Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (18 page)

"Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."

"Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."

"You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."

After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of
Treasure Island
to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate on the book at all. Funny what you learn about yourself in a short conversation. One, that he would rather have been accused of having sex with another species than with another male (even of another species). Interesting prejudice. Two, that he actually was grateful, not only to be alive, but grateful to be having completely new experiences every moment, even as a prisoner. Three, that learning was still a high, but he burned to share it with someone. And finally, that he was feeling a little jealous, a little less special, now that he knew that Emily 7 was having sex with all the male whaley boys on board. That fickle little slut.

He dozed off with Robert Louis Stevenson on his chest and the sound of killer whales calling in the distance.

Outside, the pod of twenty killer whales, most the sons or daughters of the matriarch female, were calling frantically to each other as they worried away at a huge bait ball of herring. Biologists had long speculated on the incredibly complex vocabulary of the killer whale, identifying specific linguistic groups that even «spoke» the same dialect, but they had never been able to put meaning to the calls other than to identify them as "feeding," "distress," or «social» noises. However, had they had the benefit of translation, this is what they would have heard:

"Hey, Kevin, fish!"

"Fish! I love fish!"

"Look, Kevin, fish!"

"Mmmm, fish."

"You, Kevin, take a run down that trench, fake left, go right, hit the bait ball, nothing but fish!"

"Did someone say 'fish'?"

"Yeah, fish. Over here, Kevin."

"Mmmmm, fish."

And it went on like that. Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

" 'Bite me'?" Libby Quinn said, reading the tail.

The whale tail slowly twisted in space, pixel by pixel, as the computer extrapolated the new angle. Margaret Painborne sat at the computer. Clay and Libby stood behind her. Kona was working across the room on Quinn's reassembled machine.

" 'Bite me'?" Clay repeated. "That can't be right." He thought about what Nate had said about seeing a tail just like this and shivered.

Margaret hit a few keys on the keyboard, then swiveled in Clay's chair. "This some kind of joke, Clay?"

"Not mine. That was raw footage, Margaret." As attractive as Clay found Libby, he found Margaret equally scary. Maybe the latter because of the former. It was complex. "The tail image before you shifted it is exactly what I saw when I was down there."

"You've all been saying how sophisticated their communication ability was," said Kona, trying to sound scientific but essentially just pissing everyone off.

"How?" said Libby. "Even if you wanted to, how would you paint a whale's flukes like that?"

Margaret and Clay just shook their heads.

"Rust-Oleum," suggested Kona, and they all turned and glared at him. "Don't give me the stink-eye. You'd need the waterproof, huh?"

"Did you finish inputting those pages?" Clay said.

"Yah, mon."

"Well, save them and go rake something or mow something or something."

"Save as a binary," Margaret added quickly, but Kona had already saved the file, and the screen was clear.

Margaret wheeled her chair across the office, her gray hair trailing out behind her like the Flying Sorceress of Clerical Island. She pushed Kona aside. "Crap," she said.

"What?" asked Clay.

"What?" asked Libby.

"You said save it," Kona said.

"He saved it as an ASCII file, a text file, not a binary. Crap. I'll see if it's okay." She opened the file, and text appeared on the screen. Her hand went to her mouth, and she sat back slowly in Clay's chair. "Oh, my God."

"What?" came the chorus.

"Are you sure you put this in, just as it came off the graphs?" she asked Kona without looking at him.

"Truth," said Kona.

"What?" said Libby and Clay.

"This has got to be some sort of joke," said Margaret.

Clay and Libby ran across the room to look at the screen. "What!"

"It's English," Margaret said, pointing to the text. "How is that possible?"

"That's not possible," Libby said. "Kona, what did you do?"

"Not me, I just typed ones and ohs."

Margaret grabbed one of the legal pages with the ones and ohs and began typing the numbers into a new file. When she had three lines, she saved it, then reopened the file as text. It read, WILL SCUTTLE SECOND BOAT TO__

"It can't be."

"It is." Clay jumped into Margaret's lap and started scrolling through the text from Kona's transcription. "Look, it goes on for a while, then it's just gobbledygook, then it goes on some more."

Margaret looked back at Libby with
Save me
in her eyes. "There is no way that the song is carrying a message in English. Binary was a stretch, but I refuse to believe that humpbacks are using ASCII and English to communicate."

Libby looked over to Kona. "You guys took these off of Nate's tapes, exactly the way you showed me?"

Kona nodded.

"Kids, look at this," Clay said. "These are all progress reports. Longitude and latitude, times, dates. There are instructions here to sink my boat. These fuckers sank my boat?"

"What fuckers?" Margaret said. "A humpback with 'Bite me' on his flukes?" She was trying to look around Clay's broad back. "If this were possible, then the navy would have been using it a long time ago."

Now Clay jumped up to face Kona. "What tape is this last part from?"

"The last one Nate and Amy made, the day Nate drown. Why?"

Clay sat back on Margaret's lap, looking stunned. He pointed to a line of text on the screen. They all leaned in to read: QUINN ON BOARD__WILL RENDEZVOUS WITH BLUE-6__AGREED COORDINATES__1600 TUESDAY__NO PASTRAMI

"The sandwich," Clay said ominously.

Just then Clair, home from school, stepped into the office to discover an impromptu dog pile of action nerds in front of Quinn's computer. "All you bastards want to be part of a sandwich, and you don't even know what to do with one woman."

"Not the spoon!" squealed Kona, his hand going to the goose egg on his forehead.

Nathan Quinn awoke feeling as if he needed to crawl out of his skin. If he hadn't felt it before, he would have thought he had the generic heebie-jeebies (scientifically speaking), but he recognized the feeling as being hit with heavy subsonic sound waves. The blue-whale ship was calling. Just because it was below the frequency of his hearing didn't mean it wasn't loud. Blue-whale calls could travel ten thousand miles, he assumed that the ship was putting out similar sounds.

Nate slipped out of his bunk and nearly fell reaching for his shirt. Another thing he hadn't noticed immediately — the ship wasn't moving, and he still had his sea legs on.

He dressed quickly and headed down the corridor to the bridge. There was a large console that spanned the area between the two whaley-boy pilots that hadn't been there before. Unlike the rest of the ship, it appeared to be man-made, metal and plastic. Sonar scopes, computers, equipment that Quinn didn't even recognize. Nuñez and the blond woman, Jane, were standing at the sonar screens wearing headphones. Tim was seated beside one of the whaley boys at the center of the console in front of two monitors. Tim was wearing headphones and typing. The whaley boy appeared to be just watching.

Nuñez saw Nate come in, smiled, and motioned for him to come forward. These people were completely incompetent as captors, Nate thought. Not a measure of terror among them, the humans anyway. If not for the subsonic heebie-jeebies, he would have felt right at home.

"Where did this come from?"

The electronics looked incredibly crude next to the elegant organic design of the whale ship, the whaley boys, and, for that matter, the human crew. The idea of comparing designs between human-built devices and biological systems hadn't really occurred to Nate before because he'd been conditioned never to think of animals as designed. The whale ship was putting a deep dent in his Darwin.

"These are our toys," Nuñez said. "The console stays below the floor unless we need to see it. Totally unnecessary for the whaley boys, since they have direct interface with the ship, but it makes us feel like we know what's going on."

"And they can't type for shit," said Tim, tucking his thumbs under and making a slamming-the-keys gesture. "Tiny thumbs."

The whaley boy next to him trumpeted a raspberry all over Tim's monitor, leaving large dots of color magnified in the whaley spit. He chirped twice, and Tim nodded and typed into the computer.

"Can they read?" Nate asked.

"Read, kind of write, and most of them understand at least two human languages, although, as you probably noticed, they're not big talkers."

"No vocal cords," said Nuñez. "They have air chambers in their heads that produce the sounds they make, but they have a hard time forming the words."

"But they
can
talk. I've heard Em — I mean, them."

"Best that you just learn whaleyspeak. It's basically what they use to talk to each other, except they keep it in the range of our hearing. It's easier to learn if you've learned other tonal-sensitive languages like Navajo or Chinese."

"I'm afraid not," Nate said. "So the ship is calling?"

Tim pulled off his headphones and handed them to Nate. "The pitch is raised into our range. You'll be able to hear it through there."

Nate held a headphone to one ear. Now that he could hear the signal, he could also feel it start and stop more acutely in his chest. If anything, it relieved the discomfort, because he could hear it coming. "Is this a message?"

"Yep," said Jane, pulling up a headphone. "Just as you suspected. We type it in, the computer puts the message into peaks and troughs on the waveform, we play the waveform for the whaley boys, and they make the whale sing that waveform. We've calibrated it over the years."

Nate noticed that the whaley boy at the metal console had one hand in an organic socket fitted into the front of the console — like a flesh cable that ran to the whale ship through the console's base, similar to the ones on the flesh consoles the pilots used.

"Why the computers and stuff at all if the whaley boys do it all by… what? Instinct?"

The whaley boy at the console grinned up at Nate, squeaked, then performed the international signal for a hand job.

"It's the only way we can be in the loop," Jane said. "Believe me, for a long time we were just along for the ride. The whaley boys have the same navigational sense that the whales themselves do. We don't understand it at all. It's some sort of magnetic vocabulary. It wasn't until the Dirts — that's you — developed computers and we got some people who could run them that we became part of the process. Now we can surface and pull a GPS coordinate, transmit it, communicate with the other crews. We have
some
idea of what we're doing."

"You said for a long time? How long?"

Jane looked nervously at Nuñez, who looked nervously back. Nate thought for a moment that they might have to dash off to the bathroom together, which in his experience was what women did right before they made any major decisions, like about which shoes to buy or whether or not they were ever going to sleep with him again.

"A long time, Nate. We're not sure how long. Before computers, okay?"

By which she meant she wasn't going to tell him and if he pressed it, she'd just lie to him. Nate suddenly felt more like a prisoner, and, as a prisoner, he felt as though his first obligation was to escape. He was sure that was your first obligation as a prisoner. He'd seen it in a movie. Although his earlier plan of leaping out the back orifice into the deep ocean now seemed a tad hasty, with some perspective.

He said, "So how deep are we?"

"We usually send at about two thousand feet. That puts us pretty squarely in the SOFAR channel, no matter where we are geographically."

The SOFAR channel (sound fixing and ranging) was a natural combination of pressure and temperature at certain depths that cause a path of least resistance in which sound could travel many thousands of miles. The theory had been that blues and humpbacks used it to communicate with each other over long distances for navigational purposes. Evidently whaley boys and the people who worked their ships did, too.

"So does this signal replicate a natural blue-whale call?"

"Yes," said Tim. "That's one of the advantages of communicating in English within the waveform. When the whaley boys were doing the direct communication, there was a lot more variation in the call, but our signal is hidden, more or less. Except for a few busybodies who may run across it."

"Like me?"

"Yes, like you. We're a little worried about some of the acoustic people at Woods Hole and Hatfield Marine Center in Oregon. People who spend way too much time looking at spectrograms of underwater sound."

"You realize," said Nate, "that I might never have found out about your ships. I didn't make any sort of intuitive leap to look at a binary signal in the call. It was a stoned kid who came up with that."

"Yeah," said Jane. "If it makes you feel any better, you can blame him for your being here. We were on hold until you started to look in the signal for binary. That's when they called you in, so to speak."

Nate sincerely wished he could blame Kona, but since it appeared that he might never see civilization again, having someone to blame didn't seem particularly pertinent right now. Besides, the kid had been right. "How'd you know? I didn't exactly put out a press release."

"We have ways," said Nuñez, trying not to sound spooky but failing. This evidently amused the whaley boy at the console and the two pilots no end, and they nearly wheezed themselves out of their seats.

"Oh, fuck you guys," said Nuñez. "It's not like you guys are a bunch of geniuses."

"And you guys were the nightwalkers that Tako Man was talking about," Nate said to the pilots. "You guys sank Clay's boat."

The pilots raised their arms over their heads in a menacing scary-monster pose, then bared their teeth and made some fake growling noises, then collapsed into what Nate was starting to think of as whale giggles. The whaley boy at the console started clapping and laughing as well.

"Franklin! We're not done here. Can we get the interface back?"

Franklin, obviously the whaley boy who had been working the console, slumped and put his hand back in the socket. "Sorry," came a tiny voice from his blowhole.

"Bitch," came another tiny voice from one of the pilots, followed by whaley snickering.

"Let's send one more time. I want base to know we'll be there in the morning," Nuñez said.

"Morale's not a problem, then?" asked Nate, grinning at Nuñez's loss of temper.

"Oh, they're like fucking children," Nuñez said. "They're like dolphins: You dump them in the middle of the ocean with a red ball and they'll just play all day long, stopping only long enough to eat and screw. I'm telling you, it's like baby-sitting a bunch of horny toddlers."

Franklin squeaked and clicked a response, and this time Tim and Jane joined in the laughter with the whaley boys.

"What? What?" asked Nate.

"I do
not
just need to get laid!" shouted Nuñez. "Jane, you got this?"

"Sure," said the blonde.

"I'm going to quarters." She left the bridge to the snickering of the whaley boys.

Tim looked back at Nate and nodded toward the sonar screen and headset that Nuñez had vacated. "Want to stand in?"

"I'm a prisoner," said Nate.

"Yeah, but in a nice way," said Jane.

That was true. Everyone since he'd come on board had been very kind to him, seeing to his every need, even some he didn't want seen to. He didn't feel like a prisoner. Nate wasn't sure that he wasn't experiencing the Helsinki syndrome, where you sympathized with your captors — or was that the Stockholm syndrome? Yeah, the Helsinki syndrome had something to do with hair loss. It was definitely the Stockholm syndrome.