Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (16 page)

While Nuñez prepared the coffee, Quinn looked around. The bridge was easily four times the size of the entire cabin in the humpback. Instead of riding in a minivan, it was like being in a good-size motor home — a very curvy, dimly lit motor home, but about that size. Blue light filtered in through the eyes, illuminating the pilots' faces, which shone like patent leather. Nate was starting to realize that even though everything was organic, living, the whale ship had the same sort of efficiency found on any nautical vessel: every spaced used, everything stowed against movement, everything functional.

"If you need to use the head, it's back down the corridor, fourth hatch on the right."

Emily 7 clicked and squealed, and Nuñez laughed. She had a warm laugh, not forced; it just rolled out of her smooth and easy. "Emily says it seems as if it would be more logical for the head to be in the head, but there goes logic."

"I gave up logic a few days ago."

"You don't have to give it up, just adjust. Anyway, facilities in the head are like everything on the ship — living — but I think you'll figure out the analogs pretty quickly. It's less complicated than an airliner bathroom."

Scooter chirped, and the great ship started to move, first in a fairly radical wave of motion, then smoothing out to a gentle roll. It was like being on a large sailing ship in medium seas.

"Hey, a little more warning, Scooter, huh?" said Nuñez. "I nearly dumped Nathan's coffee. Okay if I call you Nathan?"

"Nate's good."

Moving with the roll of the ship, she made it back to the table and put down the two steaming mugs of coffee, then went back for a sugar bowl, spoons, and a can of condensed milk. Nate picked up the can and studied it.

"This is the first thing from the outside that I've seen."

"Yeah, well, that's special request. You don't want to try whale milk in your coffee. It's like krill-flavored spray cheese."

"Yuck."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Cielle, if you don't mind my saying, you don't seem very military."

"Me? No, I wasn't. My husband and I had a sixty-foot sailboat. We got caught in a hurricane off of Costa Rica and sank. That's when they took me. My husband didn't make it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It was a long time ago. But, no, I've never been in the military."

"But the way you order the whaley boys around —»

"First, we need to clear up a misconception that you are obviously forming, Nate. I — we, the human beings on these ships — are not in charge. We're just — I don't know, like ambassadors or something. We sound like commanders because these guys would just goof off all day without someone telling them what to do, but we have no real authority. The Colonel gives the orders, and the whaley boys run the show."

Scooter and Skippy snickered like their counterparts on the humpback ship, Bernard and Emily 7 joined them — Bernard extending his prehensile willy like a party horn.

"And whaley girls?" Nate nodded toward Emily 7, who grinned — it was a very big, very toothy grin, but a little coquettish in the way one might expect from, say, an ingenue with a bite that could sever an arm.

"Just whaley boys. It's like the term 'mankind, you know — alienate the female part of the race at all costs. It's the same here. Old-timers gave them the name."

"Who's the Colonel?"

"He's in charge. We don't see him."

"Human, though?"

"I'm told."

"You said you'd been here a long time. How long?"

"Let me get you another cup, and I'll tell you what I can." She turned. "Bernard, get that thing out of the coffeepot!"

For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.

Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of thirteen knocking the edge off his mental acuity by the concerted application of the most epic smokage that Jah could provide (thanks be unto Him), he was now being called upon to think and remember with a sharpness that was clearly painful.

"Think," said Clair, rapping the surfer in the forehead with the spoon she had only seconds earlier used to stir honey into a cup of calming herbal tea.

"Ouch," said Kona.

"Hey, that's uncalled for," said Clay, coming to Kona's aid. Loyalty being important to him.

"Shut up. You're next."

"Okay."

They were gathered around Clay's giant monitor, which, for all the good it was doing them, could have been a giant monitor lizard. A spectrogram of whale song from Quinn's computer was splashed across the screen, and for the information they were getting from it, it might have been the aftermath of a paint-ball war, which is what it looked like.

"What were they doing, Kona?" Clair asked, spoon — steaming with herbal calmness — poised to strike. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishment was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education. "Nate and Amy both went through this with you. Now you have to remember what they said."

"It's not these things, it's the oscilloscope," Kona said. "Nate pulled out just the submarine stuff and put it on the spectrum."

"It's all submarine," Clay said. "You mean
subsonic
."

"Yeah. He said there was something in there. I said like computer language. Ones and ohs."

"That doesn't help."

"He was marking them out by hand," Kona said. "By freezing the green line, then measuring the peaks and troughs. He said that the signal could carry a lot more information that way, but the whales would have to have oscilloscopes and computers to do it."

Clay and Clair both turned to the surfer in amazement.

"And they don't," Kona said. "Duh."

It was as if a storm of coherence had come over him. They just stared.

Kona shrugged. "Just don't hit me with the spoon again."

Clay pushed his chair back to let the surfer at the keyboard. "Show me." Late into the night the three of them worked, making little marks on printouts of the oscilloscope and recording them on yellow legal pads. Ones and ohs. Clair went to bed at 2:00 A.M. At 3:00 A.M. they had fifty handwritten legal-pad pages of ones and ohs. In another time this might have felt to Clay like a job well done. He'd helped analyze data on shipboard before. It killed some time and ingratiated him to whatever scientist was leading the project he was there to photograph, but he'd always been able to hand off the work for someone else to finish. It was slowly dawning on him: Being a scientist sucked.

"This sucks," said Kona.

"No it doesn't. Look at all we have," said Clay, gesturing to all they had.

"What is it?"

"It's a lot, that's what it is. Look at all of it."

"What's it mean?"

"No idea."

"What does this have to do with Nate and the Snowy Biscuit?"

"Just look at all of this," said Clay, looking at all of it.

Kona got up from his chair and rolled his shoulders. "Mon, Bwana Clay, Jah has given you a big heart. I'm goin' to bed."

"What are you saying?" Clay said.

"We got all the heart we need, brah. We need head."

" 'Scuse me?"

And so, in the morning, with the promise of a colossal piece of information for barter (the torpedo range) but without a true indication of what he really needed to know in return (everything else), Clay talked Libby Quinn into coming to Papa Lani.

"So let me get this straight," said Libby Quinn as she paced from Clay's computer to the kitchen and back. Kona and Clay were standing to the side, following her movement like dogs watching meatball tennis. "You've got an old woman who claims that a whale called her and instructed her to have Nate take him a pastrami sandwich?"

"On rye, with Swiss and hot mustard," Kona added, not wanting her to miss any pertinent scientific details.

"And you have a recording of voices, underwater, presumably military, asking if someone brought them a sandwich."

"Correct," said Kona, "No bread, or meat, or cheese, specified."

Libby glared at him. "And you have the navy setting off simulated explosions in preparation to put a torpedo range in the middle of the Humpback Whale Sanctuary." She paused meaningfully and pivoted thoughtfully — like Hercule Poirot in flip-flops. "You have a tape of Amy doing a breath-hold dive for what appears to be an hour, with no ill effects."

"Topless," Kona added. Science.

"You have Amy claiming that Nate was eaten by a whale, which we all know is simply not possible, given the diameter of the humpback's throat, even if one were inclined to bite him, which we know they wouldn't." (She was just a deerstalker, a calabash, and a cocaine habit short of being Sherlock Holmes here.) "Then you have Amy taking a kayak out for no apparent reason and disappearing, presumed drowned. And you say that Nate was working on finding binary in the lower registers of the whale song, and you think that means something? Have I got that right?"

"Yeah," said Clay. "But you have the break-in to our offices to get the sound tapes, and you have my boat being sunk, too. Okay, it sounded more connected when we were talking about it last night."

Libby Quinn stopped pacing and turned to look at both of them. She wore cargo shorts, tech sandals, and a running bra and appeared ready at any moment to just take off and do something outdoorsy and strenuous. They both looked down, subdued, as if they were still under the threat of Clair's deadly spoon of calm. Clay had always had a secret attraction to Libby, even while she'd been married to Quinn, and it was only within the last year or so he'd been able to make eye contact with her at all. Kona, on the other hand, had studied dozens of videotapes on the lesbian lifestyle, especially as it pertained to having a third party show up in the middle of an intimate moment (usually with a pizza), so he had long ago assigned a «hot» rating to Libby, despite the fact that she was twice his age.

"Help us," Kona said, trying to sound pathetic, staring at the floor.

"This is what you guys have, and you think because I know a little biology I can make something of all this?"

"And that," said Clay, pointing at the now arranged and collated pages of ones and ohs on his desk.

Libby walked over and flipped through the pages. "Clay, this is nothing. I can't do anything with this. Even if Nate
was
on to something, what do you think? That even if we recognize a pattern, it's going to mean something to us? Look, Clay, I loved Nate, too, you know I did, but —»

"Just tell us where to start," Kona said.

"And tell me if you see anything in this." Clay went to his computer and hit a key. A still of the edge view of the whale tail from his rebreather dive was on the screen. "Nate said that he had seen some markings on a whale tail, Libby. Some writing. Well, I thought there was something on this whale, too, before it knocked me out. But this is the best shot of the tail we have. It could mean something."

"Like what?" Her voice was kind.

"I don't know what, Libby. If I knew what, I wouldn't have called you. But there's too much weird stuff going on that almost fits together, and we don't know what to do."

Libby studied the tail still. "There
is
something there. You don't have a better shot?"

"No, this is something I
do
know about. This is the best I have."

"You know, Margaret and I were helping a guy from Texas A&.M who was designing a software program that would shift perspective of tail shots, so edge and bad-angle views could be shifted and extrapolated into usable ID photos. You know how many get tossed because of bad angles?"

"You have this program?"

"Yes, it's still in beta tests, but it works. I think we can shift this shot, and if there's something meaningful there, we'll see it."

"Cool runnings," Kona said.

"As far as this binary thing, I think it's a shot in the dark, but if it's going to mean anything, you're going to have to get your ones and ohs in the computer. Kona, can you type?"

"Well, on ones and ohs? I shred most masterful, mon."

"Right. I'll set you up with a simple text file — just ones and ohs — and we'll figure out if we can do anything with it later. No mistakes, okay?"

Kona nodded.

Clay finally looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Libby."

"I'm not saying it's anything, Clay, but I wasn't exactly fair to Nate when he was around. Maybe I owe him one now that he's gone. Besides, it's windy. Fieldwork would have sucked today. I'm going to call Margaret, have her bring the program over. I'll help you if you promise that you'll put all your weight into stopping this torpedo range and you'll sign Maui Whale on to the petition against low-frequency active sonar. You guys have a problem with that?"

She was giving them the "spoon of death" look, and it occurred to both of them that this might be something that was innate to all women, not just Clair, and that they should be very, very afraid.

"Nope," said Kona.

"Sounds good to me. I'll put on a pot of coffee," said Clay.

"Margaret is absolutely going to shit when she hears about the torpedo range," said Libby Quinn as she reached for Clay's phone.