The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond

by Howard Steven Pines

  Copyright © 2013 by Howard Steven Pines

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address Pacific Reefs Publishing.

  This is a work of fiction. Unless specifically noted, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9894797-1-4

  For information, address:

  Pacific Reefs Publishing

  PacificReefsPublishing@gmail.com

  This work was originally copyrighted in 2009 as The Turing Translation.

  Excerpts from “Autumn, Ocean and Birds” and “Orion Rises on the Dunes” from the book THE OUTERMOST HOUSE edited by Henry Beston. Copyright © 1928, 1949 1956, 1977, 1988 by Henry Beston. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Brief excerpt from p. 44[“The transformation of the world . . . true perception.”] from The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti. Copyright 1954 by J. Krishnamurti Writings, Inc., renewed (c) 1982 by J. Krishnamurti. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  For Ying, Josh, and Jamie

  PROLOGUE

  THE UNFATHOMABLE DANCE

  “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

  —Henry Beston, 1928, The Outermost House

  Far away from human eyes and ears, in the depths of the North Pacific Ocean, a group of great-winged creatures cleaved curling trails through an underwater forest of sunbeams. Rotating clockwise in a heliocentric formation, their motions traced out sweeping elliptical contours, like the orbits of the planets. An incarnation of nature’s great closed-loop cycles, these titanic beings soared and whirled in a Copernican adagio.

  With graceful undulations of its fifteen-foot pectoral fins, their leader directed from the center, like an impassioned maestro waving twin batons. The whales performed in perfect synchrony to their choreographer’s cadenced vocalizations, gliding effortlessly, propelled by the hypnotic beating of their wings, and responding to every nuance of melody.

  Like a chain reaction of chemical eruptions, the titans spewed a steady stream of bubbles into each of their separate wakes. Their effervescent contrails sketched the outlines of their movements, as if they were a team of spiders weaving a web of foam. They pitched and yawed with such uncanny precision that the rate of their ascendency matched the speed of the rising bubbles. When the soloist’s song finally ceased, they paused and gazed up at their colossal creation—a rendering of concentric rings, oriented perfectly parallel to the surface.

  The pod trailed in the halo of their breath-sculpted tapestry as it climbed ever higher, shimmering in the shafts of morning light. Rising to the surface, the whales pierced the sky with a blast from their nostrils. It was time again to breathe.

  WHALE WATCHERS ANONYMOUS

  Maalaea Bay, Maui—an early January morning

  “Yes!” boomed Greg.

  Dmitri turned his head to windward and gasped in unison with his fifty shipmates. The sun-drenched panorama of sea and sky had been fractured. A trio of leviathans had breached the ocean’s skin, rocketing into the air, suspended in space before his eyes. The arc of each giant’s body bridged two worlds. Dmitri gazed upon what seemed an illusion, a magician’s trick. The forty-five-ton, forty-five-foot-long whales had transformed themselves into birds, each with the wingspan of a light corporate jet, soaring alongside the cruising tour boat.

  Dmitri’s world stood still. He viewed the striking features of the closest colossus in slow motion: the deeply grooved tire-tread pattern stamped upon its snow-white underbelly, the black and white mottled markings, like fingerprints, painted on the fifteen-foot tail fluke, and the colonies of barnacles clinging to the knobs, folds, and creases of the humpback’s body. While he blinked, the fleeting vision melted back into the sea.

  The titans’ explosive, sub-orbital reentry back to their home world unleashed a frenzied chorus of screaming and cheering. “What a rush!” Greg hollered above the din of the crowd.

  Dmitri spoke directly into his hearing-challenged friend’s ear. “I know. It’s incredible.”

  “Like Marine World,” replied Greg, “only a hundred times better.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Dmitri, his heart still pounding. “Their brains are four times larger than ours, mostly gray matter, and their minds have evolved over thirty million years. Think of the possibilities.”

  With the crowd still abuzz, Dmitri thought about his mission with mounting anticipation. He’d scheduled this winter-break vacation to crack the codes of a mystery language. Three years before, his beloved mentor and former thesis advisor, Professor Theodosius McPinsky, had published his controversial challenge to the research community. Inspired by the professor’s paradigm-busting proclamation, Dmitri had adopted the “McPinsky Challenge” as his own: “Decipher the languages of earth’s other big-brained beings before they are crushed by the juggernaut of human exceptionalism.”

  As the double-decker catamaran ploughed across Maalaea Bay, crashing through aquamarine swells, the deck swayed beneath him. Dmitri gazed at the horizon. Silvery ribbons of morning light danced from crest to crest. Textured hues of blue suffused the air and water canvas. A perpetual crown of mists veiled the volcanic peaks of Lanai and Molokai. He heard the splashing of the prow and the flapping flags upon the mast. He breathed the seaweed-scented, salt-infused air. The sights, sounds, and smells of Maui cast a spell upon a man who’d spent most of his life in the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles.

  Rounding Papawai Point and tacking northwesterly toward Lahaina, the view that gradually emerged seemed yet another surreal vision. The cane fields ascended the slopes of foothills and embraced the haunches of towering sentinels, the West Maui Mountains. Dmitri’s eyes traced the sensuous curves of a verdant carpet.

  “Dmitri, this is a blissed-out paradise!” Greg Bono, as well as the rest of David Dmitri’s friends and associates, addressed his best friend by the preferred moniker of his surname. Greg reached out as if to touch the mountains. “Like a Gauguin landscape of Tahiti. Totally awesome.”

  They slapped their hands together, high-five style. Dmitri smiled at the sight of Greg’s boyish grin and his golden, shoulder-length hair teasing the wind. They’d been colleagues for nearly a decade, associate professors of engineering and math, respectively, at Southern California Scientific University, more popularly known as SoCalSci. Dmitri had long admired his closest friend’s tenacity. Greg Bono had trained many years to overcome the auditory dysfunction he’d acquired during a childhood illness. In the parlance of communications engineering, it was a signal-to-noise ratio problem. Compared to a person with nominal hearing, Greg had
to labor to conduct conversations in noisy environments. When necessary, he compensated by reading lips.

  Dmitri forcefully enunciated each word. “You know Maui is my favorite place on the planet. That’s why I wanted to bring you here first before we cross swords about the whale song stuff.”

  “Yes, they are amazing creatures. But talking to them?” Greg arched an eyebrow.

  “Oh, quit exaggerating. I’m an acoustics engineer. I’d analyze their songs for the elements of language. It’ll make a great research paper, and my CPA tells me I can write off my trips to Maui.”

  Greg pursed his lips, a sign of grudging approval that Dmitri had come to relish. The thrum of the boat’s engine ceased, allowing Dmitri to resume at a lower volume. “I’ve already contacted the director of the local whale foundation.”

  “You’re swimming in dangerous waters.” Greg furrowed his mathematician’s brow into a familiar pattern, reminding Dmitri of the symbol for the square-root sign. “Don’t forget. Your illustrious mentor was banished from our university for preaching about interspecies communication.”

  “I appreciate your concern and I promise to fly low.”

  “Aloha, and welcome aboard our PICES whale watch expedition boat.” An amplified male voice, bearing a distinct New England accent, had spared Dmitri the sting of another of Greg’s barbs. “I’m Tom, your PICES naturalist and tour guide. I think you’ll agree. PICES is much easier to pronounce than Pacific Institute for Cetacean Educational Studies, especially after a couple of mai tais.” His baritone voice exuded confidence.

  As the crowd laughed, the guide brushed a hand across the red bandana wrapped gypsy-style around his head. Wherever Dmitri looked, he saw female gazes, like radar beams, admiring every conceivable angle of Tom’s movie-star profile.

  “You’ve just witnessed a surprise greeting from the commuters of Hawaii’s Humpback Highway,” said the naturalist. Dmitri’s upper incisors tingled with a frosty chill as he strained to comprehend the man’s noise-distorted message. “Consider yourselves extremely fortunate. I’ve never seen three humpbacks breach simultaneously and rarely this close when the engine’s at full power. Now that we’ve stopped we should have even more action.”

  Greg’s tortured expression, as if he’d bitten into a lemon, confirmed that the guide’s electronic megaphone vibrated like the sound of scraping metal. Dmitri leaned closer to Greg and said, “An intermittent short circuit in the preamp. Totally nonlinear.”

  The guide slapped his palm against the side of the loudspeaker horn. “Testing, one, two, three.” He nodded with satisfaction. “Sorry about the malfunction. Marine biologists are still speculating about the humpback’s breaching behavior. There’s no consensus explanation. Our staff divers have studied the breach from underwater. It takes only a few beats of their ginormous tail fin, no more than a couple of seconds, to generate the power to fly through the air with the greatest of ease.”

  “Mommy, look!” A freckled, red-haired girl near Dmitri pointed to twin geysers erupting from the sea. Like giant water pistols, they erased the precise V-shaped formation of a flock of jabbering cormorants.

  “Don’t be alarmed, folks,” said the guide. “Humpbacks are air-breathing mammals who, remarkably, can hold their breath for up to forty-five minutes. They surface and exhale through their blowholes at speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour to generate the twenty-foot-high vapor plumes you just experienced. They’re called ‘blows.’ After they replenish the air supply in their lungs, each the size of a Volkswagen bug, they can dive for another ten to fifteen minutes. Since the blows are visible at great distances, they’re a surefire way to locate the pods.”

  Dmitri’s thumbs played across the touch screen of his iPhone. He tapped Greg on the shoulder. “I just did a calculation about the breach.” He pointed to the numbers on the display. “It’s simple physics. The kinetic energy of the humpback exiting the water is the same as the potential energy of its body at the maximum height above the surface. Since I estimated its center of mass nearly twenty feet above the water, then its exit velocity is close to twenty-three miles per hour.”

  “Very cool,” Greg replied with a sly smile. “Amazing what engineers can discover using basic algebra.”

  “So here’s the punch line,” Dmitri went on. “If the whale is about forty tons, then it only takes him a fraction of the time to accelerate to the same speed as a fully-loaded eighteen-wheeler.”

  “I’m impressed.” A heavy-set, middle-aged woman stood next to him. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.” Smiling, she removed her big-brimmed straw hat and waved it in the air. She would have smacked Dmitri in the face, but he ducked. “Excuse me,” she singsonged at the guide, “but I believe the gentleman next to me has something interesting to share.” She pointed directly at Dmitri, who slipped behind Greg.

  “No need to be shy, sir,” said the guide in a teasing tone.

  With urging from a few bystanders, Dmitri submitted to his fate and repeated the story to his fellow passengers. The shared discovery was greeted by oohing and aahing. Greg turned the bill of a blue L.A. Dodgers baseball cap backward and launched into an exuberant fan’s display of handclapping and shrill whistling. His enthusiasm was contagious. The crowd roared.

  The guide grimaced and thrust his hands skyward. However, he couldn’t resume until the celebration had passed. In a half-hearted tone, he said, “Very impressive, sir. Most folks on a Hawaiian holiday leave their calculators at home. This is the first time anyone on my tour ever put a Bill Nye spin on the physics of whales.”

  Already embarrassed by the scattered laughter, Dmitri turned to see the guide staring directly at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”

  “No problem.” The guide brandished the megaphone with an authoritative flair. “I—” His words were swamped by a collective outcry. Like a giant periscope, a whale’s head slowly emerged straight up out of the sea until its eyes were a foot above the water line. Then it rotated a full one-hundred-eighty degrees to scan the boat, like a submarine commander searching for friend or foe.

  “The whales seem to enjoy studying us as much as we study them,” said the guide. “This type of head display is known as a spy hop.”

  Another humpback surfaced, circling the vessel, getting closer and closer, until it finally snuggled up to the starboard side. When the whale began to rub its backside against the hull, a dissonant mix of shrieks and laughter abounded around the upper deck. Animated hands reached in vain to touch the gregarious giant. After a brief massage, it backed away, rolled languorously on its side, and extended its fifteen-foot pectoral fin toward the boat. It tilted its head with an eye open, appearing to look up at everyone on board.

  “See,” announced the guide. “This boat’s no more than a scratching post for the mighty cetaceans.”

  The red-haired girl waved her arm and hopped in place. “What’s a citation?”

  The guide summoned up a grin. “That’s a very good question, young lady.” He gazed only at her, as if addressing a VIP. “Cetaceans are the dozens of species of large, air-breathing marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, and porpoises.” Reengaging with his audience, he said, “In recent years, many humpback whales in this population have approached boats for friendly encounters. Such behavior has increased each year. It might be because of the relatively recent national and international bans on hunting humpbacks. These new generations of whales have never known whaling. They’re curious and they initiate contact. They often stay for several hours, investigating.”

  The girl’s eyes were huge as she listened.

  Dmitri raised a hand. “It strikes me that their behavior indicates an extremely inquisitive mindset, not to mention the fact that cetaceans have, by far, the largest advanced brains in the solar system. Has anyone attempted to signal back to them during these encounters?”

  The guide crossed his arms and clutched the megaphone like a shield. “There was one occasion when
everyone on board started to dance the Macarena, which resulted in the whale splashing them.”

  He drawled the last few words.

  The snickers swirled around Dmitri like the buzz of bees. He fumed, not accustomed to being the butt of a public joke, particularly when perpetrated by a cocky alpha male. Seeing Greg’s concerned expression, he realized he’d better count to ten in an effort to calm himself.

  “Seriously, folks,” the guide continued. “The typical reaction is to wave back and shout greetings. Moving along now, the humpbacks have the most diverse repertoire of filter-feeding methods of all baleen whales. Their most inventive technique is known as bubble-net feeding. A group of up to a dozen whales blow bubbles while swimming in circles to create a ring. The ring of bubbles, sometimes a hundred feet in diameter, encircles the fish, which are confined in an ever-tighter area. The whales swim in smaller and smaller circles until suddenly they burst upward through the bubble net, their mouths wide open, swallowing hundreds of fish in one gulp. Some of the whales dive deeper to drive fish toward the surface while others herd fish into the net by vocalizing.”

  A gum-chewing, teen-aged girl raised her hand. In the span of a few seconds, a volley of expanding purple spheres emerged from the space between her lips.

  Dmitri stage whispered into his companion’s ear. “Humpbacks aren’t the only intelligent species with the mastery to blow bubbles.” Greg’s trademark sign of approval, puckered lips and a thumbs-up sign, more than offset the nearby straw hat lady’s “Shh!” of rebuke.

  “My boyfriend gave me an iPod download of whale songs for my birthday,” said the bubblegum girl. She popped a headphone bud from her ear and raised it above her head. “I’m listening to them right now. They’re so cool.”

  “Thank you,” said the guide. “As this young lady just reminded us, a humpback’s haunting melodies can last for fifteen to twenty minutes. Some singers have been observed repeating the song cycle for a symphony lasting longer than twenty-four hours. Those of a particular region, like the North Atlantic, all sing the same song while the humpbacks of the North Pacific sing another. Each population’s song changes slowly over a period of years, never returning to the same sequence of notes.”