Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (24 page)

Nuñez bought him a large cup of coffee at a cafe where whaley boys stood around pouring down lattes the size of fire extinguishers and exchanging clicks and whistles at an irritating volume.

"If ever there was a creature that didn't need caffeine," Nate said.

Nuñez kept him moving, while he kept trying to stop to lean on things. "Don't ever drink with them," Nuñez said. "Especially the males. You know their sense of humor. You're as likely as not to get a wet willy in the ear, and it's a real wet willy."

"I may have to hurl again."

"Don't destroy yourself out of spite, Nate. Just accept things how they are."

He wasn't trying to destroy himself, and he wasn't spiteful. He was just confused, hungover, and kind of in love, or something remotely like love, except that the pain was more localized in his temples rather than being the overall, life-ruining pain it usually caused him. "Can we stop in at the Lollipop Guild and get a couple aspirins?"

"You're late already."

In the corridors she handed him off to a pair of killer whaley boys.

"You should be honored, you know?" Nuñez said. "He doesn't meet with many people."

"You can take my appointment if you want."

The Colonel had a goo recliner waiting for him when he walked through the iris door. Nate sat in it and held his coffee cup like a security blanket against his chest.

"Well, can you see now that life wouldn't be so bad here?"

Nate's mind raced. Amy said the Colonel didn't know, but maybe the Goo knew, but the Colonel was tapped in to the Goo, so did he know? Or had he sent her in the first place and this was all a scam, just like when he'd sent her to Hawaii to spy on him? She'd fooled him for a month there, why couldn't she be fooling him now? He wanted to trust her. But what was Ryder getting at?

"What's different, Growl? When I saw you nine hours ago, I was a prisoner, and I'm a prisoner now."

Ryder seemed surprised. He wiped the lock of gray hair out of his eyes furiously, as if it had caused him to make some sort of mistake. "Right, nine hours. So you've had some time to think." He didn't sound sure.

"I got drunk and passed out. In the clear, lightning-bug light of day, Colonel, I still want to go home."

"You know, time" — Ryder patted the living chair he was sitting in as if he were petting a dog, sending waves of blush through the pink Goo outward from where he touched. Nate shivered at the sight of it — "time is different down here, it's…"

"Relative?" Nate offered.

"It's on a different scale."

"What do you want from me, Colonel? What can I possibly offer you that I get the special treatment of being spared and granted multiple audiences with the… the grand pooh-bah?" Nate was going to say "with the alpha whacko," but he thought of Amy and realized that something had changed. He no longer felt like he had nothing to lose.

Rider swiped at his hair and clutched at the flesh of his chair with the other hand. He began rocking slightly. "I want someone to tell me I'm thinking clearly, I guess. I dream things that the Goo knows, and I think it knows things that I dream, but I'm not sure. I'm overwhelmed."

"You might have thought about that before you declared yourself wizard."

"You think I chose this? I didn't choose this, Nate. The Goo chose me. I don't know how many people have been brought down here over the years, but I was the first biologist. I was the first one who had some idea how the Goo worked. It had the whaley boys bring me to a place like this, where there was raw, unformed animal, and it never let me leave. I've tried to make things better for people in Gooville, but — " Ryder's eyes rolled up in his head as if he were starting to have a seizure, but then he was back again. "Did you see the electricity on the whale ships? I did that. But it's not — It's different now than it has been."

Nate suddenly felt bad for the older man. Ryder was behaving like an early Alzheimer's patient who is realizing that he's losing recognition of his grandchildren's faces. "Tell me," Nate said.

Ryder nodded, swallowed hard, pressed on — hardly the picture of the powerful leader he'd appeared the night before.

"I think that after the Goo found its safe haven here under the sea, it needed to have more information, more DNA sequences to make sure it could protect itself. It produced a minute bacterium that could spread throughout the oceans, be part of the great world ecosystem but could pass genetic information back to the source. We call the bacteria SAR-11. It's a thousand times smaller than normal bacteria, but it's in every liter of seawater on the planet. That worked fine to transmit information back to the Goo for three billion years — everything that could be known was in the sea. Then something happened."

"Animals left the water?"

"Exactly. Until then, everything there was to know — every piece of information that could be known — was transmitted through DNA, replicators, in creatures that lived in the seas. The Goo knew everything. Mind you, it might take a million years to learn how to make an arthropod's segmented shell. It might take two million years to learn to make a gill or, say, twenty million to make an eye, but it had its safe niche, so it had the time — it didn't have anywhere it needed to be. Evolution doesn't really have a destination. It's just dicking around with possibilities. The Goo is the same way. But when life left the water, the Goo got a blind spot."

"I'm having a little trouble seeing the immediacy of your story, Colonel. I mean, why, beyond the obvious that I'm sitting inside this thing, is this supposed to be urgent?"

"Because four hundred million years later, the land creatures came back into the water — sophisticated land animals."

"Early whales?"

"Yes, when mammals came back to the sea, they brought something that even the dinosaurs — the reptiles and amphibians that had come back to the water — didn't have. Something the Goo didn't know. Knowledge that didn't replicate itself through DNA. It replicated through imitation, learned knowledge, not passed on. Memes."

Nate knew about memes, the information equivalent of a gene. A gene existed to replicate itself and required a vehicle, an organism, in which to do it. It was the same with memes, except a meme could replicate itself across vehicles, across brains. A tune you couldn't get out of your head, a recipe, a bad joke, the Mona Lisa — all were memes of sort. They were a fun model to think about, and computers had made the idea of a self-replicating piece of information more manifest with computer viruses, but what did that have to do with — But then it hit him. Why he'd learned about memes in the first place.

"The song," Nate said. "Humpback song is a meme."

"Of course. The first culture, the first exposure the Goo had to something it didn't understand. What, maybe fifteen million years ago it found out it wasn't the only game in town. Three billion years is a long time to get used to living in what you think is your private house only to suddenly find out that someone moved into an apartment above you while you were sleeping.

"For a long time the Goo didn't perceive that genes and memes were at odds. Whales were the first carriers. Big brains because they need to imitate complex behaviors, remember complex tasks, and because they could get the high-protein food to build the brains the memes needed. But the Goo came to terms with the whales. They're an elegant mix of genes and memes, absolute kings of their realm. Huge, efficient feeders, immune from any predation except from each other.

"But then something started killing whales. Killing them in alarming numbers. And it was something from the surface world. It wasn't something the Goo could find out about from its ocean-borne nervous system, so that's when I think it created the whale ships, or a version of them. Late seventeen or early eighteen hundreds, I'd guess. Then, I think when it had somehow gotten back enough samples of human DNA, it made the whaley boys. To stay camouflaged but to watch, to bring people back here so it could learn, watch us. I may have been the final link that started the war."

"What war? There's a war?" Nate had a quick vision of the paranoid megalomaniacs that the Colonel said he'd considered for pseudonyms, Captain Nemo and Colonel Kurtz, both complete bedbugs.

"The war between memes and genes. Between an organism that specializes in the replication of gene machines — the Goo — and one that specializes in the replication of meme machines — us, human beings. I brought electrical and computer technology here. I brought the Goo the theoretical knowledge of memes and genes and how they work. Where the Goo is now and where it was before I came is the difference between being able to drive one and being able to build a car from lumps of raw steel. It's realizing the threat. It's going to figure it out."

Ryder looked at Nate expectantly. Nate looked at him as if he wasn't getting the point. When he'd studied under Ryder, the man had been so cogent, so clear. Grumpy, but clear. "Okay," Nate said slowly, hoping Ryder would jump in, "so you need me to… uh…?"

"Help me figure out a way to kill it."

"Didn't see that coming."

"We're at war with the Goo, and we have to find a way to kill it before it knows what's happening."

"Then don't you think you should keep your voice down?"

"No, it doesn't communicate that way." The Colonel looked perturbed at Nate's comment.

"So you want me to figure out how to kill your god?

"Yes, before it wipes out the human race in one fell swoop."

"Which would be bad."

"And we have to kill it without killing everyone in Gooville."

"Oh, we can do that," Nate said, completely confident, the way he'd seen hostage negotiators in cop movies tell the bank robbers that their demands were being met and the helicopter was on the way. "But I'm going to need some time."

The strangest thing was, as Nate left the Colonel's chamber after being in direct contact with the Goo for only a few minutes, his hangover was completely gone.

"Evidently," said Nate, "where we screwed up was killing the whales."

"No way," said Amy.

"We tipped our hand."

"About being meme machines, right?"

"Yeah. Are you sure you're not spying for him?"

"Nope. Know how you can tell? When I was spying, did I ever touch you here?"

"No. No, you did not."

"And did I ever let you touch me here?" She moved his hand for him.

"No, you did not. Especially not in public."

"Yeah, we should probably go back to your place."

She had called him on his buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing, about which he made a mental note to ask what the name of it was at his first convenience. They'd met for coffee at a Gooville café that catered to whaley boys. She'd assured him that no one would notice them, and, strangely enough, the whaley boys had completely ignored them. Maybe he was no longer news.

"If they say anything, I'll just tell them that we're having sex," Amy said.

"But you said you didn't think I should tell the Colonel I'd seen you."

"Yeah, but that was before he let you in on his secret plan."

"Right."

"Although I'm a little ashamed of how old you are. We should talk about that."

"So should I move my hand?"

"Yeah, down and a little to the right."

"Let's head back to my place."

Back at his apartment, standing in the kitchen, he said, "Hey, what do you call this thing?" He pointed to that thing.

"The phone."

"No kidding?" He nodded as if he'd known that all along. "So where were we?"

"Killing whales was where we went wrong?"

"Yes."

"Or how old you are?"

"So," he continued, "killing whales was a big mistake."

"Which you knew, because that's what made you want to become a nerd in the first place."

"No, that's not right."

" 'Scuse me,
action
nerd."

"You want to know how I got into this field, really?"

"No. I mean, sure. You can tell me about the destruction of the human race later."

"You have to promise you won't laugh."

"Of course." She looked incredibly sincere.

"My sophomore year at the University of Sasketchewan in the Sticks —»

"You're kidding."

"It's a good school. You promised you wouldn't laugh."

"Oh, you meant even this early in the story I'm not supposed to laugh? Sorry."

"I mean, I'm sure it doesn't measure up to Gooville Community College —»

"Not fair."

"Home of the Gooville Fighting Loogies —»

"Okay, you made your point."

"Thank you. So a friend and I decided that we're going to go to break out of our boring small-college lives, we were going to take some risks, we were going to —»

"Talk to a girl?"

"No. We decided to drive all the way to Florida for spring break just like American kids, where we would then drink beer, get sunburned, and
then
talk to a girl — girls."

"So you went."

"Took almost a week to get there, but yes, we drove in his dad's Vista Cruiser station wagon. And I did indeed meet a girl. In Fort Lauderdale. A girl
from
Fort Lauderdale. And I talked to her."

"You dirty little tramp. Like, 'How's it going, eh? »

"Among other things. We conversed. And so she invited me to go see a manatee."

"He shoots! He scores!"

"But I thought it was an American way of saying matinee. I thought we were going to a movie. You know, you don't think about those things as being real."

"But it was."

"She did volunteer work for a rescue hospital for injured marine mammals, mostly manatees that had been hit by boats. They had a bottlenose dolphin, too. We stayed there for hours, caring for the animals, her teaching me about them. I was hooked. I hadn't even picked my undergrad major, but as soon as I got back to school, I went for biology, and I've been studying marine mammals ever since."

"Oh, my God, you didn't get laid, did you?"

"I found a passion for life. I found something that drives me."

"I can't believe I fell for such a pathetic loser."

"Hey, I'm pretty good at this whale stuff. I'm respected in my field."

"But you're dead."

"Yeah, before then, I mean. Hey, did you say that you fell for me?"

"I said I fell for a pathetic loser, if the shoe fits…"

He kissed her. She kissed him back. That went on for a while. They both found it excellent. Then they stopped.

"You said you wanted to talk about our age difference," Nate said, because he always picked women who broke his heart, and, figuring that his heart was now into this whole thing far enough to be broken, he wanted to get on with it.

"Yeah, we probably should. Maybe we should sit down."

"Couch?"

"No, at the table. You might want a drink."

"No, I'm okay."
Yep, heartbreak,
he thought. They sat.

"So," she said, curling her legs up under her, sitting like a little kid, making him feel ever more the creepy old guy leching on the young girl, "you know that the whaley boys have been pulling people in here from shipwrecks and plane crashes for years, right?"

"That's what Cielle said."

"She wants you, I can tell, but that's beside the point. Do you know that they pulled whole crews off sunken submarines, plus they've yanked sonar guys out of port for years?"

"I didn't know that."

"Doesn't matter, has nothing to do with what I'm telling you. So you realize that some people who have been lost at sea, like the crew of the American sub
Scorpion
that sank back in 67, actually ended up here?"

"Okay. That makes sense. More of the Goo looking out for itself. Gaining knowledge."

"Yeah, but that's not the point. I mean, those guys helped put together a lot of the technology you saw on the whale ship, the human technology, but that doesn't matter. The important part is that the world thinks that the crew of the
Scorpion
is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, even though they're not. Got it?"

"Okay," Nate said, really slowly, the way he had spoken to the Colonel when he was losing the point — much the way he was waving in the conversational wind right now.

"And you realize that when I applied with you and Clay, that I gave my real name, which is Amy Earhart, and that Amy is short for Amelia?"

"Oh, my God," Nate said.

"Ha!" Amy said.

The ship broker found Clay's ship in the Philippines, in Manila Harbor. Clay bought it based on faxed photographs, a spec sheet, and a recent hull certification for just under $2 million of the Old Broad's money. It was a 180-foot-long U.S. Coast Guard fisheries patrol vessel built in the late fifties. It had been refitted several times since then, once in the seventies for fishing, once in the eighties for ocean survey, and finally in the nineties as a live-aboard dive boat for the adventure tourist. It had plenty of comfortable cabins as well as compressors, dive platforms, and cranes to raise and lower support vessels onto the rear deck, although, except for the lifeboats, it came with no support craft. Clay thought they could use the rear deck as a helicopter-landing pad, even if there wasn't a budget for a helicopter, but — you know — someone with a helicopter might want to land there, and it helped no end to have a big H painted on the deck. There
was
a budget for painting a big H. The ship had efficient, if not quite state-of-the-art, navigation equipment, radar, autopilot, and some old but functioning sonar arrays left over from its days as a fishing ship. It had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower diesel engines and could distill up to twenty tons of freshwater a day for the crew and passengers. There were cabins and support for forty. It was also rated a class-three icebreaker, which was a feature that Clay hoped they wouldn't have to test. He really didn't like cold water.

Through another broker Clay hired the crew of ten men, sight unseen, right off the docks of Manila: a group of brothers, cousins, and uncles with the last name of Mangabay, among whom the broker guaranteed that there were no murderers, or at least no convicted murderers, and only petty thieves. The eldest uncle, Ray Mangabay, who would be Clay's first mate, would sail the ship to Honolulu, where Clay would meet them.

"He's going to be driving my ship," Clay said to Clair after he'd gotten the news that he had a crew and a first mate.

"You have to let your ship go, Clay," Clair said. "If he sinks it, it wasn't really yours."

"But it's my ship."

"What are you going to call it?"

He was thinking about the
Intrepid
or the
Merciless
or some other big-dick, blow-shit-up kind of name. He was thinking about
Loyal
or
Relentless
or the
Never Surrender,
because he was determined now to find his friend, and he didn't mind putting that right on the bow. "Well, I was thinking about —»

"You were thinking deeply about it, weren't you?" Clair interrupted.

"Yes, I thought I'd call her the
Beautiful Clair."

"Just the
Clair
will be fine, baby. You don't want the bow to look busy."

"Right. The
Clair."
Strangely enough, on second thought, that pretty much encompassed
Intrepid, Merciless, Relentless,
and
Loyal. Plus, it had the underlying meaning of keeper of the booty, which was sort of a bonus in a ship name,
he thought. "Yeah, that's a good name for her."

"How long before she gets here?"

"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."

"Well, now that she's called the
Clair,
I hope they bring her in safe."

"My ship," Clay said anxiously.

"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"

"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.

Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.

"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger — and decidedly luscious, I might add — woman had chosen you, right?"

"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?

"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent —»

"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.

"So the age thing? It's a problem?"

"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."

"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."

"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."

"I was just messin' with you. I'm her daughter. Ha!"

"Stop it! This isn't funny, Amy. If you're trying to make a point, you've made it. Yes, you're an attractive young woman, and maybe your youth's a part of why I'm attracted to you, but that's just biology. You can't blame me for that. I didn't make a move on you, I didn't harass you when we were working together. I treated you exactly as I would have treated any research assistant, except maybe you got away with more because I liked you. You can't ridicule me for responding to you sexually down here when you came on to me. The rules had changed."

"I'm not ridiculing you. Amelia Earhart really is my mother."

"Stop it."

"You want to meet her?"

Nate searched her face for signs of a grin or a tremble in her throat that might indicate the rise of an Amy
Ha!
Nothing there, just that little bit of sweetness that she usually tried to hide.

"So somehow, living down here, you haven't aged. Your mother?"

"We age, but not like on the surface. I was born in 1940. I'm about the same number of years older than you than you were older than me a half hour ago — kinda sorta. You going to dump me?"

"It's so hard to believe."

"Why, after you've seen all this? You've seen what the Goo can do. Why is it so hard to believe that I'm sixty-four?"

"Well, for one, you're so immature."

"Shut up. I'm young at heart."

"But for a second there I was so sure we were doomed." Nate rubbed his temples — trying to stretch them, maybe — to make his head bigger to hold the whole concept of Amy's being sixty-four.

"No, it's okay, we just haven't gotten to that yet. We're still doomed."

"Oh, thank goodness," Nate said. "I was worried."

Later, after they had pushed the world away for a while, made love and napped in each other's arms, Amy made a move to start another round, and Nate awoke to an immediate and uncertain anxiety.

"Are we really doomed?" he asked.

"Oh, goddamn it Nate!" She was straddling him, so she was able to get a good windup before thumping him hard in the chest with her fist. "That's just un-fucking-professional!"

Nate thought about how the praying mantis female will sometimes bite off the male's head during copulation and how the male's body continues to mate until the act is finished.

"Sorry," he said.

She rolled off him and stared up at dim strips of green luminescence on the ceiling. "It's okay. I didn't mean to bite your head off."