Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (19 page)

He stepped up to the sonar screen and put on the headset. Immediately he heard the distant song of a humpback. He looked at Tim, who raised his eyebrows as if to say,
See.

"So tell me," Nate said, "what's the singing mean?" It was worth a shot.

"We were just going to ask you," said Jane.

"Swell," said Nate. Suddenly he didn't feel so well. After all this, even people who traveled inside whales didn't know what the song meant?

"Are you all right, Nate?" Jane asked. "You don't look so good."

"I think I have Stockholm syndrome."

"Don't be silly," said Tim. "You've got plenty of hair."

"You want some Pepto?" asked Jane, the ship's doctor.

Yes, he thought, escape would seem a priority. He was pretty sure that if he didn't get away, he was going to snap and kill some folks, or at least be incredibly stern with them.

Funny, he thought, how your priorities could change with circumstances. You go along for the greater part of your life thinking you want something — to understand the humpback song, for instance. So you pursue that with dogged single-mindedness at the expense of everything else in your life, only to be distracted into thinking maybe you want something in addition to that — Amy, for instance. And that becomes a diversion up until the time when circumstances make you realize what it is you really want, and that is — strangely enough — to get the fuck out of a whale. Funny, Nate thought.

"Settle down, Kona," Clair said, dropping her purse by the door, "I don't have a spoon."

Clay jumped off Margaret's lap. He and Kona watched as Clair crossed the room and exchanged hugs with Margaret and Libby, lingering a bit while hugging Libby and winking over her shoulder at Clay.

"So nice to see you guys," Clair said.

"I'm not going out to get the pizza, mon. No way," said Kona, still looking a bit terrified.

"What are you guys doing?" Clair asked.

And so Margaret took it upon herself to explain what they had discovered over the last few hours, with Kona filling in the pertinent and personal details. Meanwhile, Clay sat down in the kitchen and pondered the facts. Pondering, he felt, was called for.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feel pulled to. Margaret and Libby were scientists, used to jamming their facts into the appropriate slots as quickly as possible, and Kona… well, a thought rolling around in his mind was rather like a tennis ball in a coffee can — it was just a little too fuzzy to make any impact — and Clair was just catching up. No, the pondering fell to Clay, and he sipped a dark beer from a sweating bottle on a high stool in the kitchen and waited for the roulette ball to fall. Which it did, right about the time that Margaret Painborne was reaching a conclusion to her story.

"This obviously has something to do with defense," Margaret said. "No one else would have a reason — hell,
they
can't even have a
good
reason. But I say we write our senators tonight and confront Captain Tarwater in the morning. He's got to know something about it."

"And that's where you're completely wrong," Clay said. And they all turned. "I've been pondering this" — here he paused for impact — "and it occurs to me that two of our friends disappeared right about the time they found out about this stuff. And that everything from the break-in to the sinking of my boat" — and here he paused for a moment of silence — "has had something to do with someone not wanting us to know this stuff. So I think it would be reckless of us to run around trying to tell everybody what we know before we know what we know is."

"That can't be right," said Libby.

" 'Before we know what we know is'?" quoted Margaret. "No, that's not right."

"Is making perfect sense to me," said Kona.

"No, Clay," said Clair, "I'm fine with you and the girl-on-girl action, and I'm fine with a haole Rasta boy preaching sovereignty, but I'm telling you I won't stand for that kind of grammatical abuse. I
am
a schoolteacher, after all."

"We can't tell anyone!" Clay screamed.

"Better," said Clair.

"No need to shout," Libby said. "Margaret was just being a radical hippie reactionist feminist lesbian communist cetacean biologist, weren't you, dear?" Libby Quinn grinned at her partner.

"I'll have an acronym for that in a second," mumbled Clair, counting off words on her fingers. "Jeez, your business card must be the size of a throw rug."

Margaret glared at Libby, then turned to Clay. "You really think we could be in danger?"

"Seems that way. Look, I know we wouldn't know this without your help, but I just don't want anyone hurt. We may already be in trouble."

"We can keep it quiet if you feel that's the way to go," said Libby, making the decision for the pair, "but I think in the meantime we need to look at a lot more audio files — see how far back this goes. Figure out why sometimes it's just noise and sometimes it's a message."

Margaret was furiously braiding and unbraiding her hair and staring blankly into the air in front of her as she thought. "They must use the whale song as camouflage so enemy submarines don't detect the communication. We need more data. Recordings from other populations of humpbacks, out of American waters. Just to see how far they've gone with this thing."

"And we need to look at blue-, fin-, and sei-whale calls," said Libby. "If they're using subsonic, then it only makes sense that they'll imitate the big whales. I'll call Chris Wolf at Oregon State tomorrow. He monitors the navy's old sonar matrix that they set up to catch Russian submarines. He'll have recordings of everything we need."

"No," said Clay. "No one outside this room."

"Come on, Clay. You're being paranoid."

"Say that again, Libby. He monitors
whose
old sonar matrix? The military still keeps a hand in on that SOSUS array."

"So you think it is military?"

Clay shook his head. "I don't know. I'm damned if I can think of a reason the navy would paint 'Bite me' on the tail of a whale. I just know that people who find out about this stuff disappear, and someone sent a message saying that Nate was safe after we all thought he was dead."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Find him," Clay said.

"Well, that's going to totally screw up the funeral," said Clair.

The whale ship opened its mouth, and Nate and the crew spilled out onto the shore like sentient drool, which was some coincidence, since that's exactly what lay beneath the hard shell of the landing. They were met by a group of whaley boys, one of whom handed Nate a pair of Nikes, then went off to trade clicks and squeals and greeting rubs with the returning crew. It was so bright after nearly ten days in the whale ship that Nate couldn't immediately tell what was happening. The rest of the human crew were wearing sunglasses as they sat down on the ground to put on their shoes, only a few feet from the ship's mouth. From the rigid feel of the ground, Nate thought they might be on a dock of some kind, but then Cal Burdick took off his own sunglasses and handed them to Nate.

"Go ahead. I've been looking at all of this for a lot of years, but I think you'll find it interesting."

With the dark glasses, Nate was able to see. His eyes were fine, but his mind was having a hard time processing what they were telling him. It was as light as daylight (on an overcast day, at least), but they were not outdoors. They were inside a grotto so immense that Nate could not even make out the edges of it. A dozen stadiums could have fit inside the space and still left room for a state fair, a casino, and the Vatican if you snipped off a basilica or two. The entire ceiling was a source of light, cold light, it appeared — some sections yellow, some blue — great blotches of light in irregular shapes, as if Jackson Pollock had painted a solar storm across the ceiling. Half of the grotto was water, flat and reflective as a mirror, the smoothness broken by small whaley boys porpoising here and there in groups of five and six, their blowholes sending up synchronized blasts of steam every few yards. Whaley kids, he thought. Fifty or so whale ships of different species pulled up to the shore, their crews coming and going. Huge segmented pipes that looked like giant earthworms were attached to each of the ships, one on each side of the head, and ran off to connections on shore. The ground — the ground was red, and as hard as linoleum, polished, yet not quite shiny. It ran out for hundreds of yards, perhaps over a mile, and appeared to continue halfway up the walls of the immense grotto. Nate could see openings in the walls, oval passages or doorways or tunnels or something. From the size of the people and whaley boys passing in and out, he could tell that some of the openings were perhaps thirty feet around, while others seemed only the size of normal doors. There were windows next to some of the smaller ones — or what he guessed were windows — their shapes all curves and slopes. There wasn't a right angle in the grotto. Hundreds of people moved about amid as many whaley boys, maintaining the ships, moving supplies and equipment on what seemed very normal hand trucks and carts.

"Where in the hell are we?" Nate said, nearly wrenching his neck trying to look at all of it at once. "I mean, what in the hell is this?"

"Pretty amazing," Cal said. "I like to watch people when they see Gooville for the first time."

Nate ran his hand over the ground, or floor, or whatever this surface was they were sitting on. "What is this stuff?" It appeared smooth, but it had texture, pores, a hidden roughness, like stoneware or —

"It's living carapace. Like a lobster shell. This whole place is living, Nate. Everything — the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the passageway in from the sea, our homes — it's all one huge organism. We call it the Goo."

"The Goo. Then this is Gooville?"

"Yes," Cal said, with a big smile that revealed perfect teeth.

"And that would make you?"

"That's right. The Goos. There's a wonderful Seussian logic to it, don't you think?"

"I
can't
think, Cal. You know how all your life you hear people talk about things that are mind-boggling? It's just a meaningless cliché — a hyperbole — like saying that you're wasted or that something is bloodcurdling?"

"Yep."

"Well, I'm boggled. I'm totally boggled."

"You thought the ships were impressive, huh?"

"Yeah, but this? One living organism shaped itself into this complex… what? System? I'm boggled."

"Imagine how the bacteria who live in your intestinal tract feel about you."

"Well, right now I think they're pissed off at me."

A group of whaley boys was gathering about ten yards away from them, pointing at Nate and snickering.

"They're coming down to check out the newcomer. Don't be surprised if you get rubbed up against in the streets. They're just saying hi."

"Streets?"

"We call them streets. They're sort of streets."

Now, out of the dim yellow light of the whale ships, Nate realized that there was a wide variety in the whaley boys' coloring. Some were actually mottled blue, like the skin of a blue whale, while others were black like a pilot whale, or light gray like a minke whale. Some even had the black-on-white coloring of killers and Pacific white-sided dolphins, while a few here and there were stark white like a beluga. The body shapes of all were very similar, differing only in size, with the killer whaley boys, who were taller by a foot and heavier by perhaps a hundred pounds, having jaws twice the width of the others'. He also noticed in the brighter light that he was the only human who had a tan. The people, even Cal and the crew, looked healthy; it just appeared that none of them had ever seen the sun. Like the British.

Nuñez came over and helped Cal, and then Nate, to his feet.

"How're the shoes?" she asked Nate.

"They're strange after not wearing any for so long."

"You'll be wobbly for a few hours, too. You'll feel the motion when you stand still for a day or so. No different from having been at sea in normal ship. I'll take you to your new quarters, show you around a little, get you settled in. The Colonel will probably send for you before too long. People will help you out, humans and whaley boys. They'll all know you're new."

"How many, Cielle?"

"Humans? Almost five thousand live here. Whaley boys, maybe half that many."

"Where is here? Where are we?"

"I told him about Gooville," said Cal.

Nuñez looked up at Nate and then pulled her sunglasses down on her nose so he could see her eyes. "Don't freak out on me, huh?"

Nate shook his head. What did she think, that whatever she was going to tell him was going to be weirder, grander, or scarier than what he'd seen already?

"The roof above this ceiling — which is thick rock, although we're not exactly sure how thick — anyway, it's around six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. We're about two hundred miles off the coast of Chile, under the continental shelf. In fact, we came in through a cliff in the continental rise, a cliff face.

"We're six hundred feet underwater right now. The pressure?"

"We came in through a very long tunnel, a series of pressure locks that pass the ships along until we're at surface pressure. I would have shown you as we came through, but I didn't want to wake you."

"Yeah, thanks for that."

"Let's get you to your new house. We've got a long walk ahead of us." She headed away from the water, motioning for him to follow.

Nate nearly stumbled trying to look back at the whale ships lining the harbor. Tim caught him by the arm. "It's a lot to take in. People really have freaked out. You just have to accept that the Goo won't let anything bad happen to you. The rest is simply a series of surprises. Like life."

Nate looked into the younger man's dark eyes to see if there was any irony showing there, but he was as open and sincere as a bowl of milk. "The Goo will take care of me?"

"That's right," said Tim, helping him along toward the grotto wall, toward the actual village of Gooville, with its organically shaped doorways and windows, its knobs and nodules, its lobster-shell pathways, its whaley-boy pods working together or playing in the water, where was housed an entire village of what Nate assumed were all happy human wackjobs.

After two days of looking for meaning in hash marks on waveforms and ones and ohs on legal pads that were hastily typed into the machine, Kona found a surfer/hacker on the North Shore named Lolo who agreed to write it all into a Linux routine in exchange for Kona's old long board and a half ounce of the dankest nugs
[1]
.

"Won't he just take cash?" asked Clay.

"He's an artist," explained Kona. "Everyone has cash."

"I don't know what I'm going to put that under for the accountant."

"Nugs, dank?"

Clay looked forlornly at the legal-pad pages piling up on the desk next to where Margaret Painborne was typing. He handed a roll of bills over to Kona. "Go. Buy nugs. Bring him back. Bring back my change."

"I'm throwing in my board for the cause," said Kona. "I could use some time in the mystic myself."

"Do you want me to tell Auntie Clair that you tried to extort me?" Clay had taken to using Clair as a sort of sword of Damocles/assistant principal/evil dominatrix threat over Kona, and it seemed to work swimmingly.

"Must blaze, brah. Cool runnings."

Suddenly something sparked in Clay's head, a déjà vu trigger snapping electric with connections. "Wait, Kona."

The surfer paused in the doorway, turned.

"The first day you came here, the day that Nate sent you to the lab to get the film — did you actually do it?"

Kona shook his head, "Nah, boss, the Snowy Biscuit see me going. She say keep the money and she go to the lab. When I come back with my ganja, she give me the pictures to give to Nate."

"I was sort of afraid of that," Clay said. "Go, blaze, be gone. Get what we need."

So three days later they all stood watching as Lolo hit the return key and the subsonic waveform from a blue-whale call began scrolling across the bottom of the screen, while above it letters were transcribed from the data. Lolo was a year older than Kona, a Japanese-American burned nut brown by the sun with ducky-yellow minidreads and a tapestry of Maori tattoos across his back and shoulders.

Lolo spun in the chair to face them. "I mixed down a fifty-minute trance track with sixty percussion loops that was way harder than this." Lolo's prior forays into sound processing had been as a computer DJ at a dance club in Honolulu.

"It's not saying anything," said Libby Quinn. "It's just random, Clay."

"Well, that's the way it's gone so far, right?"

"But there's been nothing since that first day."

"We knew that might happen, that there couldn't be messages on all of them. We just have to find the right ones."

Libby's eyes were pleading. "Clay, it's a short season. We have to get out in the field. Now that you have this program, you don't need the manpower. Margaret and I will bring back more tapes — we have them coming in from people we trust — but we can't afford to blow off the season."

"And we need to go public with the torpedo range," Margaret added, less sympathetic than Libby had been.

Clay nodded and looked at his bare feet against the hardwood floor. He took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he smiled. "You're right. But don't just blow a whistle and hope someone will notice. Cliff Hyland told me that the diving data was the only thing they were worried about. You're going to need proof that humpbacks dive close to the bottom of the channel, or the navy will claim that you're just being whale buggers and there's no danger to the animals. Even with the range."

"You're okay if we go public, then?" asked Libby.

"People are going to know about the torpedo range soon enough. I don't think that's dangerous for you. Just don't say anything about the rest of this, okay?"

The two women looked at each other, then nodded. "We have to go," Libby said. "We'll call you, Clay. We're not running out on you."

"I know," Clay said.

After they left, Clay turned to the two surfers. Thirty years working with the best scientists and divers in the world, and this was what it came down to: two stoner kids. "If you guys need to go do things, I understand."

"Outta here," said Lolo, on his feet and bounding toward the door.

Clay looked at the screen where Lolo had been sitting. Scrolling across it: WILL ARRIVE GV APPRX 1300 MONDAY__HAVE__SIZE 11 SNEAKERS WAITING FOR QUINN__END MSS__AAAA__BAXYXABUDAB.

"Get him back," Clay said to Kona. "We need to know which tape this was."

"Libby gave them all to him."

"I know that. I need to know where she got it. Where and when it was recorded. Call Libby's cell phone. See if you can get hold of her." Clay was trying to make the screen print before the message scrolled away. "How the hell does this thing work?"

"How you know I'm not leaving?"

"You woke up this morning, Kona. Did you have a reason to get out of bed other than waves or pot?"

"Yah, mon, need to find Nate."

"How'd that feel?"

"I'm calling Libby, boss."

"Loyalty is important, son. I'll go catch Lolo. Confirm which tape it was."

"Shut up, boss. I'm trying to dial."

Behind them the cryptic message scrolled out of the printer.