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

by Howard Steven Pines

  “Hey, Dmitri, snap out of it.”

  Dmitri felt a friendly tug. As his eyes popped open, he beheld the sight of his hands clutching the steering wheel and Greg gazing at him with concern. “Really, Greg, wouldn’t it be great to have a toy like this?”

  “Dream on, Dmitri. We can’t drive the L.A. fast lane on the vapor fumes of our academic salaries.”

  “It’s what vacations are for, a vicarious life of luxury.” He gunned the engine and accelerated from the curb, pinning them both back into their cushy leather seats. Like giddy teens, the two professors whooped and hollered down the road.

  Dmitri hugged the coast highway for a while, sneaking an occasional glance at the spuming breakers crashing onto white sand beaches. He veered inland at the first crossroad, following the signs leading to Maui’s geological raison d’être. Haleakala’s massive shield volcano comprised more than 70% of Maui’s surface. Zigzagging up the shortest paved road in the world between sea level and ten thousand feet, Dmitri felt as if he were flying a plane, climbing into the sky to reveal the contours of the entire island.

  In two scenic hours, they’d traversed several distinct climate and vegetation zones, stopping twice at roadside sanctuaries to admire specimens of endangered species: the Nene goose, Hawaii’s state bird, and the Haleakala silversword plant.

  When they’d arrived at the chilly summit, Greg gestured toward the empty parking lot. “Is this the right place?”

  “Yes, the tour groups are long gone. Most folks come here for the sunrise.”

  “And, as usual, you’re au contraire?”

  “You’ll see why.”

  A gust of wind shook the car. “Good thing that ranger told us to raise the top,” said Greg.

  After they’d parked, they donned their airport souvenir-shop purchases, a pair of stenciled I LOVE MAUI hooded sweatshirts.

  Dmitri couldn’t wait. Ever since his first visit, nearly ten years before, an imperceptible force had drawn him back here again and again. “Last one to the lookout buys dinner.”

  They slammed the doors and raced across the parking lot, then hurtled down the sloping footpath leading to the summit’s edge. Reducing speed as they approached the end of the trail, they grabbed the handrails of the protective barrier to prevent plunging into the abyss. Dmitri caught his breath and leaned into the stiff breeze.

  As he stood at the edge of the precipice, he was enveloped by the gentle roar of the wind. The unceasing sound poured into both ears like the quavering drone of the harmonium in his favorite Ravi Shankar raga. In the Hindu tradition, this sustained resonance, or shruti, symbolized the universal soul of Brahma—the oceanic state of pure being suffusing all things. Entranced, he felt himself drifting in the tranquil flow of deep cosmic waters. The sound of the wind was a raga now, its shruti vibrations resounding as an all-encompassing essence while the emergent melody of the sitar sang the story of Haleakala’s fiery creation.

  “I’m feeling the biggest rush since my first trip to the Grand Canyon.” Greg’s voice broke Dmitri’s spell.

  Dmitri turned to enjoy the sight of Greg’s exhilaration. “Haleakala means ‘house of the sun.’”

  “It looks like a geological Chartres,” declared Greg.

  “Very cool. I never tire of staring into this crater.”

  Like a compass needle compelled to yield to a greater power, Dmitri’s focus swept back to the sight below. Sensing the late afternoon sun radiating his back, he saw their shadows spill onto the ground, cascade over the lookout’s edge, and dissolve into the depression. As his eyes leapt beyond the arrows of their projected figures, he gazed three thousand feet down into a crater the size of Manhattan Island. The synergy of eons of oxidation and weathering had sculpted a Dali-esque landscape, a sea of ash strewn with islands of dormant cinder cones. Although the cones’ various heights ranged between five hundred and twelve hundred feet, they were dwarfed in the vastness of the pit.

  “It looks like the surface of Mars or an alien world like Dune, and the cones are like colossal anthills,” whispered Greg.

  Billowy puffs of luminous cloud drifted through the Ko’olau and Kaupo Gaps, two gaping wounds in the crater’s outer wall chiseled by erosion and the relentless breath of the trade winds. The sun’s slanting rays seeped through occasional breaks in the clouds, focused into intense beams. Like searchlights, they swept across the archipelago of cones to generate a dazzling spectrum of burnt oranges, yellows, reds, and ochers.

  Dmitri recalled a mythic phrase he’d read on the Haleakala website. He stretched his arms, swaying back and forth, and imagined himself steering a glider. “‘They soared with the Gods on the Kua Mauna—the land above the clouds.’”

  “I truly feel it . . . like I’m floating above the ocean and the clouds.”

  “I’m glad you’re here to share the good vibes. The locals believe Haleakala is the temple of the grandmother of the demigod Maui. They see it as a spot of power.”

  “Yeah, like the Native American traditions.”

  Feeling closer than ever to his friend, Dmitri scanned the crater with his prized possession, a pair of Swarovski binoculars. Although the last volcanic eruption had occurred over three hundred years ago, the force field here verged on the palpable, yet defied logical description. He offered the binoculars to Greg. “I’m inspired every time I’m here. This time it’s about McPinsky’s ideas for communicating with other species.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Greg’s voice was only mildly taunting. He peered through the precision-cut, crystal lenses, rotating through a full three-hundred-sixty degrees. “Love the bird’s-eye view. Makes you realize this mighty mountain’s just a speck in the vast blue Pacific.” He drew a deep breath and then exhaled dramatically. “The renowned McPinsky Challenge,” he announced. “I’ve memorized it verbatim by now: ‘Find the biggest-brained being in the vicinity, identify and break the codes of their language, then build a bridge of symbols of light and sound and—’”

  “Impressive, Greg,” interrupted Dmitri, his neck tightening.

  “So you want to converse with the whales? You heard what Gorman said. It’s sad, but soon there won’t be many left alive to have a conversation with.”

  “He also said that if someone can raise awareness about their intellectual potential, it’ll be another compelling reason to lobby for their protection. Back at PICES, I thought I’d heard your concern.”

  “I do care.” Greg’s left eyelid twitched twice. “But who’s gonna protect you and your job if you’re spouting off about Mensa for whales? I don’t want my friend to suffer the same fate as his mentor.”

  Dmitri interpreted Greg’s familiar pleading tone like a guilt trip. “Simmer down,” he snapped. “Let’s not start a big argument up here on my favorite mountain.” When Greg averted his gaze back to the crater, Dmitri instantly regretted his reaction. When a cloud drifted across the sun, an uncomfortable silence eclipsed the conversation.

  Dmitri felt a pang of nostalgia for his old college thesis advisor and mentor. Three years ago, the renowned McPinsky had departed SoCalSci due to institutional resistance to his controversial theory that communications engineering and information science could address humanity’s profound existential predicament.

  A few months before McPinsky’s departure, Dmitri had sat entranced in the front row during the landmark lecture when the professor looked directly at him and said, “For at least a few of you, this is the most important message you will ever receive.” He’d held his breath until his mentor had issued his daring proposal. “Since alienation and isolation are the misbegotten stepchildren of fear and ignorance, humanity must be proactive if we are to escape the grip of solitude. There are no more excuses to justify our passive wait-for-the-ET’s-to-contact-us mentality or our self-serving indifference to the fellow creatures who share our planet.”

  McPinsky’s concluding remarks were seared into Dmitri’s mind. After a tantalizing pause, he had pounded the podium with a fist and thundere
d, “Carpe diem! Find the biggest brained being in the vicinity, identify and break the codes of their language, then build a bridge of symbols of light and sound to initiate a conversation and begin to ask the questions that matter—before it’s too late!”

  McPinsky’s message had resounded like a thunderclap in the progressive scientific arena. Christened the “Interspecies Communication Imperative” by the techno-cognoscenti, but more popularly known as the McPinsky Challenge, it was the reason Dmitri had scheduled this vacation. Beguiled by its philosophical appeal, he’d come to see the whales up close and to chat with the experts before he would begin to analyze their songs for a research paper. Now, with the additional impetus of Gorman’s entreaty and the horrific memory of the hemorrhaging humpback, Dmitri had resolved to take an even bolder step to decrypt the mystery code. Why not take such a risk for the reward of a major communication breakthrough and the possibility of the first-ever cetacean conversation? He felt a buoyancy transcending the effect of the altitude.

  Dmitri reflected upon his deep attraction to his mentor’s philosophical narrative and to their bond. He knew that the links were rooted in childhood, when he’d been abandoned by both of his primary male role models.

  Greg broke their prolonged silence. “Since the wind’s died down, how about joining me for a quick hike?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll just hang out and enjoy the view.”

  After Greg disappeared beyond the crest of the trail descending into the crater, Dmitri ambled over to a nearby bench. As in all previous trips to this spot, the power of the mountain was soon upon him. Perched upon a ten-thousand-foot-tall platform in the middle of an immense sea, he was mesmerized by the refractions of the waning sunset. Eyes closed, he initiated his daily relaxation ritual. He visualized a ship’s anchor drifting down into the depths of his consciousness. Shedding the stresses of the day, one at a time, he could control the rate of the anchor’s descent, until it floated lazily in the void. A peaceful energy emanated from within. He visualized his mind as a perfectly shaped sphere, free of distorting forces, adrift in space and time, pure unfocused consciousness—

  CROP CIRCLE CONUNDRUM

  United States Satellite Imaging Agency, Maryland

  Mission Specialist Tamara Roberts’s thoughts churned in a maelstrom of confusion when the klaxon’s first shrill tones assaulted her eardrums. A knot of her colleagues had bolted up from their chairs. The alarm’s rhythmic howl echoed throughout the auditorium-sized room, the command and control center of the United States Satellite Imaging Agency, better known by its acronym, the USSIA. A theatre-sized monitor suspended from an atrium ceiling flashed its warning beacon in blood-red letters: LEVEL THREE ALERT, bathing the brushed chrome and smoked glass interior in a pulsing, pink glow.

  Seconds earlier, an RH-12 spy satellite had trained its eight-foot-diameter glass eye upon a region of the ocean near Hawaii. As sophisticated and complex as the Hubble Space Telescope, the outer-space magnifying glass extraordinaire could resolve the details of an object as small as a jackrabbit. After capturing the first surveillance images of the U.S. Navy’s top secret maneuvers, the RH-12 beamed the electromagnetic incarnation of the digitized pictures through an invisible microwave downlink channel to a ground station in Guam. From there, the digital data stream flowed through an ultra-secure, worldwide communications network to the USSIA in Maryland. As more images arrived at the USSIA, a supercomputer had performed a preliminary pattern-recognition analysis, detected a suspicious object, and activated the alarm. In the ensuing milliseconds, the world’s fastest video processing system sharpened the initial image, pixel by pixel, for brightness, contrast, and noise reduction via a complex correlation analysis of millions of data bits.

  A collective clamor resounded throughout the viewing gallery when the first enhanced photo appeared on the threat monitor. The image revealed a vast array of concentric rings, frothy white against the backdrop of the blue Pacific, and hundreds of meters in diameter. The computers relentlessly crunched the numbers, enhancing each subsequent image, until a slow-motion video commenced on the big screen. The ring-shaped pattern changed with time, like a slowly evolving geometric construction, similar to time-lapse movies of flowers in bloom. When wisps of smoke emerged from the heart of the formation, all activity ceased in the USSIA control room.

  Once the excitement had waned, Tamara and several of her colleagues settled down at their workstations to study the images of the enigmatic figures. If hostile forces dared to eavesdrop on the U.S. Navy’s Hawaiian maneuvers, their job was to alert their superiors to the detection of such threats, but after an hour of expert analysis, no one could explain what it was or what might have caused it.

  The anomaly reminded Tamara of the Internet photos of crop circle formations hewn into farmer’s fields by ET hoaxers. The striking structure emblazoned on the monitor, however, had been photographed on the surface of the ocean, not in a cornfield. Her mind struggled to formulate a plausible explanation. Was it a naturally occurring event, possibly weather-related? But it didn’t look like a spiral pattern with a central vortex, as would be expected if generated by cyclonic winds. Could it be an optical phenomenon similar to the halos encircling the sun and the moon? Those were caused by the diffraction bending and spreading of light waves around microscopic particles. Still, that happened up in the sky, not in the sea.

  She typed “diffraction rings” into the laptop’s web browser and found an intriguing post: “Specter of the Brocken ring patterns projected onto clouds and caused by the diffraction of light.” Yet those only occurred at high altitudes, not at sea level. She kept on searching, but most of the results were crackpot theories about circular cloud formations generated by black-ops radar weapons. The design on the screen didn’t look anything like a shadow projected from above. The ring shapes appeared whitish in color, suggesting they might have emerged from beneath the surface.

  Stymied, Roberts decided to consult her colleague at the adjoining workstation. Once she’d finally captured his attention, he pocketed his cell phone and sauntered over. Mission Specialist Noel Harrison’s face appeared baggy eyed, lacking its conspicuous, charismatic grin.

  “How are you, Noel?”

  “Just the usual money and kid problems.” His voice bobbed with the cadence of a faint Appalachian accent.

  Roberts sighed. “Sorry to interrupt, but I need a second opinion.” She pointed at her monitor.

  Harrison studied the image while scratching his head.

  “Come on, Mister Recon Expert!” She nudged him in the ribs with an elbow. “Tell me what you see!”

  Harrison gazed at the photo for another ten seconds, and then he sneered, “You playin’ a practical joke on me?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Is this photo linked to the surveillance of the Navy’s operation near Hawaii?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re tellin’ me crop circles are poppin’ up in the middle of the ocean?”

  The squeak of a nervous chuckle escaped through the tunnel of Tamara’s windpipe. “That’s what I thought too, but that’s impossible.”

  “What about those rumors . . . that the Navy’s testin’ an advanced sonar weapon?

  “You think that would cause these halo patterns?”

  “Who knows,” he replied. “And even if they did, they’d never admit it.”

  She sighed. “So do you think I should kick this up the chain of command?”

  Harrison replied with an incredulous expression. “Ever hear what happened in the 1950’s, to the Air Force pilots who swore their planes were being shadowed by UFOs? All endured psychiatric evaluations. They were never promoted, and some were even hounded out of the Force. Does that answer you?”

  “I get the message.”

  As Harrison ambled back to his workstation, he turned around and drawled, “I need a good laugh. Why don’t you copy that pic over to my workstation? I’ll give it another looksee.”

  “Why not?”


  A MESSAGE FROM ON HIGH

  Haleakala Crater Summit Lookout, Maui—early evening

  When Dmitri opened his eyes, he saw Mercury and Mars gleaming in the twilight. Greg sat beside him, eyes closed and legs pretzeled into a lotus pose. An awesome silence, like shruti vibrations, filled everything. He braced his arms against the Haleakala mountain chill.

  With the darkness intensifying, Dmitri’s thoughts tunneled through the lingering scar of his father’s untimely death, back to his first memorable experience of the night sky. To celebrate his eighth birthday, Dmitri had joined his father, Michael, and older brother, Paul, for an inaugural family camping trip. Experiencing a child’s first-night jitters, he’d whined about the scary shadows and wailing coyotes. He’d known his dad would comfort him with a spellbinding story, and he was not disappointed.

  Lying side by side in the blackness, he heard the reassuring sound of his father’s voice. “David, want to see something cool? Reach your hand up to the sky.” With a rush of anticipation, he’d lifted an arm. His dad grasped his wrist and said, “Now just let go and follow my lead.” They’d begun with the Big Dipper. Michael Dmitri had guided David Dmitri’s hand from star to star, drawing a connect-the-dots picture with David’s pointed finger. Their hands journeyed across the heavens: Aquila the eagle, Cygnus the swan, Hercules the warrior, and Sagittarius the centaur. As they’d finger painted the firmament, Michael regaled his sons with tales about the ancients and their personification of the constellations’ patterns into their mythology and stories. Enraptured by his father’s narrative, David had imagined himself living during those olden times.