Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (21 page)

Nate still had a couple bites of his sandwich left. "Hey, I've still got a couple of bites of my sandwich left," he said.

"Really? Well, did you ask yourself where in Gooville we got meatballs? What sort of meat might be in them?"

Nate dropped his sandwich.

"Bit of the whining wussy boy, aren't we?" said Brennan as she came out of the kitchen to take away their plates.

Nate was reading a cheesy lawyer novel that he'd found in the small library in his apartment when the whaley boys came for him. There were three of them, two large males with killer-whale coloring and a smaller female blue. Only when the blue squeaked "Hi Nate" in a mashed-elf voice did he recognize it as Emily 7.

"Wow, hi, Emily. Is just Emily okay, or should I always say the Seven?" Nate always felt awkward with someone afterward, even if there wasn't anything for the ward to be after.

She crossed her arms over her chest and bugged out her left eye at him.

"Okay," Nate said, moving on, "I guess we'll be going, then. Did you see my new doorknob? Brand-new. Stainless steel. I realize it doesn't go with everything else, but, you know, it feels a little like freedom."
Right, Nate. It's a doorknob,
he thought.

They led him around the perimeter of the grotto, beyond the village, and into one of the huge passageways that led away from the grotto.

They walked for half an hour, tracing a labyrinth of passageways that got narrower and narrower the farther off they went, the bright red lobster-shell surface fading into something that looked like mother-of-pearl the deeper in they went. It glowed faintly, just enough so they could see where they were going.

Finally the passageway started to broaden again and open into a large room that looked like some sort of oval amphitheater, all of it pearlescent and providing its own light. Benches lined the walls around the room, all in view of a wide ramp that led to a round portal the size of a garage door, closed now with an iris of black shell.

"Ooooh, the great and powerful Oz will see you now," Nate said.

The whaley boys, who normally found practically anything funny, just looked away. One of the black-and-whites started whistling a soft tune from his blowhole. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" or a Streisand tune —
something
creepy, Nate thought.

Emily 7 backhanded the whistler in the chest, and he stopped abruptly. Then she put her hand on Nate's shoulder and gestured for him to go up the steps to the round portal.

"Okay, I guess this is it." Nate started backing up the ramp as the whaley boys started backing away from him. "You guys better not leave me, because I'll never find my way back."

Emily 7 grinned, that lovely hack-a-salmon-in-half smile of hers, and waved him on.

"Thanks, Em. You look good, you know. Did I mention? Shiny." He hoped shiny was good.

The iris opened behind him, and the whaley boys fell to their knees and touched their lower jaws to the floor. Nate turned to see that the pearlescent ramp led into a vibrant red chamber that was pulsing with light and glistening with moisture as the walls appeared to breathe. Now,
this
looked like a living thing — the inside of a living thing. Really much more what he'd expected to see when the whale had eaten him. He made his way forward. A few steps in, the ramp melded into the reddish flesh, which Nate could now see was shot through with blood vessels and what might be nerves. He couldn't get the size of the space he was in. It just seemed to expand to receive him and contract behind him, as if a bubble were moving along with him inside it. When the iris disappeared into the pink Goo, Nate felt a wave of panic go through him. He took a deep breath — damp, fecund air — and strangely enough he remembered what Poynter and Poe had told him back on the humpback ship: It's easier if you just accept that you're already dead. He took another deep breath and ventured forward a few more feet, then stopped.

"I feel like a friggin' sperm in here!" he yelled. What the hell, he was dead anyway. "I'm supposed to have a meeting with the Colonel."

On cue, the Goo began to open in front of him, like the view of a flower opening from the inside. A brighter light illuminated the newly opened chamber, now just large enough to house Nate, another person, and about ten feet of conversational distance. Reclining in a great pink mass of goo, dressed in tropical safari wear and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat, was the Colonel.

"Nathan Quinn, good to see you. It's been a long time," he said.

Nate hadn't seen his old teacher, Gerard «Growl» Ryder, in fourteen years, but except for the fact that he was very pale, the biologist looked exactly the same as Nate remembered him: short and powerful, a jaw like a knife, and a long swoop of gray hair that was always threatening to fall into his pale green eyes.

"You're
the Colonel?" Nate asked. Ryder had disappeared twelve years ago. Lost at sea in the Aleutians.

"I toyed with the title for a while. For a week or so I was Man-Meat the Magnificent, but I thought that sounded like I might be compensating for something, so I decided to go with something military-sounding. It was a toss-up between Captain Nemo from
Twenty Thousand Leagues
and Colonel Kurtz from
Heart of Darkness.
I finally decided to go with just 'the Colonel. It's more ominous."

"That it is." Once again reality was taking a contextual tilt for Nate, and he was trying to keep from falling. This once brilliant, brilliant man was sitting in a mass of goo talking about choosing his megalomaniacal pseudonym.

"Sorry to keep you waiting for so long before I brought you down here. But now that you're here, how's it feel to stand in the presence of God?"

"Respectfully, sir, you're a fucking squirrel."

"This doesn't feel right," Clay whispered to Libby Quinn. "We shouldn't be having a funeral when Nate's still alive."

"It's not a funeral," said Libby. "It's a service."

They were all there at the Whale Sanctuary. In the front row: Clay, Libby, Margaret, Kona, Clair, and the Old Broad. Moving back: Cliff Hyland and Tarwater with their team, the Count and his research grommets, Jon Thomas Fuller and all of the Hawaii Whale Inc. boat crews, which constituted about thirty people. On back: whale cops, bartenders, and a couple of waitresses from Longee's. From the harbor: live-aboards and charter captains, the harbormaster, booth girls and dive guides, boat hands and a guy who worked the coffee counter at the fuel dock. Also, researchers from the University of Hawaii and, strangely enough, two black-coral divers — all crowded into the lecture hall, the ceiling fans stirring their smells together into the evening breeze. Clay had scheduled the service in the evening so the researchers wouldn't miss a day of the research season.

"Still," said Clay.

"He was a lion," said Kona, a tear glistening in his eye. "A great lion." This was the highest compliment a Rastafarian can bestow upon a man.

"He's not dead," said Clay. "You know that, you doof."

"Still," said Kona

It was a Hawaiian funeral in that everyone was in flip-flops and shorts, but the men had put on their best aloha shirts, the women their crispest flowered dresses, and many had brought leis and head garlands, which they draped over the wreaths at the front of the room that represented Nathan Quinn and Amy Earhart. A Unity Church minister spoke for ten minutes about God and the sea and science and dedication, and then he opened up the floor to anyone who had something to say. There was a very long pause before the Old Broad, wearing a smiling-whale-print muumuu and a dozen white orchids in her hair, tottered to the podium.

"Nathan Quinn lives on," she said.

"Can I get an amen!" shouted Kona. Clair yanked his remaining dreadlocks.

All the biologists and grad students looked at each other, eyes wide, confused, wondering if any of them had actually brought an amen that they could give up. No one had told them they were going to need an amen, or they would have packed one. All the harbor people and Lahaina citizens were intimidated by the science people, and they were not about to give up an amen in front of all of these eggheads, no way. The whale cops didn't like the fact that Kona was not in jail, and they weren't giving him shit, let alone an amen. Finally one of the black-coral divers who had that night found the perfect cocktail for grieving in a hit of ecstasy, a joint, and a forty of malt liquor, sighed a feeble «Amen» over the mourners like a sleepy, stinky, morning-breath kiss.

"And I know," continued the Old Broad, "that if it were not for his stubbornness in procuring a pastrami on rye for that singer in the channel, he would be here with us today."

"But if he were here with us — " whispered Clair.

"Shhhhhh," shushed Margaret Painborne.

"Don't you shush me, or you'll be munching carpet through a straw."

"Please, honey," said Clay.

The Old Broad rambled on about talking to the whales every day for the last twenty-five years, about how she'd known Nate and Clay and Cliff when they first came to the island and how young and stupid they were then, and how that had changed, as now they weren't that young anymore. She talked about what a thoughtful and considerate man Nate was, but how, if he hadn't been so absentminded, he might have found a decent woman to love him, and how she didn't know where he was, but if he didn't get his bottom back to Maui soon, she would twist his ear off when she saw him. And then she sat down to resounding silence and tittering pity, and everyone looked at Clay, who looked at a ceiling fan.

After a long, awkward minute, when the Unity minister had to head-fake to the podium a couple of times, as if he would have to call a conclusion to the service, Gilbert Box — the Count — got up. He wasn't wearing his hat for once, but he still wore his giant wraparound sunglasses, and without the balance of the giant hat, the glasses atop his angular frame made him appear insectlike, a particularly pale praying mantis in khakis. He adjusted the microphone, cleared his throat with great pomp, and said, "I never liked Nathan Quinn…" And everyone waited for the "but," but it never came. Gilbert Box nodded to the crowd and sat back down. Gilbert's grommets applauded.

Cliff Hyland spoke next, talking for ten minutes about what a great guy and fine researcher Nate was. Then Libby actually went forward and spoke at length about Nate's Canadianness and how he had once defended the Great Seal of British Columbia as being superior to all the other provincial seals in that it depicted a moose and a ram smoking a hookah, showing a spirit of cooperation and tolerance, while Ontario's seal depicted a moose and an elk trying to eat a bear, and Saskatchewan's showed a moose and a lion setting fire to a fondue pot — both of which clearly exploited the innate Canadian fear of moose — and the seal of Quebec depicted a woman in a toga flashing one of her boobs at a lion, which was just fucking French. He'd named all the provinces and their seals, but those were the ones Libby could remember. Then Libby sniffled and sat down.

"That's what you could come up with?" hissed Clay. "What, five years of marriage?"

Libby whispered in his ear, "I had to go with something that wouldn't threaten Margaret. I don't see
you
storming the podium."

"I'm not going to talk about my dead friend when I don't think he's dead."

And before they knew it, Jon Thomas Fuller was at the podium being thankful for Nate's support for his new project, then going on about how much he appreciated how the whale-research community had gotten behind his new "dolphin interaction center," all of which was big news to the whale-research community who was listening. During the short speech, Clair had caught Clay's neck in what appeared to be an embrace of consolation but was in fact a choke hold she'd learned from watching cops on the news. "Baby, if you try to go after him, I'll have you unconscious on the floor in three seconds. That would be disrespectful to Nate's memory." But her effort left Kona unattended on the other side, and he managed to cough «Bullshit» as Jon Thomas took his seat.

Next a grad student who worked for Cliff Hyland stood and talked about how Nate's work had inspired her to go into the field. Then someone from the Hawaiian Department of Conservation and Resources talked about how Nate had always been at the forefront of conservation and protection of the humpbacks. Then the harbormaster talked about Nate's being a competent and conscientious boat pilot. All told, an hour had passed, and when it seemed obvious that no one else was going to stand up, the minister moved toward the podium but was beaten to it by Kona, who had slipped from Clair's steely grip and high-stepped his way to the front.

"Like old Auntie say, Nathan is living on. But no one here today say a thing about the Snowy Biscuit, who — Jah's mercy be on her — is feeding fishes in the briny blue about now." (Sniff.) "I know her only short time, but I think I can say for all of us, that I always want to see her naked. Truth, mon. And when I think upon the round, firm —»

"— she will be missed," Clay said, finishing for the faux Hawaiian. He had clamped a hand over Kona's mouth and was dragging him out the door. "She was a bright kid." With that, the minister jumped to the podium, thanked everyone for coming, and declared, with a prayer, all respects paid in full. Amen.

"Well, yes, mental health can be a problem," said Growl Ryder.

"Being God's conscience is a tough job."

Nate looked around, and, as if following his gaze, the Goo receded around them until they were in a chamber about fifteen feet in diameter — a bubble.
It was like camping in someone's bladder,
Nate thought.

"That better?" Ryder asked.

Nate realized that the Colonel was the one controlling the shape of the chamber they were in.

"Someplace to sit would be good."

The Goo behind Nate shaped itself into a chaise longue. Nate touched it tentatively, expecting to pull his hand back trailing strings of slime, but although the Goo glistened as if it were wet, on the chair it felt dry. Warm and icky, but dry. He sat down on the chaise. "Everyone thinks you're dead," Nate said.

"You, too."

Nate hadn't thought about it much, but, of course, the Colonel had to be right. They would have thought him long dead.

"You've been here since you disappeared, what, twelve years ago?"

"Yes, they took me with a modified right whale, ate my whole Zodiac, my equipment — everything. They brought me here in a blue whale. I went mad during the trip. Couldn't handle the whole idea of it. They kept me restrained most of the way here. I'm sure that didn't help." Ryder shrugged. "I got better, once I accepted the way things are down here. I understood why they took me."

"And that would be…?"

"The same reason they took you. I was about to figure out their existence from what was hidden in the signal of different whale calls. They took both of us to protect the whale ships and, ultimately, the Goo. We should be grateful they didn't just kill us."

Nate had wondered about that before. Why the trouble? "Okay, why didn't they?"

"Well, they took me alive because the Goo and the people here wanted to know what I knew, and by what path I came to suspect the content in the whale calls. They took you alive because I ordered it so."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, 'why'? Because we were colleagues, because I taught you, because you're bright and intuitive and I liked you and I'm a decent guy. 'Why? Fuck you, 'why? »

"Growl, you live in a slime lair and maintain an identity as the mysterious overlord of an undersea city, you command a fleet of meat dreadnaughts with crews of humanoid whale people, and you're currently reclining in a pulsating mass of gelatinous goo that looks like it escaped from hell's own Jell-O mold — so excuse the fuck out of me if I question your motives."

"Okay, good point. Can I get you something to drink?"

Like many scientists Nate had known, Ryder had plodded on only to realize midcourse that he'd forgotten certain social niceties practiced by other civilized humans, but in this case he was completely missing the point. "No, I don't need anything to drink. I need to know how this happened. What is this stuff? You're a biologist, Growl, you have to have been curious about this."

"I'm still curious. But what I do know is that this stuff makes up everything in Gooville, everything you've seen here, the buildings, the corridors, most of the machinery — although I guess you'd call it biomachinery — all of it is the Goo. One giant, all-encompassing organism. It can form itself into nearly any organism on earth, and it can design new organisms as the need arises. The Goo made the whale ships and the whaley boys. And here's the kicker, Nate: It didn't make them over thirty million years. The entire species isn't more than three hundred years old."

"That's not possible," Nate said. There were certain things that you accepted if you were going to be a biologist, and one of them was that complex life was a process of evolution by natural selection, that you got a new species because the genes that favored survival in a certain environment were replicated in that species, selected by being passed on, often a process that took millions of years. You didn't put in your order and pick up a new species at the window. There was no cosmic fry cook, there was no watchmaker, there was no designer. There was only process and time. "How could you possibly know that anyway?"

"I just know things by being in contact with the Goo, but I'm not far off. It might be less time — two hundred years."

"Two hundred years? The whaley boys are definitely sentient by any definition, and I don't even know what the whale ships are, but they're definitely alive, too. That kind of complexity doesn't happen in that short a time."

"No, I'd say the Goo has probably been here as long as three and a half billion years. The rocks around these caves are some of the oldest in the world. I'm just saying the whaley boys and the ships are new. They're only a few hundred years old because that's how long ago the Goo needed them."

"The Goo needed them, so it made them to serve it? Like it has will?"

"It does have will. It's self-aware, and it knows a lot. In fact, I'd venture to say that the Goo is a repository for every bit of biological knowledge on the planet. This, Nate, this Goo is as close to God as we are ever going to see. It's the perfect soup."

"As in primordial soup?"

"Precisely. Four billion years ago some big organic molecules grouped up, probably around some deep-sea source of geothermal heat, and they learned how to divide, how to replicate. Since replication is the name of life's game, it very quickly — probably in the span of less than a hundred million years — covered the entire planet. Big organic molecules that couldn't exist now because there are millions of bacteria that would eat them, but back then there were no bacteria. At one time the entire oceanic surface of the earth was populated by one single living thing that had learned to replicate itself. Sure, as the replicators were exposed to different conditions they mutated, they developed into new species, they fed on each other, some colonized each other and turned into complex animals, and then more complex animals, but part of that original living animal pulled back into its original niche. By this time chemical information was being exchanged — first by UNA, then by DNA — and as each new species evolved, it carried on all the information for making the next species, and that information came back to the original animal. But it had its safe niche, pulling energy from the earth's heat, sheltered in the deep ocean and by rock. It took in all the information from the animals that it came in contact with, but it changed only enough to protect itself, replicate itself. While a million million species lived and died in the sea, this original animal evolved very slowly, learning, always learning. Think of it, Nate: Within the cells of your body is not only the blueprint for every living thing on earth but everything that has ever lived. Ninety-eight percent of your DNA is just hitching a ride, just lucky little genes that were smart enough to align themselves to other successful genes, like marrying into money, if you will. But the Goo, not only does it have all of those genes, it has the diagram to turn them on and off. That seat you're sitting on may well be three billion years old."