The Emissary

by Patricia Cori

  “Hell, no!” Jimbo motioned to him to sit down and join them. “Got no private conversations on this ship that I know of.” Jimbo went over to the bar to pour himself a drink.

  “So, what exactly is your role here, Philippe?” Jamie said, in a low voice.

  “I work for the Canadian Marine Wildlife Preservation Department,” he replied. “Our concern is to study how marine organisms interact with each other and the physical environment—especially as it is affected by human behavior.”

  “Do you monitor the effect of sonar as well?”

  “We study the overall impact, I guess you could say.”

  Jimbo returned with his scotch, and another beer for Jamie.

  “And wouldn’t you agree that with a huge Orca sanctuary so close and migration lines cutting through our trajectory, that sonar would be disruptive?”

  “Say what?” Jimbo said, listening in.

  “We haven’t got enough data to conclude that sonar testing is damaging to the whales,” said Philippe. He looked up at Jimbo, knowing he had to be careful how he talked to Jamie: careful not to get political.

  “How much data do you need? This ship can blast out over three hundred hertz—what does that do to them? To their music?”

  “Their music?”

  “You will agree there are all kinds of musical emissions coming from the Cetaceans?”

  “Well, sure. I suppose.”

  “And will you admit that a lot of whale and dolphin beachings regularly occur after Navy sonar tests?”

  “That could be one of the reasons. We really don’t know for certain.” It was clear Philippe felt pressured.

  “With all due respect for our military, there’s no question that they don’t seem too concerned about the effect of their secret weapons on the environment.”

  Sam glanced over at them, as he drew a card from the dealer. “Sounds like the conversation is getting a little heavy over there,” he said to Liz, under his breath.

  Jimbo bristled. “Now hold on a minute, Miss Jamie. Nobody is going to be talking against the Navy on my ship. I don’t want to hear it. The military is trying to protect the world—not destroy it.”

  “Really? They’re doing a pretty bad job so far, I’d say,” she said, standing up to him. “Seems like all the military knows how to do is destroy, Captain. What we need protection from is the military—are you sure you haven’t got that backwards?”

  “They’re out there protecting the borders, trying to hold things together,” he said, looking into his glass.

  “What borders? I thought the term ‘international waters’ spoke for itself.”

  “Damn it, Jamie. There is a lot that has to go on to protect against terrorism, let’s leave it at that.”

  “Oh yeah, right, I forgot. The terrorists. What is it—one if by land, and two if by sea? And who is protecting us against the protectors, Jim? Who is protecting the whales and the dolphins, whose only borders are the curves and jagged edges of the Earth’s landmasses? Don’t you understand that, for them, there is no escape from sonar weapons?”

  Clearly unwilling to get embroiled in a conversation that would find no way to resolution, Philippe got up. “On that note, I’m back in the game. Excuse me.” He walked back over to the table.

  Liz threw in her cards. “You’ll have to excuse me, guys … I’m getting a headache. I’m out.” She served herself a cup of tea from the buffet. Sam studied her from behind. She smiled seductively at him as she walked out.

  Sam looked at Jamie with the usual air of disapproval. He threw his cards into the pile and asked to be cashed out. “I’m out, too.” He said his goodnights and walked out after Liz.

  “You see there?” Jimbo said. “You went and spoiled the party. It serves no purpose talking like that … no purpose whatsoever.”

  Doc and Brady tallied up the chips and put things back in the cabinet, just as Alberto and Domenico came out to join the game.

  “What happened?” Alberto asked.

  Doc, a man of few words, just said, “Game over.”

  Jamie leaned closer to Jimbo and spoke straight from the heart, staring him in the eyes. “I do see things, Jim. Some are in the shadows, some are in the light—and it isn’t always the first impression, but I do see behind the curtain. I see the Hidden.”

  Jimbo leaned even closer. “That’s cool. You go ahead and see what you need to see … but remember, we aren’t monsters out here. If you want to get along with everybody, you’re gonna have to lighten up and stop preaching. You make it sound like you’re working against us, instead of for us. We’re all just doing our jobs—just like you. It’s not easy living out on the water for weeks on end. People out here, see, they don’t want to go there.”

  She stood up, preparing to walk out. “Who will care about the whales and the dolphins, Jimbo? Who is willing to go there?” Lost in her own thoughts, Jamie said goodnight and then left Jimbo sitting there. She walked out, down the hall to her suite, never even noticing that Fin was following not so far behind.

  Back in her suite, she couldn’t wait to go to bed and forget the tensions of a difficult day. As she was brushing her teeth, preparing to go to bed, she peered out the bathroom window, amazed to see whales out on the horizon, breaching in the moonlight. She rushed into the bedroom, to her camera, and snapped a picture just in time, before they disappeared from sight, and then she turned off the light, and fell asleep.

  Unlike that first night in harbor, it was a fitful, nightmarish sleep, one that had her tossing and turning wildly all through the night. In a vivid dream, Jamie relived the horror of the tragedy back in New Zealand, with the dying whales. She was standing on the wet sand, shivering, in a soaking-wet nightgown. Hundreds of whales and dolphins lay dying on the beach, where the tide had receded, and more kept coming in, throwing themselves onto the sand, dying all around her. She walked up to one of the whales, whose calf was lying there beside her, and implored her to return to the water. The whale looked at her and started crying, and so did the calf—they just looked at her in complete desperation. Jamie pleaded. She implored them to turn back to the ocean and find their way back to living.

  She tried to push the whale back out into the water, but of course there was no way she could move the immense body.

  She felt the cold of the whale’s death overtake her own body, and a voice uttered the words “Beware the Ides of March.” And then, an enormous explosion sounded, louder than the booming blast of a bomb. Jamie saw blood oozing from the whale’s blowhole. She tried to stop the flow, throwing her arms over the whale, but she was already dead. And so was her baby. The dead whale stared at her from the cold, gray beach, the light in her eyes dimmed forever, with Jamie standing next to her, covered in her blood.

  With that horrible image in her waking mind, the memory flooding back from the beach in New Zealand, Jamie woke up, crying. She began to sob uncontrollably, feeling the pain so deep within her she could barely breathe. There was no one to call, no one she could talk to. Surely no one on the ship would understand, and no one seemed sensitive enough to even care.

  She got up, afraid of sleep, and took a hot shower, as if she still had the blood on her body—so real was that image. Wrapped in the bathrobe, she searched the suite’s small kitchen, where she found an electric teapot in one of the cabinets. She took a box of herb teas from her bag and made herself a cup, and then just sat quietly on the sofa, hoping dawn was not long in coming. So many thoughts flooded her mind—all sad and despairing. She drank her tea and then crawled back into bed, so tired, trying to calm her spirit.

  Jamie reached for her camera to look at the picture she had taken earlier of whales out on the horizon. To her amazement, what was looking back at her in the frame was not distant whales in the moonlight, but rather an eerie close-up of a whale’s eye, looking right at her. She stared at the camera, incredulous. How was it possible? What was she seeing? Was she in a lucid dream?

  She sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake—
this was no dream. She turned the camera off and back on again, and there it was still—imprinted on the camera’s screen: the eye of the whale.

  And a voice that echoed through the hallways of her mind kept repeating and repeating: Beware the Ides of March.

  10

  The Whale Rebellion

  Jamie felt caged and restless in the night, waiting for morning to lift her from the burden of a dreamscape filled with death. Despite the luxurious surroundings, she felt uncomfortable, a captive guest, of sorts, on a ship headed nowhere: cut off from the world. She stepped out to the terrace, briefly, peering into the night. She looked out upon nothing but darkness, with not a sound, not a light—only the lapping of the waves, hitting up against the ship. From their position in the great Pacific, with no sight of land in any direction, she felt unbearably confined and restricted. She realized then that a month at sea, aboard The Deepwater, was going to be impossible, and that her deal with Mat was ill conceived from the onset. She would have to make amends, but her instincts told her that she would be getting off the ship well before April, as she had originally agreed. Everything about it was wrong from the start: her first encounter with Sam, the tension, her dream, the ominous eye in the camera … and that visceral sense of doom, hovering over her, like storm clouds gathering over dark fog. She tried to shake it, but she could not.

  Hungry from the night before, she opened all the cabinets in her kitchenette, looking for something healthy to munch on, but all she found was the usual hotel fare: potato chips, nuts, and chocolate bars, and plenty of booze in the bar. The tin from Max’s was empty—not a crumb. With an hour or more to go before sunrise, she decided to find her way into the galley and make herself some breakfast, or, at the very least, heat up some leftovers from dinner the night before. Coffee and a couple of slices of toast would more than hold her over until the galley opened. Anything to get out of that room … her bed … the dream. It lingered, haunting, taking her back to that day and the requiem of death that sounded, over and over again, in her mind.

  She dressed and threw some blush on her cheeks, and then grabbed her jacket and cap, warm gloves, and the camera, hoping some early-morning photography would capture the incredible spectrum of light that paints the horizon, over the great waves, the way the sun does when it rises on the water.

  When she opened the door to leave, she found Fin, curled up against the doorway of her suite, sleeping. He was shivering, in the cold of the unheated hallway. Had she only known, she would have welcomed him in with her, a companion through the long night. She couldn’t believe this amazing animal was there for her, guarding her space through the night and waiting for her to wake up. She reached down to embrace Fin, so filled with gratitude and joy that he knew to be there in that moment. He lifted her spirits in an instant, and brought the joy back.

  “Hooboy, Finny, you are a sight for sore eyes,” she said in a whisper.

  Fin was playful—a couple of overzealous barks and the whole ship would have been awakened in the middle of the night. Jamie got into her jacket and hat and together they found their way down the poorly illuminated corridor, where only the emergency night-light lit the way. When they got to the lounge, she remembered where Doc had turned off the lights, so she was able to light up the public spaces—but she had no clue where to look for the thermostat. They would have to freeze until somebody woke up. She and Fin stole into the galley, thieves in the night, and there she fumbled around trying to find the coffeepot. She’d never seen a ship’s galley before and everything was so … big. She finally found the coffee and filters, and put the pot on to brew—then she opened the refrigerator and found everything she needed: bread, butter, an assortment of jams, and cream for her coffee.

  Fin sat quietly, waiting for his share of the bounty. She fed him the first two slices, and put another two in the toaster. As she waited for the toast to pop up, she gazed through the galley window, where, in the distance, the first hint of morning glowed indigo out on the horizon.

  Pouring herself a cup of hot coffee, she thought she saw whales, far ahead of the ship. At first, she could just barely make them out. It was still dark and they were a significant distance away, but she could feel them—there was no mistaking Orcas ahead. And they were many. Jamie could never have imagined she would ever prefer not to be in the presence of whales. Something wasn’t right about it, even though the unnatural presence there was their intrusive ship, not the whales. Still, their appearance that early in the morning, leaping black silhouettes against the violet ray of Earth awakening, made her feel apprehensive.

  Transfixed, she stared out the galley window. More whales were gathering, rapidly now. She could hear the force of their tails, slamming down hard against the water’s surface—as the dolphins had done, the day before, with Fin. These animals were clearly stressed, and the momentum was building, somehow, across species lines: the incident with Liz, the strange dolphin behavior with Fin, and now Orcas.

  Fin heard them, too. He whined and gestured to Jamie to go back out on deck, just as insistently and with the same urgency as the day before.

  “No way, boy,” Jamie said. She topped up her cup of coffee, buttered the toast, and carried a tray back out into the living room, to the sofa. There she would wait for day to break and the cold night’s silence to be pierced by sounds of the others, moving about in the morning hours. Fin curled up at her feet, waiting patiently and watching for signs. When she finished eating, he jumped up onto the couch, right next to her, something he would never have dared to do in his master’s presence, but he knew, with Jamie, house rules didn’t apply.

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” she said. She hugged him tightly, and then lay down with her head on his back. The warmth of him close to her was reassuring, and she was starting to relax under the blanket, almost falling back to sleep, when, somewhere between the worlds of perception in her mind, she heard a whale call—just as clearly as if she were out there, in the water with them. She leaped to her feet, listening—a live audience to their distress calls—and she heard it again. She went back to the galley window, to find there were more whales, closer in—exhibiting those same behavioral patterns.

  Something was seriously wrong. She could taste it.

  With Fin following close to her side, Jamie searched near the galley door and finally found the key rack. Following her intuition, she took the key to the Tech Office and headed for the doorway, like Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of a clue, with Watson in tow. What she would find there, she didn’t yet know. What she was sure of, however, was that whatever was creating the agitation in the whales and dolphins had to be connected to that room.

  Once inside, Jamie stood before the array of equipment with no idea whatsoever. What was she looking for? How could she find it? “Oh great computer god, show me where we are,” she said. She fiddled with a few switches, clueless, and then startled herself when one of the monitors actually came on. Frustrated, knowing she was out of her element completely, she walked back down to the main deck, into the hallway, past Sam’s cabin. She could hear voices coming from the room and decided to be bold, and knock.

  He already hated her, so she figured there was nothing to lose.

  Sam cracked the door just a sliver, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Through the opening, she saw Liz, naked, in bed behind him—no surprise there.

  “What the hell?” he demanded of Jamie.

  “Forgive me, I realize this is off the charts—I’m sorry. Something is very wrong, I can feel it. I need you to tell me where we are in relationship to the whale sanctuary.”

  “Are you out of your mind? It’s five in the morning!”

  “Five? Oh, thank god it’s that late.”

  “Five a.m., Jamie … five!”

  “I know. I’m mortified.”

  “Why didn’t you just go up to the navigation room and talk to Bobby? We’re on automatic pilot anyway, for god sakes.”

  “I didn’t know that. I took a big liberty
and went to the Tech Office and tried to turn on the equipment myself, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “What do you think you’re doing? That is highly sensitive equipment!”

  In the background, Liz threw on Sam’s shirt and came to the door. “What on earth is going on?”

  “It’s the whales. There’s a bunch of them, not far ahead of us. They’re amassing. I think we’ve entered the sanctuary,” said Jamie.

  Sam threw his hands up in the air. “I give up.”

  “Please, Sam. I might have done something stupid—I turned a few switches in there.”

  “Jesus, Jamie! Let me get my pants on.” He closed the door in Jamie’s face, while she and Fin stood in the hall, waiting in the cold. Inside, Sam slipped into a sweatshirt and his wrinkled pants from the night before. Liz searched for her clothes, which were strewn all over the room, to dress to go with him. “No, you stay here … keep the bed warm. Hopefully, this will only take a minute.” He sat on the edge of the bed, putting on his socks and shoes. “I so did not sign up to sail with this whack job.”

  “Don’t you find it curious, though?” said Liz. “It was the dolphins yesterday—they were so strange.”

  “I refuse to engage in a conversation about Cetaceans at five in the morning.” Sam opened the door, tucking his shirt into his pants, and then he stepped into the hall, where Jamie and Fin were waiting. They raced up to the Tech Office, where, fortunately, all Jamie had done was to turn on one of the monitors. The main systems board was untouched. “I can’t believe you would just walk in here and put the ship at risk, meddling where you have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t know what to do—no one was awake.”

  “There’s always someone on the bridge—just a few doors down.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jamie replied, apologetically.

  Sam fired up the system and then sat down at his desk chair, typing on the keyboard, checking the system. “Sorry,” he said, with his back to her, “but isn’t the point of you being here that you’re supposed to be able to see these things? What part of your psychic genius am I missing?”