by Olga Werby
“Toby can’t use it.”
“I know.”
“Rider can. He’s been training with Kyle. Lilly brought Eeny over and Rider has been riding her.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough…and with the zapper. The results have been incredible.”
“Really? I have to see that.” For a moment, the weight of their situation—Will’s daughter’s dire illness, the grief-crazed orcas, the consciousness transplant—all appeared to lift, and George saw the brilliant, enthusiastic scientist he had first met not that many years ago.
He smiled at Will and patted him on the shoulder. “Soon, Will. We’re almost there.”
Shh, little one. We’re okay.
Toby sang to Mele in a lilting voice in her head. Mele liked it when Toby sang-spoke. Perhaps it reminded her of whale language. If Mele weren’t so young and her mother so unavailable in these last few days, Toby might have learned a few phrases of that language. But that would have to wait. And who knew? Wild orcas might speak a whole different dialect. Different peoples spoke different languages, so why not different populations of orcas?
Whenever Toby got involved with chasing a thought—like whale dialects—Mele settled down. It was as if the whale recognized that Toby was using words to form concepts and she was interested in following along.
Toby thought this had started because of music. Somewhere along the way, Toby started to hum along with the music that played in the riding room and, as she hummed, she thought about the ups and downs and the different instruments playing that music, about the musical themes, about the changes in tempo and style of songs. Something clicked for Mele and she began focusing her attention on Toby’s inner speech. The orca calf didn’t understand the meaning—yet—but she realized that there was meaning. It represented huge progress. And Toby kept it hidden from everyone else. It was her little secret. Her’s and Mele’s.
Mele was allowed to feed, but as soon as breastfeeding was over, she was hoisted out of the tanker by a giant crane. Her body was supported by wide canvas belts and she watched as the water, and then the ship, dropped away beneath her. It was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measures. Toby wondered if this was how roller coasters felt—she’d never been on one and never would.
Panic mixed with regret surged over both of them. Mele wanted to cry out, to call for her mother. Toby managed to keep Mele calm as she was lowered into the waiting truck filled with water.
But the moment the whale hit the water, she started to struggle in wild panic. The water felt like poison, burning her skin. She cried out. Toby cried out.
Stop it! Pull us out! Stop!
“What’s going on? Why is the calf thrashing?” Major Evans asked. “Did she hit something?”
Beside him, Will looked panicked. “What’s going on with Toby?”
George was already on the phone. “Lilly? What’s happening with Toby?”
“It’s like she’s having a seizure,” Lilly said. “Should I disconnect her from the BBI?”
“No! Keep her connected!”
“They can’t disconnect them now!” Will screamed. “We’ll lose Mele!”
Kyle’s voice came over the phone. “It’s something about the water,” he said. “Toby said it hurts her skin.”
“Who put the water in the truck?” George bellowed.
“The water’s just seawater, sir,” said the marine biologist traveling with them. “I watched them fill it myself.”
Mele was no longer in the water; the moment she’d started to struggle, George had ordered the crane operator to lift her back up and now she was suspended in the air a few feet above the truck. But she couldn’t stay out of the water like that for long—her lungs would collapse from her own weight and she would suffocate.
George thought quickly. “Were the trucks decontaminated first?” he asked.
It took a few moments to get the answer. Chlorine had been used to disinfect the tank trucks. But while that was distasteful, a small amount of chlorine shouldn’t harm the whale.
“Check the chlorine levels!” George yelled. Someone ran to follow his orders, but this was taking too much time. “Will, we can’t do much about this now. We have to go through with this.”
Will looked lost, stunned, unsure of what to do.
“We can—” Kyle began, but George had already made up his mind.
“Do it,” he shouted to the crane operator. “Lower her in.”
Mele moaned as she was reintroduced to the truck’s water. Through the phone, George could hear Toby crying out.
George surveyed this disaster. He was out of options. What will be, will be, he thought as he hung up the phone.
“Get the zapper,” Kyle shouted to Rider, but the man was already pulling it out of his backpack and attaching the electrodes to Toby’s temple and arm.
“What are you doing?” cried Lilly and Vikka simultaneously.
“It’s an electro-cranial stimulation device. I used these back when I flew drones for Major Watson,” Kyle said quickly, continuing to setup the electronics. “This is going to help Toby allocate more cognitive resources to the task.”
“Is it safe?”
“No drugs, no side effects. Just performance enhancement.”
“But we’ve never tested the BBI with the…the zapper!”
“Yes, we have. I used it once, early on, and it was fine. And for the last several days, we’ve been testing it extensively on Rider.”
“It works amazingly well,” Rider said. “No problems at all.”
Lilly gasped. “So that’s why they told me to bring Eeny.” She looked horrified.
“Yes. But it works, Lilly. I’m an experienced rider now—and it only took hours, not months.”
Ignoring them both, Kyle turned on the zapper.
Immediately, Toby relaxed. The muscles of her face went slack. It was like she was sleeping—a very peaceful sleep.
“She’s no longer seizing,” Vikka said.
“Her vitals are stabilizing,” Lilly added.
“Kyle, can you find out what’s happening to Mele?” Rider asked.
“I’m on it,” Kyle said.
Mele stopped thrashing.
Perhaps she got used to whatever chemical is in the water? George thought. But he suspected another reason. Toby.
“Get her moving,” George said. “We’ll clean the other truck and bring Kona after.”
The big truck lumbered out of the shipyard, escorted by military vehicles with their lights flashing. A special truck with a “wide load” sign took up the rear.
“Now we wait,” Kyle said.
Lilly had managed to push her panic down. Vikka was still sniffling, holding Toby’s hand, but she wasn’t interfering. If she did, Rider would take her from the room.
“Is she conscious?” Vikka asked in a hushed voice.
“I think she’s conscious for Mele,” Rider said.
The pain and panic subsided. It was like a ray of sunshine coming out on a gloomy day.
I’m here, Toby thought to Mele.
The young orca squirmed with pleasure and Toby got hit by a tidal wave of sensations. This time, however, Toby was able to keep up. Mele shared a view of her tank on the truck, painted as proprioceptive depth variations over the surface of her skin. The little clicks that orcas generated in their nasal cavity gave an echolocation view of the world with a surprising level of detail. Vibrations from the road transferred through the water, giving another view of the space.
And then Mele stopped paying attention to her cramped surroundings and imagined a whole other space—one infused with hope. Just as humans could imagine visual images, orcas could imagine sculptured impressions gathered via their echolocation organ—and what Mele shared with Toby was a dream of a space where the young calf could swim free and play with the fish amid the kelp that Toby had thought-described for her. The experience was both overwhelming and awesome.
Toby opened her human eyes and stared out
of the window of the lab. It was nighttime and the sky was clear. The rippling surface of their little bay flashed with moonlight, glinting like the silver scales of the fish Mele had toyed with during her feeding time back in Texas. Mele had never been good at catching the fish—she was still too young—but she liked to play with them.
Mele shared a vision of herself racing through the bay and playing with the moonlight. It reminded Toby of a cat chasing a dot of light made by a laser pointer.
The thing about sharing thoughts and memories was that it was never a one-way thing. As soon as Toby thought of cats and laser pointers, Mele wanted to know what cats were. Mele had never seen a cat and Toby’s thought hadn’t been visually oriented. As a result, Mele’s interpretation of Toby’s musings was hilariously off. The baby orca thought of a furry human trainer chasing fish that flopped around on the ground. It was hilarious. Surreal. Toby laughed.
Then Mele shared her memory of the only time she’d actually seen Toby, through the window in her enclosure in Texas. But Mele no longer had a clear image of what Toby looked like—and in her memory, Toby had morphed into an orca. A land orca.
Then Mele did something that Toby didn’t understand—she shared an echo image of what Toby looked like. It was formed like a question: Is that you?
Of course it looked nothing like Toby and probably wasn’t a good echo image either. So Toby tried to think of herself looking in a mirror. To her surprise, the result didn’t look like her at all: it was a strange mixture of Toby and Cory. Strange—even in her own mind, she wasn’t entirely a girl.
The truth was, ever since she had gotten very sick and was stuck most of the time in a wheelchair, Toby had stopped looking at her own reflection. It just made her sad—it wasn’t how she wanted to think of herself. On the inside, she was healthy and able to fly. And apparently, she’d spent so much time riding Cory in the past several months that her worldview had merged with Cory’s. She now had a raven’s point of view. Halfway, anyway.
This confused Mele even more. She knew birds from the park and she knew that her mother didn’t like them. One time, Mele had seen Kona eat one of those birds.
I’m not like those birds! Toby reassured Mele. She formed an accurate image of Cory in all her regal black splendor. She showed Mele what it felt like to fly high in the sky. And Mele understood. There was a familiarity to the freedom of movement. There was an up and down in addition to the four sides. Flying really was a lot like swimming.
“She’s burning up,” Vikka said.
“How high?” Kyle asked.
Lilly was monitoring Toby’s vitals. “One oh three point six,” she said.
“She’s been on antibiotics since we left Houston,” Vikka said. “They’re just not working.”
“But why?” Rider asked. “I get that cystic fibrosis is clogging up her lungs with a glue-like mucous. But why the fever? Why the rapid decline?”
“She has a lung infection,” Vikka explained. “The doctors in Houston said it was Burkholderia cepacia—it’s a common bug found in dirt. For someone like Toby, it can be a death sentence.”
“Did they tell her that?” Rider asked.
“You mean that she was going to die?” Vikka asked. “No, but they told Uncle Geo and me while Cory was there. So yes, she knows.”
Rider glanced at Cory and Grock. It was clear that the ravens also knew how grave Toby’s condition was. “So what do we do?” he asked.
“All we can do is try to lower her temperature with ice packs,” Lilly said. “George said that we are at no point to allow Toby to be disconnected from Mele.”
At the mention of Mele’s name, Cory uttered a strange cry—like a raven imitating an orca. It was haunting. Somehow Cory understood that her rider was part orca now. She was trying to reach her.
Cold, thought Toby. Mele felt the girl’s body shiver. She liked the sensation and imitated it in her water tank.
The clarity of communication was amazing—there was no separation at all between the human and orca. It was almost like talking to herself in a vivid dream. A fantastical, super realistic dream.
But it was also exhausting and Toby was already tired. The infection was spreading, leaving her with even less lung capacity than she was used to, and even the oxygen assist through her cannula wasn’t enough to mitigate the problem. To help, Mele rose to the surface and took a deep breath from the pocket of air at the top of her container. The truck’s air was well vented—better than the stale air in the ship. It didn’t taste very good, but it was full of oxygen.
Toby delighted in it and Mele delighted with her. The orca rose up to the surface again and inhaled deeply once more. She sank to the bottom and let the air out, making thousands of tiny bubbles that made the water almost fizzy. It was like swimming in soda water. It tickled.
Toby remembered a video she’d seen of whales hunting together by creating a encircling net of tiny bubbles to trap the fish in the center. The fish didn’t realize they could swim right through the curtain of air and the whales lunged up through the center to feast. Mele loved the idea. She wanted to try it right away.
Soon, Mele. Soon, Toby thought to her.
And surprisingly, Mele understood. She settled down to wait for the transport to be over.
“She’s sleeping,” Lilly said to the room. “I can see it in her brainwave pattern.”
“Is she dreaming?” Rider asked. He was monitoring the connections for the zapper. Toby had several episodes of cold sweats and he was afraid she’d become accidentally disconnected.
“Yes, but her respiration is horrible. Her oxygenation is down to 80%. If we can’t get it back up, she’ll suffer hypoxia and she won’t wake up.” Her voice was even, professional. She was stating the facts. But next to Toby, Vikka was clearly trying hard not to break down completely. “We’ve seen her go below eighty before,” Lilly said to Vikka. “She’s managed to bounce back.”
No one replied.
“How much longer until Mele gets here?” Rider asked. “I’d like her to feel the open ocean.”
“We’re not going to release Mele out there, are we?” Lilly asked. “Isn’t she too young to be there alone?”
“She’ll have Toby,” Kyle said. “Toby is older than she looks. She’ll take care of Mele until her mother arrives.”
“But George said to unload the baby orca in the enclosure,” Lilly said. “We’re not supposed to open the gate that leads to the ocean until later.”
“Then we’ll just have to ‘forget’ to close the gate,” Rider said. He looked around at Lilly, Kyle, and Vikka. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’d like her to get a chance to swim free.”
No one disagreed.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” Kyle said. “I’ll take care of the gate.”
A crane lifted Toby/Mele from the revolting water of the truck. The air outside was crisp, cold, and prickly. For a few minutes, her body felt so heavy and cumbersome. Toby gasped and cried out. And then she was back in the water—in the outside enclosure at the lab.
It was large and it felt wonderful to no longer be constrained. But Toby wanted to feel real water—the waters of the bay and the ocean beyond. She tasted that water streaming in from an opening at the other end of the enclosure. She swam for it.
And there it was. The bay! The shore next to the enclosure had been excavated to make a channel to deeper waters, but after that, the contour of the bay was natural. Its center had been dug out by eons of wave action and, in the shallower areas by the water’s edge, sea grasses moved back and forth in time with the waves above.
The freedom was amazing.
And it was just as fun as Mele had imagined. There were fish and other creatures hiding in the rocks and kelp below. She couldn’t wait to play with them. Although she still craved her mother’s milk, she would try to make a bubble net and see if she could catch anything. Kona would be here soon and then they would explore the bay together, mother and daughter.
“Se
venty-five,” Lilly announced. “And dropping. She cyanotic.” Toby’s extremities and lips had turned blue from lack of oxygen.
“When do we cut the connection?” Rider asked.
Everyone looked at Will. He and George had arrived with Mele, and now Will was on his knees beside Toby’s unconscious body. Vikka was on the girl’s other side, holding her hand. George and Kyle were outside.
“Cut the connection?” Vikka spoke through tears.
“We can’t have Toby go while she’s connected,” Will said. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper.
“Go?” Vikka didn’t understand. Or perhaps she just refused to.
“When we drop below fifty, I’ll administer morphine,” Will said. “We’ll cut the connection just before.”
“Uncle Geo?” Vikka looked around, seeking help.
Rider pointed out the window. Kyle and George stood on the rocky bluff above the bay, watching the young whale frolic in the moonlit waves. “He knows,” he said.
Vikka stood up and walked to the windows. It was the first time she’d let go of Toby’s hand in hours. She put her palms and forehead against the window and looked out at the orca. “Is she in there?”
“I think so,” Will said. “The transfer started as soon as we left Texas.” The zapper helped speed the process. It had been a surprisingly effective idea.
“It’s time,” Lilly said.
Will wasn’t ready, but he nodded. How could anyone be ready for this? There was a taboo to discussing death even as it happened. It was obscene to talk about it, especially in relation to our loved ones. Even the frailty leading up to death was off limits. Will had spent many years working at not thinking about it. And now it was here.
