probably die."

At that moment a yellow research submersible bubbled up to the surface of the lagoon, a dozen headlights blazing into the grotto around a great Plexiglas bubble in the front.

"That's it, then. I'll stay. I don't mind, Amy. I'll stay here. We can live here. I could spend a lifetime learning about this place, the Goo."

"You can't do that either. It will become part of you, too. If you stay too long, you won't be able to leave either. You had to have noticed that first night we got drunk together, how fast you recovered from the hangover."

Nate thought about how quickly his wounds had healed, too  -  weeks, maybe months of healing overnight. There was no other explanation. He thought about spending his life with only fleeting glimpses of sunlight, and he said, "I don't care. I'll stay."

"No you won't. I won't let you. You have things to do." She shoved the specimen jar in his pocket, then kissed him hard. He kissed her back, for a long time.

The hatch at the top of the dry exit tower on the sub opened, and Clay popped up to see Nate and Amy for the first time since they'd both disappeared.

"Well, that's unprofessional," Clay said.

Amy broke the kiss and whispered, "You go. Take that with you." She patted his pocket. Then she turned to Clay as she checked her watch again. "You're late!"

"Hey, missy, I set a time when I'd be at the coordinates you sent  -  six hundred and twenty-three feet below sea level  -  and I was there. You didn't mention that I had another mile of submarine cave with some of the scariest-looking rock formations I've ever seen." He glanced at Nate. "They looked alive."

"They are alive," Amy said.

"Are we close to the surface? The pressure is  - »

"I'll explain on the way," Nate said. "We'd better go." Nate stepped onto the sub as Clay slipped down inside the hatch to allow him to pass. Nate crawled into the hatch and looked back to Amy before he closed it.

"I'll stay, Amy. I don't care. For you I'll stay. I love you. You know that, right?"

She nodded and brushed tears out of her eyes. "Yeah," she said, Then she spun around quickly and started walking away. "You take care of yourself, Nathan Quinn," she shouted over her shoulder, and Nate heard her voice break when she said his name.

He climbed down into the sub and secured the hatch above him.

Clay had watched Amy walk away from the big, half-submerged Plexiglas bubble in the front of the sub.

"Where's Amy going?"

"She can't come home, Clay."

"She's okay, though?"

"She's okay."

"You okay?"

"I've been better."

They were quiet for the long ride through the pressure locks to the outside ocean, just the sound of the electric motors and the low hum of instruments all around them. The lights of the sub barely reached out to the walls of the cave, but every hundred yards or so they would come to a large, pink disk of living tissue, like a giant sea anemone, which would fold back to let them pass, then expand to fill the passageway once they had gone through. Nate watched the pressure gauge rise one atmosphere every time they passed through one of the gates, and it was then that he realized he wasn't escaping at all. The Goo knew exactly where and what they were, and it was letting him go.

"You're going to explain what all this is, right?" Clay said, not even looking away from the controls.

Nate was startled out of his reverie. "Clay, I can't believe  -  I mean, I believe it, but  -  Thanks for coming to get me."

"I never told you, you know  -  it's not really appropriate or anything  -  but I have pretty strong feelings about loyalty."

"Well, I respect that, Clay, and I appreciate it."

"Yeah, well, don't mention it."

Then they were both a bit embarrassed and both pretended that something was irritating their throats and they had to cough and pay attention to their breathing for a while, even though the air in the little submarine was filtered and humidified and perfectly clean.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Pirates

Nate was standing with Clay on the flying bridge of the Clair as she steamed into the Au'au Channel.

"You'd better put on some sunscreen, Nate."

Nate looked down at his forearms. He'd lost most of his color while in Gooville, and he could feel the sun cooking him, even through his T-shirt.

"Yeah." He looked off toward Lahaina, the harbor he'd piloted into a thousand times. They'd have to anchor far outside the breakwater with a ship this size, but it still had the feeling of coming home. The wind was warm and sweet, the water the heartbreak blue of a newborn's eyes. A humpback fluked about eight hundred yards to the north of them, its tail glistening in the sun as if it were covered with sequins.

"There's still a month left of the season," Clay said. "We can still get some work done."

"Clay, I've been thinking. Maybe we can be a little more purposeful in what we're doing. Maybe a little more active, conservation-wise."

"I could go for that. I like whales."

"I mean, we have the resources now, and even if I could prove the meaning of the song  -  somehow decipher the vocabulary of it  -  I could never prove the purpose. You know, without compromising Gooville."

"Not a good idea." During the trip home Nate had explained it all.

"I mean, there's no reason we can't do good science and still, you know  - »

"Kick some ass."

"Well, yeah."

Clay affected an exaggerated Greek accent. "Sometimes, boss, you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble."

"Zorba?"

"Yeah." Clay grinned.

"Great book," Nate said. "Is that the Always Confused?"

Clay pulled up a pair of binoculars and focused on a speedboat that was rounding the Lahaina breakwater, showing more wake than she should in the harbor. Kona was driving the Always Confused.

"My boat," Clay said, somewhat distressed.

"You need to get over that, Clay."

The speedboat came around to a parallel course with the Clair as the ship cut her engines in preparation to drop anchor. Kona was waving and screaming like a madman. "Irie, Bwana Nate! Irie! The lion come home! Praise Jah's mercy. Irie!"

Nate came down the steps from the flying bridge to the deck. Whatever resentment he might have had for the surfer at one time was gone. Whatever threat he might have felt from the boy had melted away. Whatever irrelevancy Kona's youth and strength might have underscored in his own character was irrelevant. Maybe it was time to be an example instead of a competitor. Besides, he was genuinely glad to see the kid. "Hey, kid, how you doing?"

"Jammin' now, don't you know."

"That's good. How'd you like to go be a pirate?"

Because the Navy didn't maintain permanent offices on Maui, Captain L. J. Tarwater had been given a small office that the navy sublet for him in the Coast Guard building, which meant that, unlike on a naval base, here the public could pretty much come and go as they wished. So Tarwater wasn't that surprised to see someone come strolling through his office door. What he was surprised by was that it was Nathan Quinn, whom he thought quite drowned, and who was carrying a four-gallon glass jar full of some clear liquid.

"Quinn, I thought you were lost at sea."

"I was. I'm found now. We need to have a chat." He set the jar on Tarwater's desk, leaving a wet ring on some papers there, then went back and shut the door to the outer offices.

"Look, Quinn, if this is some kind of stunt, like spray-painting fur, you're wasting your time. You guys act like the military is the great Satan. I'm here to study these animals. I grew up in the same generation you did, and so did most of the people in the navy who do what I do. We don't want to hurt these animals."

"Okay," Nate said. "We only have two things to talk about here. Then I'll show you something."

"What's in the jar? That better not be kerosene or anything."

"It's seawater. I got it at the beach about ten minutes ago. Don't worry about it. Look, first you're going to finish your study and you're going to strongly recommend that the navy's torpedo range not be moved into the sanctuary. You will not let that happen. The animals do dive to depths where they can be hurt by the explosions, and they will be hurt by the explosions, which you'll be setting off not to defend the country but just so you guys can practice."

"There's no evidence that they ever dive deeper than two hundred feet."

"There will be. I've got data tags coming in from the mainland, I'll have data in a month."

"Still..."

"Shut up," Nate said, then thought better of it and added, "Please." Then he continued. "Second, you need to do everything in your power to back off of testing low-frequency active sonar. We know that it kills deepwater hunters like beaked whales, and there's probably some chance that it also injures the humpbacks, and under no circumstances do you want to do that."

"And why would that be?"

"You know what my work has been for the last twenty-five years, right?"

"You've been studying the humpback song. What, trying to figure its purpose?"

"I found it, Tarwater. It's a prayer. The singers are praying."

"That's preposterous. There's no way you could know that."

"I'm positive of it. Absolutely positive. I know it's a prayer, and that the torpedo base and LFA will harm a God-fearing animal." Nate paused to let it sink in, but Tarwater just looked at him like he was an annoying rodent that had crawled in from the cane fields.

"How could you possibly know that, Quinn?"

"Because their prayers are answered." Nate took a portable tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and set it on the desk next to the seawater, into which he'd already mixed part of the Goo that Amy had given him. He pushed the «play» button, and the sound of humpback-whale song filled the office.

"This is ridiculous," Tarwater said.

"Watch," Nate said, pointing to the water, which began to swirl, a tiny pink vortex forming in the middle.

"Get out of here. I'm not impressed with your Mr. Wizard tricks, Quinn."

"Watch," Nate said again. As they watched, the pink vortex expanded while the whale song played, until half the jar was filled with a moving pink stain. Then Nate turned off the tape.

"So what?" Tarwater said.

"Look more closely." Nate opened the jar, reached in, strained out some of the pink, and threw it on Tarwater's desk. Tiny shrimp  -  each only an inch long  -  flipped about on the blotter. "Krill," Nate said.

Tarwater didn't say anything. He just looked at the krill, then scraped a couple into his hand and examined them more closely. "They are krill."

"Uh-huh."

"What, it's like Sea Monkees, right? You had brine-shrimp eggs in there."

"No, Captain Tarwater, I did not. The humpbacks are praying, and God is answering them, giving them food. We could run this little experiment a hundred times, and that water would be clear when we started and full of krill when we ended. Trust me, I've done it." And he had. The little bit of Goo in the water created the krill out of the other life in there, the ubiquitous SAR-11 bacteria that existed in every liter of seawater on the planet.

Tarwater held up the krill. "But I thought they didn't eat when they were here."

"You're thinking on too small a scale. They don't feed for four months, and then they do nothing but feed. They're thinking in advance  -  the way you might think about breakfast before you go to bed at night. Doesn't matter, really. What you need to do, Captain, is everything in your power and influence to stop the range and the LFA testing."

Tarwater looked stunned now. "I'm just a captain."

"But you're an ambitious captain. I can have a jar of seawater on the secretary of the navy's desk in ten hours. Do you really want to be the one to explain to this administration that you're hurting an animal that prays to God? Particularly this administration?"

"No, sir, I do not," said Tarwater, looking decidedly more frightened than he had been just a second before.

"I thought you were an intelligent man. I trust you'll handle this, and this will be the last anyone will hear of my jar."

"Yes, sir," Tarwater said, more out of habit than respect.

Nate took his tape recorder and his jar and walked out, grinning to himself, thinking about the praying humpbacks. Of course, it's not your particular God, he thought, but they do pray, and their god does feed them.

He headed back to Papa Lani to make the calls and write the paper that would torpedo any hope of Jon Thomas Fuller's ever building a captive dolphin petting zoo on Maui.

A pirate's work is never done.

Three months later the Clair cruised into the cold coastal waters off Chile on her way to Antarctica to intercept, stop, harass, and generally make business difficult for the Japanese whaling ship Kyo Maru. Clay was at the helm, and when the ship reached a precise point on the GPS receiver, he ordered the engines cut. It was a sunny day, unusually calm for this part of the Pacific. The water was so dark blue it almost appeared black.

Clair was below in their cabin. She'd been seasick for most of the voyage, but she had insisted on coming along despite the nausea, using her saber-edged persuasive skills on the captain. ("Who's got the pirate booty? All right, then, help me pack.")

Nate stood on the deck at the bow, his arm around Elizabeth Robinson. Above them swung an eighteen-foot rigid-hull Zodiac on a crane, ready to drop into the water whenever it was needed. There was another one on the stern, where once the submarine had been stowed. Up on the flying bridge, Kona scanned the sea around them with a pair of «big-eye» binoculars on a heavy iron mount that was welded to the railing.

"There's one, a thousand yards."

Clay came out onto the walkway beside Kona. They all looked to starboard, where the residual cloud of a whale blow was hanging over the calm water.

"Another one!" Clay shouted, pointing to a second blow closer to the ship off the port bow.

Then they started firing into the air as if triggered by a chained fuse: whale blows of different shapes, heights, and angles  -  great explosions of spray erupting so close to the ship now that the decks started to glisten with the moisture. Then the backs of the great whales rolled in the water around them, gray and black and blue, hills of slick flesh on all sides, moving slowly, then lying in the water. Nate and Elizabeth moved up to the bow railing and watched a group of sperm whales lolling in the water like logs just a few feet off the bow. Next to them a wide right whale floated, bobbing gently in the swell, only a slow wave of the tail revealing that the creature was alive. It rolled to one side, and its eye bulged as it looked at them.

"You okay?" Nate asked Elizabeth, squeezing her shoulder. This was the first time she'd been out on the water in over forty years. In her hands she clutched a brown paper lunch bag.

"They're still amazing up close. I'd forgotten."

"Just wait."

There were probably a hundred animals of different species around the ship now, most rolled on their side, one eye bulged out to focus in the air. Their blows settled into a syncopated rhythm, like cylinders of some great engine firing in succession.

Kona jumped up and down next to Clay, praising Jah and laughing as each animal breathed or flicked a tail. "Irie, my whaley friends!" he shouted, waving to the animals close to the boat. Clay desperately resisted the urge to grab up cameras and start blasting film or digital video. It felt like he had to pee, really badly, from his eyes.

"Nate," Clay called, and he pointed to a bubble net forming just outside the ring of floating whales. They'd seen them dozens of times in Alaska and Canada, one humpback circling and releasing a stream of bubbles to corral a school of fish while others plunged up through the middle to catch them. The circle of bubbles became more pronounced on the surface, as if the water were boiling, and then a single humpback breached through the ring, cleared the water completely, and landed on its side in white crater of splash and spray.

"Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth said. Flustered, she pressed her face into Nate's jacket, then looked back quickly, lest she miss something.

"They're showing off," Clay said.

The lolling whales lazily paddled out of the way, opening a corridor to the ship. The humpback motorboated toward the bow, its knobby face riding on top of the water. When it was only ten yards from the bow, the animal rose up in the water and opened its mouth. Amy stood up, and next to her stood James Poynter Robinson.

"Hey, can we get a ladder down here?" Amy shouted.

"Praise Jah's mercy," Kona said, "the Snowy Biscuit has come home."

Nate threw a cargo net over the side, then climbed halfway down and pulled Amy up onto the net. He held her there as the ship moved in the swell, and she tried to kiss him and nearly chipped a tooth.

"Help me with Elizabeth," Nate said.

Together they got the Old Broad down the cargo net and handed her to her husband, who stood on the tongue of a whale and hugged his bride after not seeing her for four decades.

"You look so young," Elizabeth said.

"We can fix that," he said.

"You'll get old?"

"Nope." He looked back to Nate and saluted. Nate could hear whaley-boy pilots snickering inside the whale.

"I brought you a pastrami on rye," she said.

Poynter took the paper bag from her as if he were accepting the Holy Grail.

Nate and Amy scrambled up the cargo net and stood at the bow as the whale drifted away from the bow.

"Thank you, Nate," the Old Broad said, waving. "Thank you, Clay."

Nate smiled. "We'll see you soon, Elizabeth."

"We will, you know," Amy said as the whale ship closed and sank back into the waves.

"I know."

"I have to come back here every few months, you know."

"I know."

"Forever."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm the new colonel now. I'm sort of in charge down there, you know, since I'm sort of the daughter of their god. So we'll have to spend time down there."

"Do I have to call you 'Colonel'?"

"What, you have a problem with that?"

"No, I'm okay with that."

"You realize that the Goo really could decide to wipe out the human species at any minute."

"Yep. Same as it's always been."

"And you know if I live out here, I'm not always going to, you know, look like this?"

"I know."

"But I will always be luscious, and you  -  you will always be a hopeless nerd."

"Action nerd," Nate corrected.

"Ha!" Amy said.

AUTHOR NOTES

Science and Magic

"The science you don't know looks like magic," Kona says in Chapter 30. I have generally come down on the side of magic, simply because it involves less math, but with Fluke it was necessary to learn a little science. Because so much of Fluke does fall into the realm of magic, though, I thought it only fair to give you, gentle reader, some idea of what's fact and what's not.

The body of knowledge on cetacean biology, especially as it relates to behavior, is growing at such a staggering rate that it's hard to be sure of what you know from one day to the next. (This happens to be exactly the way I live my life, so that worked out nicely.) Scientists have been studying humpback song for fewer than forty years, and it's only in the last decade that studies have been undertaken to try to relate the song to social behavior and interaction. (And a challenging question there: What constitutes interaction in an animal whose voice can carry a thousand miles?) As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters. There is no reasonable explanation for this, but as of yet no tagged humpbacks have been tracked to the New Age section at Sam Goody's.)

At this point no one has ever seen or filmed the mating of humpbacks, so while it would appear that the song has something to do with mating, because it is performed only by males and because it is sung only during the mating season, no one has drawn a direct correlation between the song and mating. Theories abound: The males are marking territory sonically, they are showing their fitness and size by singing, they are calling mates, they are just saying «howdy»  -  all of the above, none of the above. The fact remains that, regardless of its purpose, the humpback-whale song is the most complex piece of nonhuman composition on earth. Whether it's art, prayer, or a booty call, the humpback song is an amazing thing to experience firsthand, and I suspect that even once the science of it is put to bed, it will remain, as long as they sing, magic.

Beyond the song, much of the whale behavior and biology described in Fluke is accurate, or as accurate as I could keep it and not overburden the story. (Excepting the whale ships, the whaley boys, and every killer whale's being named Kevin, all of which I made up. Killer whales are actually all named Sam. Duh.) The acoustic data, and the analysis thereof, is generally balderdash. While scientists do indeed collect data in the manner described, much of the analysis process came from my imagination. For the record, though, low-frequency whale calls can and do travel thousands of miles under the sea.

While the Lahaina Harbor is indeed inundated with whale researchers every winter, and while there are indeed lectures given periodically at the Whale Sanctuary visitor center, the acrimony, competition, and tension described among the researchers is completely of my own creation, as are the individual descriptions and personalities of the characters. Tension among a bunch of neurotics is just more interesting for a story than is a description of dedicated professionals doing their work and getting along, which is the case in reality. When in doubt, assume I made it up.

CONSERVATION

The reason we shouldn't kill whales is because they fire the imagination.

-  JAMES DARLING, PH.D.

Hey, I thought they were saved already! No one likes the "We're glad you enjoyed this story about the rainforest with all its cute little animals and charming native people, BECAUSE IT WILL ALL BE A CHARRED DESERT NEXT WEEK!" approach, and I hate to do it to you, but you should know that much of the conservation information in Fluke is accurate. They aren't quite saved.

The Japanese and the Norwegians continue to practice whaling, each taking up to five hundred minke whales a year under "scientific research" permits (the meat ends up in markets in Europe and Asia). Despite "free market" arguments to the contrary, whaling is not a profitable business in Japan. It is subsidized by the government, and, to bolster consumer demand, they have introduced whale meat into the school lunch program so children will develop a taste for it. (Good thinking there. Don't we all crave the cafeteria cuisine of our youth? Mmmm, mashed peas.) Biologists working undercover in Japanese markets (spy nerds), by running DNA tests, have found endangered whale species (including blue whale) in cans of whale meat labeled as "minke whale meat." (So someone is still killing them.)

Except for scientific whaling, the International Whaling Commission's moratorium on hunting great whales is still in effect, but several whaling nations are rallying hard to have the moratorium lifted and finance survey studies to prove that great-whale populations, including humpbacks and grays, have recovered enough for them to resume hunting. The U.S. antiwhaling position in the IWC is severely compromised by the fact that they support aboriginal whaling  -  that is, subsistence hunting by indigenous people. The argument for aboriginal whaling by the actual indigenous people is seldom made on a basis of subsistence, but more often because hunting whales is a "cultural tradition of their people that must be preserved." This, of course, is utter bullshit. It's a tradition of Americans of European descent to commit genocide on indigenous people, but that doesn't mean we ought to start doing it again. Even some old ideas are still bad ideas.

While it is true that many whale species seem to be recovering, like the gray and the humpback, other populations still struggle, and some, like the North Atlantic right whale, may yet disappear from the planet. (Not due to hunting, but as one researcher, whom I won't name, said, "because they're stupid as shit and won't get out of the way when they hear a ship coming." Hell, I almost wreck when a squirrel runs in front of my car, and there're millions of them. I can't imagine trying to keep a supertanker from going in the ditch while swerving to avoid one of the last remaining right whales.) Recent surveys estimate (and they can only estimate, because scientists can't find enough of the animals to actually count  -  I guess when you find one, you just have to count the bejeezus out of him, then extrapolate with algorithms and computer projections) that there may be fewer than three hundred North Atlantic right whales left in the world.

But on a happier note, some of the populations are recovering, and although the Japanese government appears to be a bunch of nimrods (and who are we to talk?), the Japanese people seem more interested in watching whales than eating them, so the pressure to extend the hunt may relent.

The kicker to all this is probably that habitat loss and pollution, not hunting, present the greatest threat to marine mammals. (Wha...? Habitat loss, don't they have the whole ocean?) For the most part our oceans are great, wet deserts, with millions of square miles in which life is very sparse. Predictably, human populations have started to compete with marine mammals for the food sources, and, under increased demand and improved fishing methods, many once rich fishing grounds are becoming as barren as a clear-cut forest. Hydroelectric dams that restrict the migration of salmon and other species to their freshwater breeding grounds are already having an impact on the populations of marine mammals that feed on the adult salmon.

As industrial pollution and agricultural runoff take toxic chemicals to the ocean, it would seem that the enormous volume of seawater would dilute these chemicals to harmless levels, and that's what happens until the chemicals are gathered up by a mechanism called the food chain. Recent studies of tissue samples of some toothed whales (killer whales and dolphins, who feed fairly high up on the food chain) show levels of man-made toxins so high that the animal's blubber actually qualifies as toxic waste. Studies are now going on to determine if declining marine mammal populations on the west coast of North America may not be caused by the lower birth rates and the compromised immune systems of animals who feed on toxic fish. (Oh yeah, guess who else is at the top of the seafood chain?)

You want to help? Pay attention. Caring about the condition of our oceans does not make you a psycho, tree-hugging, bleeding-heart liberal, it just makes you smart. The health of all life on this planet depends on the health of the oceans. It's just good business. (Even a supply-sider has to admit that if you fish a population to extinction, there will be no supply, so there will be no demand. It's bad economics from the right or the left.) So watch what you eat, and don't eat fish that are being over-fished (like Chilean sea bass, for instance). And don't pour the used oil from your oil change down the storm drain unless you want your next shrimp platter to taste like Quaker State and you sort of like the idea of having your own children born with flippers.

And go look at some whales. Not captive ones, wild ones. It all comes down to economics, and as long as it's more profitable to have whales around to look at, we'll have them around to look at. If you don't live near water and can't get to any, rent a whale video. It all comes around.

Barring that, just yell at people randomly to stop killing whales. It could catch on. Really.

("Would you like fries with that?"

"Shut up and stop killing whales!"

"Thank you. Drive through, please.")

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, my thanks to the home team: to Charlie Rodgers, as usual, for thoughtful reads and cogent comments; to my editor, Jennifer Brehl; and to my agent, Nicholas Ellison, who a couple of years ago said, "Hey, how about a book about whale song? I don't know  -  like there's meaning in it or something. You figure it out." Blame or credit goes to Nick for that. As always, thanks to Dee Dee Leichtfuss for being my "reader without an agenda." Thanks, too, to Galen and Lynn Rathbun, for taking time away from studying the hose-nose shrew to fill me in on the home life of the field biologist and for putting me in touch with the people at NOAA.

My thanks also to Kurt Preston for geological information, to Dr. David Kirkpatrick for information on genetics, to Mark Joseph for my "Introduction to Sonar" phone lecture, and to Bret Huffman for Rasta-Pidgin tutoring.

Much of the background on genes, evolution, and memes came from the work of Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, and others; also from Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and from Susan Blakemore's excellent book The Meme Machine. I recommend them all for further reading, but when you're finished, you may have to read several of my books and watch a lot of TV just to get stupid enough again to function in the modern world again. Fortunately I am gifted in this respect and have recovered nicely, thank you.

The laser-measurement algorithm described in Chapter 1 was formulated by Dr. John Calambokidis of the Cascadia Research Collective. He should get credit for that as well as for many other contributions to the field.

Many of the research anecdotes I used in Fluke were fashioned out of stories told to me by the researchers themselves. The story of the Japanese whalers being affected by seeing a mother sperm whale and her calf (Chapter 30) was told to me by Bob Pittman of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. The story of the Pacific Biological Research Project, where the military funded a feasibility study to use seabirds as a biological-warfare vector, was told to me by Lisa Ballance, Bob's wife, who also works at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

Thanks, too, to Dr. Wayne Ferryman, also from NOAA, who shared many hours of stories, providing me with information about the lifestyles of researchers. My thanks to Dr. Ferryman as well for inviting me to observe the California gray whale survey in person and not insisting that I always bring the pizza.

Thanks to Jay Barlow from NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center for information on navy research projects and the relationship between researchers and the navy. Much of which I blew off so I could put Captain Tarwater in Maui, but still, thanks, Jay.

My thanks, too, to Carol DeLancey of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Program, who told me the great story of the female right whale using a researcher's Zodiac as a diaphragm while the researchers were assaulted by a pair of prehensile whale willies (Chapter 8)  -  something that happened directly to Dr. Bruce Mate, but which I embellished in that I don't believe that the whales ejaculated in the boat, and Dr. Mate did not become a lesbian.

For information on underwater acoustics and the nature and range of blue-whale calls, much of which I totally ignored, many thanks to Dr. Christopher G. Fox of the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. It was Chris's description of an unidentified, persistent throbbing noise coming from deep under the Pacific Ocean, somewhere off the coast of Chile, that first inspired the undersea city of Gooville.

For the inside story on harbor life in Lahaina and the dating life of the female researcher, my thanks to Rachel Cartwright and Captain Amy Miller, who study humpback cow/calf behavior and biology in Maui in the winter and Alaska in the summer.

My thanks, too, to Kevin Keyes for whale and dolphin stories, as well as for his infinite patience in teaching me ocean kayaking and providing the "cold-water discipline" safety training that probably kept me from drowning while trying to get out among the animals.

Finally, my deepest thanks to Dr. Jim Darling, Flip Nicklin, and Meagan Jones, who for two seasons allowed me to ride along and observe their research in Maui, as well as for giving generously of their time to answer my questions both in person and by e-mail. While most of the information about humpbacks and humpback song in Fluke came out of these trips, the inaccuracies and liberties taken with the information are my own. The anecdotes and science I learned from these folks, all of whom have spent their lives working in the field, were enough to fill two books, and were certainly too voluminous to list here. Simply put, this book would not have been possible without their help. Kinder, more intelligent, more dedicated people than these do not the face of this earth walk.

To support their ongoing research on humpback song and behavior, send your tax-deductible donations to:

Whale Trust

300 Paani Place

Paia, HI 96779