Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (7 page)

Kona was looking over the side at the singer, whose tail was only twenty feet below the boat (although his head was forty feet deeper). He was only a couple of minutes into his song. He'd be down at least ten minutes more.

"Kona, we need to get a DNA sample."

"How we do that?"

Nate pulled a set of flippers out of the console and handed them and an empty coffee cup out to the surfer. "You're going to need to go get a semen sample."

The surfer gulped. Looked at the whale, looked at the cup, looked over the side at the whale again. "No lid?"

Clay Demodocus drifted silently down past the tail of the breath-holder, only the quiet hissing of his own breath in his ears. Breath-holders were called such because they hung there in the water for up to forty minutes, heads down like a singer, just holding their breath. Not swimming or singing or doing much of anything else. Just hanging there, sometimes three or four of them, tails spread out like the points of a compass. As if someone had just dropped a handful of sleeping whales and forgotten to pick them up. Except they weren't sleeping. Whales didn't really sleep, as far as they knew. Well, the theory was that they slept with only half of their brain at a time, while the other half took care of not drowning. For an air-breather, sleeping in the water and not drowning is a big problem. (Go ahead, try it. We'll wait.)

Falling asleep would be so easy with the rebreather, Clay thought. It was very quiet, which was why Clay was using it. Instead of using a tank of air that was exhaled through a regulator into the water as bubbles, the rebreather sent the diver's exhalation back through a scrubber that took out the carbon dioxide, past some sensors and a tank that added some oxygen, then back to the diver to be rebreathed. No bubbles, which made the rebreather perfect for studying whales (and for sneaking up on enemy ships, which is why the navy had developed it in the first place). Humpbacks used bubble blowing as a means of communication, especially the males, who threatened one another with bubble displays. Consequently it was nearly impossible to get close to a whale with scuba gear, especially a static animal like a singer or a breath-holder. By blowing bubbles the diver was babbling away in whalespeak, without the slightest idea of what he was saying. In the past Clay had dropped on breath-holders with scuba gear, only to watch the animals swim off before he got within fifty feet of them. He imagined the whales saying, "Hey, it's the skinny, retarded kid talking nonsense again. Let's get out of here."

But this season they'd gotten the rebreather, and Clay was getting his first ever decent footage of a breath-holder. As he drifted by the tail, he checked his gauges, looked up to see Amy snorkeling at the surface, silhouetted in a sunbeam, a small tank strapped on her back ready to come to his rescue should something go wrong. The one big drawback to the rebreather (rather than a fairly simple hose on a tank as in a scuba setup) was that it was a very complex machine, and, should it break, there was a good chance it would kill the diver. (Clay's experience had taught him that the one thing you could depend on was that something would break.)

Around him, except for the whale, was a field of clear blue; below, nothing but blue. Even with great visibility he couldn't see the bottom, some five hundred feet down.

Just past the tail he was at a hundred feet. The navy had tested the rebreather to more than a thousand feet (and since he could theoretically stay down for sixteen hours if he needed to, decompression wasn't a problem), but Clay was still wary of going too deep. The rebreather wasn't set to mix gases for a deep dive, so there was still the danger of nitrogen narcosis — a sort of intoxication caused by pressurized nitrogen in the bloodstream. Clay had been narced a couple of times, once while under arctic ice filming beluga whales, and if he hadn't been tethered to the opening in the ice with a nylon line, he would have drowned.

Just a few more feet and he'd be able to sex the breath-holder, something that they hadn't done more than a few times before, and then it was by crossbow and DNA. The question so far was, are breath-holders all male like singers, and if so, does the breath-holding behavior have something to do with the singing behavior? Clay and Quinn had first come together over the question of sexing singers, some seventeen years before, when DNA testing was so rare as to be nearly nonexistent. "Can you get under the tail?" Nate had asked. "Get photos of the genitals?"

"Kinky," Clay had said. "Sure, I'll give it a try."

Of course, except for a few occasions when he was able to hold his breath long enough to get under an animal, about a third of the time, Clay had failed at producing whale porn. Now, with this rebreather…

As he drifted below the tail, so close now that even the wide-angle lens could take in only a third of the flukes, Clay noticed some unusual markings on the tail. He looked up from the display just as the whale began to move, but it was too late. The whale twitched, and the massive tail came down on Clay's head, driving him some twenty feet deeper in an instant. The wash from the flukes tumbled him backward three times before he settled in a slow drift to the bottom, unconscious.

As he watched the pseudo-Hawaiian try to kick down to the singing whale for the eighth time, Nathan Quinn thought,
This is a rite of passage. Similar things were done to me when I was a grad student. Didn't Dr. Ryder send me out to get close-up blowhole pictures of a gray whale who had a hideous head cold? Wasn't I hit by a basketball-size gob of whale snot nearly every time the whale surfaced? And wasn't I, ultimately, grateful for the opportunity to get out in the field and do some real research? Of course I was. Therefore, I am being neither cruel nor unprofessional by sending this young man down again and again to perform a hand job on the singer.

The radio chirped, signaling a call from the
Always Confused.
Nate keyed the mike button on the mobile phone/two-way radio they used to communicate between the two boats. "Go ahead, Clay."

"Nate, it's Clair. Clay went down about fifteen minutes ago, but Amy just dove after him with the rescue tank. I don't know what to do. They're too deep. I can't see them. The whale took off, and I can't see them."

"Where are you, Clair?"

"Straight out, about two miles off the dump."

Nate grabbed the binoculars and scanned the island, found the dump, looked out from there. He could make out two or three boats in the area. Six or eight minutes away at full throttle.

"Keep looking, Clair. Get ready to drop a hang tank if you have one set up, in case they need to decompress. I'll be there as soon as I get the kid out of the water."

"What's he doing in the water?"

"Just a bad decision on my part. Keep me apprised, Clair. Try to follow Amy's bubbles if you can find them. You'll want to be as close to them as you can when they come up."

Nate started the engine just as Kona broke the surface, spitting out the snorkel and taking in a great gasp of air. Kona shook his head, signifying that he hadn't accomplished the mission. "Too deep, boss."

"Come, come, come. To the side." Nate waved him to the boat. Quinn brought the boat broadside to Kona, then reached over with both hands. "Come on." Kona took his hands, and Quinn jerked the surfer over the gunwale. Kona landed in a heap in the bottom of the boat.

"Boss —»

"Hang on, Clay's in trouble."

"But, boss —»

Quinn buried the throttle, yanked the boat around, and cringed at the bunny-in-a-blender screech as the hydrophone cord wrapped around the prop, sheared the prop pin, and chopped itself into a whole package of expensive, waterproof licorice sticks.

"Fuck!" Nate snatched off his baseball cap and whipped it onto the console.

The hydrophone sank peacefully to the bottom, bopping the singer on the back as it went. Nate killed the engine and grabbed the radio. "Clair, are they up yet? I'm not going to be able to get there."

Amy felt as if someone were driving huge ice picks into her eardrums. She pinched her nostrils closed and blew to equalize the pressure, even as she kicked to go deeper, but she was moving too fast to get equalized.

She was down fifty feet now. Clay was a hundred feet below her, the pressure would triple before she got there. She felt as if she were swimming through thick, blue honey. She'd seen the whale tail hit Clay and toss him back, but the good news was that she hadn't seen a cloud of bubbles come up. There was a chance that the regulator had stayed in Clay's mouth and he was still breathing. Of course, it could also mean that he was dead or that his neck had snapped and he was paralyzed. Whatever his condition, he certainly wasn't moving voluntarily, just sinking slowly, relentlessly toward the bottom.

Amy fought the pressure, the resistance of the water, and did math problems as she kicked deeper. The rescue tank held only a thousand pounds of air, a third of the capacity of a normal tank. She guessed that she'd be at around a hundred and seventy-five to two hundred feet before she caught Clay. That would give her just enough air to get him to the surface without stopping to decompress. Even if Clay was unhurt, there was a good chance he was going to get decompression sickness, the bends, and if he lived through that, he'd spend three or four days in the hyperbaric decompression chamber in Honolulu.

Ah, the big palooka is probably dead anyway,
she thought, trying to cheer herself up.

Although Clay Demodocus had lived a life spiced with adventures, he was not an adventurer. Like Nate, he did not seek danger, risk, or fulfillment by testing his mettle against nature. He sought calm weather, gentle seas, comfortable accommodations, kind and loyal people, and safety, and it was only for the work that he compromised any of those goals. The last to go, the least compromised, was safety. The loss of his father, a hard-helmet sponge diver, had taught him that. The old man was just touching bottom at eight hundred feet when a drunken deck hand dragged his ass across the engine start button, causing the prop to cut his father's air line. The pressure immediately drove Papa Demodocus's entire body into the bronze helmet, leaving only his weighted shoes showing, and it was in his great helmet that he was lowered into the grave. Little Clay (Cleandros in those days in Greece) was only five at the time, and that last vision of his father haunted him for years. He never did see a Marvin the Martian cartoon — that great goofy helmet body riding cartoon shoes — when he did not have to fight a tear and sniffle for Papa.

As Clay drifted down into the briny blue, he saw a bright light and a dark shape waiting there on the other side. Out of the light came a short but familiar figure. The face was still dark, but Clay knew the voice, even after so many years. "Welcome, Earth Being," said the vacuum-packed Greek.

"Papa," said Clay.

Clair dragged the heavy tank out of the
Always Confused
's bait well and tried to attach the regulator in order to hang it off a line for Amy and Clay to breathe from so they could decompress before coming up. Clay had shown her how to do this a dozen times, but she had never paid attention. It was his job to put the technothingies together. She didn't need to know this stuff. It wasn't as if she was ever going to go diving without him. She'd let him drone on about safety this and life-threatening that while she applied her attention to putting on sunscreen or braiding her hair so it wouldn't tangle in the equipment. Now she was blinking back tears and cursing herself for not having listened. When she thought she finally might have the regulator screwed on correctly, she grabbed it and dragged the tank to the side of the boat. The regulator came off in her hands.

"Goddamn it!" She snatched the radio and keyed the mike. "Nate, I need some help here."

"Go ahead, sistah," came back. "He be in the briny blue, fixing the propeller."

"Kona, do you know how a regulator goes on a scuba tank?"

"Yah mon, you got to keep the bowl above the water or your herb get wet and won't take the fire."

Clair took a deep breath and fought back a sob. "See if you can put Nate on."

Back on the
Constantly Baffled,
Nate was in the water with snorkel and fins fighting the weight of half a dozen wrenches and sockets he'd put in the pockets of his cargo shorts. He almost had the propeller off the boat. With luck he could install the shear pin and be up and running in a couple of minutes. It wasn't a complex procedure. It had just been made a lot trickier when Nate found that he couldn't reach the prop to work on it from inside the boat. Then, suddenly, his air supply was cut off.

He kicked up, spit the snorkel out of his mouth, and found himself staring Kona right in the face. The fake Hawaiian hung over the back of the boat, his thumb covering the end of Nate's snorkel, his other hand holding the radio, which he'd let slip halfway underwater.

"Call for you, boss."

Nate gasped and snatched the receiver out of Kona's hand — held it up out of the water. "What in the hell are you doing? That's not waterproof." He tried to sling the water out of the cell phone and keyed the mike. "Clair! Can you hear me?" No sound, not even static.

"But it's yellow," said Kona, as if that explained everything.

"I can see it's yellow. What did Clair say? Is Clay all right?"

"She wanted to know how to put the regulator on the tank. You have to keep the bowl above the water, I tell her."

"It's not a bong, you idiot. It's a real scuba tank. Help me out."

Nate handed up his fins, then stepped on the trim planes on the stern and pulled himself into the boat. At the console he turned on the marine radio and started calling. "Clair, you listening? This is the
Constantly Baffled
calling the
Always Confused.
Clair, are you there?"

"Constantly Baffled,"
cut in a stern, official-sounding male voice, "this is the Department of Conservation and Resources Enforcement. Are you displaying your permit flag?"

"Conservation, we have an emergency situation, a diver in trouble off our other boat. I'm dead in the water with a broken shear pin. The other boat is roughly two miles off the dump."

"
Constantly Baffled,
why are you not displaying your permit flag?"

"Because I forgot to put the damn thing up. We have two divers in the water, both possibly in trouble, and the woman on board is unable to put together a hang tank." Nate looked around. He could see the whale cops' boat about a thousand yards to the west toward Lanai. They were alongside another boat. Nate could see the familiar figure of the Count standing in the bow, looming there like doom in an Easter bonnet.
Bastard!