Exodus 2022 (28 page)

Into oblivion
, his mind told him.
Death.

This is where I die.

Everything he’d ever experienced—every molecule of muscle memory—told him that no other outcome was possible.

The body he now inhabited was huge—he realized that immediately—and heavy. Immensely heavy.

And it was hurtling off a cliff. Flying off a cliff. Shooting forward with stupendous velocity and momentum.

Joe’s homo sapien brain registered the instant as a perverse physics equation: mass plus inertia equals death.

This is where I die.

And then his perception clarified slightly, and he screamed again. A scream of joy this time.

This mountain is alive.

This mountain is a wave.

This mountain is liquid. Fluid. Water. And water is where I live!

Understanding unfurled in his mind then like the seascape opening wide in every direction.

The body he was in—Mia’s body—dolphined through the waves and took a breath. An enormous breath, a hundred times the amount of air his human lungs breathed during the most extreme exertion.

He looked around. Tried to process everything at once, seize the moment, knowing it wouldn’t last. Couldn’t last.

A moment is all I have.

He shoved everything else aside—cares, fears, worries—and took the helm of the body he was in, the creature he had temporarily become.

What an extraordinary creature it was.

Fast. Agile. Immensely, insanely powerful.

He felt an electric jolt as his, or rather, Mia’s, tail fluke came down, driving her body forward—hurling it forward—like an afterburner catapulting a fighter jet—pectorals steering, dorsal fin slicing the water like a blade. A rush of speed that sent chills skittering along his spine like perfectly skipped stones.

Extraordinary.

Joe laughed. He’d always been a good swimmer. A strong swimmer. Swam for his high school team all four years and made varsity, no problem.

What a joke.

Calling what a human—any human—did in the water “swimming” was laughable. Like calling a chicken’s spastic fluttering “flying.”

Not the same thing. Not at all.

Joe sensed others around him and realized now that he was swimming in a group. Swimming in formation. He felt the rhythm of the pod, embraced it, and—gazing out through Mia’s cetacean, utterly nonhuman eyes—perceived the world, the universe, in an entirely new light.

He was among hunters. Predators. Creatures patient, strategic, and cunning.

Bane of lesser whales, nightmare specter to seals, sea lions and all manner of creatures, the orcas were afraid of nothing. An entire school of great white sharks would stand no chance against one of these individuals.

Hunters? Yes. Apex predators? Definitely.

But Joe saw that the beings arrayed around him were many other things as well. As full of surprises and contradictions as any of their human cousins.

He could feel their minds, bright and inquisitive. Vessels of light illuminating the deep. And he longed for more time.

It was not to be.

Amid the blizzard of stimuli, amid the tsunami of information flooding his mind, a few things about the pack stood out. Facts. Truths that would linger in his memory.

First, there was love. Love all around him. Love tinged with humor, tinged with sadness, tinged with grace. Love deep and profound and ancient. Love between family members. Between mates. Between parent and offspring, young and aged, members of long-separated clans.

Love of Earth, sea, and sky.

The love that connected these creatures—to each other, to place—was palpable. An underlying vibe as steady and constant as a heartbeat.

Something else: he could tell that the whales around him—they all had names, though he didn’t know the names, didn’t know how to say them—were aware that Mia had gone away. That a foreign mind resided now, momentarily, in her body.

Joe felt the whales closing ranks around him, guiding, observing, shepherding him, until Mia’s return.

Good thing
, he thought.
Since I have no idea what to do or how to act or how to be, inside this body.

The body he was in—Mia’s body—could see extraordinarily well. Above the waves. Below the waves. Close up and far away.

But visual information was only part of the “seeing” he was experiencing now. Some of the pictures entering his head were of creatures and objects far below, or hundreds of feet to the right or left. Things he could not possibly know about via rods and cones and optic nerves alone.

Halibut on the seafloor. A school of herring hugging the cliffs in the inlet up ahead. Another pod of whales a mile to the right. He could “see” them all. Not vague, murky shapes, but crisp, colorful, spectacularly detailed images. Pictures rich and vibrant.

Sound travels four times faster in the water than in the air—he’d read that somewhere once. Maybe that physical law accounted for the speed with which images registered in his mind.

In any case, thirty million years of evolution had given these creatures gifts and talents humans could not begin to imagine.

Peering out through Mia’s eyes, listening for the constant stream of clicks and whistles departing and returning to her body, Joe understood that for the orca there was no gloom, no inky blackness, no crevice or canyon cloaked by distance or depth or turbidity.

He’d heard people say that orcas “echolocate.” It was a spectacular understatement. Like saying Michelangelo painted church ceilings.

The whales around him were talking, conversing as they moved, chatting in overlapping phrases—short bursts and long trains of complex-sounding dialogue. A symphony of whistles, clicks, and nanosecond pulses.

A few minutes here and I’ll understand what they’re saying,
Joe thought.

A few minutes swimming with the pod, settling into Mia’s head, and it will all come clear.

But he didn’t have a few minutes. The clock was ticking. The trade couldn’t last.

Joe focused on the conversation, the symphony coming at him from all sides. Let it flow over him. Through him.

Like listening to space aliens,
he thought.

Incomprehensible.

No.

Wait.

The conversation resolved slightly, like a picture coming slowly into focus. He couldn’t fully understand it yet, but the gist was clear.

They’re saying good-bye.

The revelation surprised him.

They’re saying good-bye,
and they’re full of sadness.

He let the conversation flow, let it swirl around in his mind.

The pod swam on.

They’re saying good-bye to this place. Grieving for all the places they’ve ever been.

There was a finality about their “words,” their phrases, that touched his heart. Broke his heart.

He realized something else.

It isn’t speech I’m hearing.

It’s song.

He listened.

It was true. The pod was singing. Singing a prayer. Singing together. Not just this group but all of the whales within a hundred miles.

All of them.

He listened. Tried to understand. Swam on.

Strange images filled his mind, images conveyed, or conjured, by the song itself.

This is the land and sea as it was
, he thought, looking ahead and scanning the shoreline as the pod rolled forward.

This is the same place we’re swimming through as it was ages and epochs ago, when the sea was healthy and brimming with life. When salmon choked the rivers and orcas numbered in the tens of thousands.

Where earlier he’d glimpsed lobotomized hillsides—shoreline eviscerated by clear-cuts, he saw now lush ancient forest and waterfalls too numerous to count. Streams choked with salmon, flashing like diamonds.

This is how it looked when the planet was healthy. When the sea was healthy. When life was abundant.

The pod swam on, and questions filled Joe’s mind.

Did these creatures pass memories intact from one generation to the next? Was this the land and sea as it had actually looked?

He didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know.

He marveled at his companions, Mia’s kin, traveling with him, all around him; creatures full of light, they seemed.

Full of grace. More like angels than flesh and blood organisms.

And it struck him that they were in touch with mysteries humans no longer even recognized.

It’s like a song inside them, a chant. Something we’ve forgotten.

He longed for more understanding.

The pod swam on. Joe listened. And all at once he discerned another thread in the conversation: a whispered stream paralleling the mournful song, happening at the same time. Words hushed and anxious and frenetic.

The meaning of this second thread crystallized in his mind.

They’re excited.

There’s something up ahead—not far now—something fantastic. Something calling to them. Calling to them all. Something they cannot wait to see.

He listened. Concentrating on the cacophony washing over him.

It’s a destination. A place that will change the world.

And it dawned on Joe—though he was sure it had been there all along—that this was where they were headed now. The goal they were making for with all speed.

He listened, heard the call they were all hearing. A distant echo in the deep. A resonant tone, haunting and somehow familiar, sacred and joyful, nuanced and mysterious. A whisper in the deep, calling their names over and over.

But there was something impeding the call. Blocking it. Limiting its power and magic.

The sonar.

The Kanaga sonar.

A
ping…ping…ping
tainting the call like an obscenity. Tainting everything.

Joe realized then that it wasn’t simply that the sonar was polluting the soundscape, or preventing the orcas from hearing the sacred voice—the call coming from someplace miles ahead.

It was more than that. Mia needed to do something. Mia needed to say something, to let others know what was happening. To alert them that the time had come.

This was her role. Her job. Her mission. The task that she had been preparing for all her life.

The time has come. The hour is at hand. Prepare yourself.

And Joe wondered:
Who will she call?
Who is the message for?

The answer formed in his mind as soon as the question was asked.

Everyone.

And Joe felt a shiver travel the length of Mia’s great body.

Who are you?
he asked his host.

Who is Mia?
he asked the beings around him.

He felt them answering, placing the answer in his mind so that he could understand it.

Leader.

Matriarch.

Mia is the Messenger.

The one who knows the words, who knows the song. Who will show us the way.

Messenger for whom?
Joe asked.
And what message is she carrying?

Questions jammed his mind. There was so much he didn’t know. So much he wanted to ask.

The pod swam on, but now, in his peripheral vision, Joe could see another place. A jarring panorama that seemed utterly alien at first glance. A place populated with bizarre shapes and strange forms.

And then it dawned on him. He was looking at a human environment. A location he recognized.

It filled his field of vision now, as he slid back into position behind his own eyes and reengaged with his own earthbound body once more.

The Pike Place Market.

JOE SHOOK HIS HEAD
like a fighter recovering from a punch and looked around. He was standing next to Ella, facing a wall of fresh produce. Peaches, cherries, heirloom tomatoes.

He noticed two things immediately.

First, Ella was no longer holding his hand, but was instead supporting him around the waist, bearing part of his weight as if he were an injured comrade.

Second, people were staring at them: Tourists. Merchants. Old people. Little kids. Staring at him, specifically. Gawking, actually, as if he were some sort of freak-show attraction.

“What happened?” he asked, turning to Ella. The expression on her face frightened him. She looked panicky.

“Joe? Is that you?”

He stared at her. “Yeah. It’s me. What happened?

“Let’s go,” she said.

Some of the gawkers were turning away now.

“What happened?” Joe repeated.

Ella let go of his waist, took his hand firmly in hers and led him forward, into the crowd, past the gawkers, toward First Avenue and the St. Anthony’s van.

“You were acting like a mental patient,” she said at last. “Blank stare. Drooling. Not a new look for the Market, but still—“

“I’m sorry,” he said.

They walked.

Mia had vanished from his head.

He could feel her presence still, but not like before. She was far away again. Back in her own body, presumably. Leading her pod. Preparing to send her message—assuming the sonar went off.

And Joe was left with a question that superseded all the others:
Why did she want to trade places with me?

Because she’s curious?

No.

It was more than that.

Mia is the leader of a…

He couldn’t find the word.

Migration?

Movement?

Exodus?

Was that the term?

She’s the leader.

The leader.

The cog in the heart of the machine. The key that will unlock…

He didn’t know what. But that was beside the point.

Mia’s the leader. The matriarch.

The Messenger.

 
So why did she leave? Why trade places with me? Why risk such a thing when she’s on the brink of finishing her life’s work?