Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

by Christopher Moore

Nate looked into the younger man's dark eyes to see if there was any irony showing there, but he was as open and sincere as a bowl of milk. "The Goo will take care of me?"

  "That's right," said Tim, helping him along toward the grotto wall, toward the actual village of Gooville, with its organically shaped doorways and windows, its knobs and nodules, its lobster-shell pathways, its whaley-boy pods working together or playing in the water, where was housed an entire village of what Nate assumed were all happy human wackjobs.

  * * *

  After two days of looking for meaning in hash marks on waveforms and ones and ohs on legal pads that were hastily typed into the machine, Kona found a surfer/hacker on the North Shore named Lolo who agreed to write it all into a Linux routine in exchange for Kona's old long board and a half ounce of the dankest nugs[1].

  "Won't he just take cash?" asked Clay.

  "He's an artist," explained Kona. "Everyone has cash."

  "I don't know what I'm going to put that under for the accountant."

  "Nugs, dank?"

  Clay looked forlornly at the legal-pad pages piling up on the desk next to where Margaret Painborne was typing. He handed a roll of bills over to Kona. "Go. Buy nugs. Bring him back. Bring back my change."

  "I'm throwing in my board for the cause," said Kona. "I could use some time in the mystic myself."

  "Do you want me to tell Auntie Clair that you tried to extort me?" Clay had taken to using Clair as a sort of sword of Damocles/assistant principal/evil dominatrix threat over Kona, and it seemed to work swimmingly.

  "Must blaze, brah. Cool runnings."

  Suddenly something sparked in Clay's head, a déjà vu trigger snapping electric with connections. "Wait, Kona."

  The surfer paused in the doorway, turned.

  "The first day you came here, the day that Nate sent you to the lab to get the film — did you actually do it?"

  Kona shook his head, "Nah, boss, the Snowy Biscuit see me going. She say keep the money and she go to the lab. When I come back with my ganja, she give me the pictures to give to Nate."

  "I was sort of afraid of that," Clay said. "Go, blaze, be gone. Get what we need."

  * * *

  So three days later they all stood watching as Lolo hit the return key and the subsonic waveform from a blue-whale call began scrolling across the bottom of the screen, while above it letters were transcribed from the data. Lolo was a year older than Kona, a Japanese-American burned nut brown by the sun with ducky-yellow minidreads and a tapestry of Maori tattoos across his back and shoulders.

  Lolo spun in the chair to face them. "I mixed down a fifty-minute trance track with sixty percussion loops that was way harder than this." Lolo's prior forays into sound processing had been as a computer DJ at a dance club in Honolulu.

  "It's not saying anything," said Libby Quinn. "It's just random, Clay."

  "Well, that's the way it's gone so far, right?"

  "But there's been nothing since that first day."

  "We knew that might happen, that there couldn't be messages on all of them. We just have to find the right ones."

  Libby's eyes were pleading. "Clay, it's a short season. We have to get out in the field. Now that you have this program, you don't need the manpower. Margaret and I will bring back more tapes — we have them coming in from people we trust — but we can't afford to blow off the season."

  "And we need to go public with the torpedo range," Margaret added, less sympathetic than Libby had been.

  Clay nodded and looked at his bare feet against the hardwood floor. He took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he smiled. "You're right. But don't just blow a whistle and hope someone will notice. Cliff Hyland told me that the diving data was the only thing they were worried about. You're going to need proof that humpbacks dive close to the bottom of the channel, or the navy will claim that you're just being whale buggers and there's no danger to the animals. Even with the range."

  "You're okay if we go public, then?" asked Libby.

  "People are going to know about the torpedo range soon enough. I don't think that's dangerous for you. Just don't say anything about the rest of this, okay?"

  The two women looked at each other, then nodded. "We have to go," Libby said. "We'll call you, Clay. We're not running out on you."

  "I know," Clay said.

  After they left, Clay turned to the two surfers. Thirty years working with the best scientists and divers in the world, and this was what it came down to: two stoner kids. "If you guys need to go do things, I understand."

  "Outta here," said Lolo, on his feet and bounding toward the door.

  Clay looked at the screen where Lolo had been sitting. Scrolling across it: WILL ARRIVE GV APPRX 1300 MONDAY__HAVE__SIZE 11 SNEAKERS WAITING FOR QUINN__END MSS__AAAA__BAXYXABUDAB.

  "Get him back," Clay said to Kona. "We need to know which tape this was."

  "Libby gave them all to him."

  "I know that. I need to know where she got it. Where and when it was recorded. Call Libby's cell phone. See if you can get hold of her." Clay was trying to make the screen print before the message scrolled away. "How the hell does this thing work?"

  "How you know I'm not leaving?"

  "You woke up this morning, Kona. Did you have a reason to get out of bed other than waves or pot?"

  "Yah, mon, need to find Nate."

  "How'd that feel?"

  "I'm calling Libby, boss."

  "Loyalty is important, son. I'll go catch Lolo. Confirm which tape it was."

  "Shut up, boss. I'm trying to dial."

  Behind them the cryptic message scrolled out of the printer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Single-Celled Animal

  Stockholm syndrome or not, Nate was starting to get tired of the whole hippie-commune, everything-is-wonderful-and-the-Goo-will-provide attitude. Nuñez had come by for three days running to take him out on the town, and every person he met was just a little too damn satisfied with the whole idea that they were living inside a giant organism six hundred feet under the ocean. Like this was a normal thing. Like he just wasn't getting with the program because he continued to ask questions. At least the whaley boys would blow wet raspberries at him and snicker as he walked by. At least they had some sense of the absurdity of all this, despite the fact that they shouldn't even have existed in the first place, which did seem to be a large point of denial on their part.

  They'd installed him in what he guessed was a premier apartment, or what you'd call an apartment, on the second floor, looking out over the grotto. The windows were oval, and the glass in them, although perfectly clear, was flexible. It was like looking out on the world through a condom, and that was just the beginning of the things that creeped him out about this place. He had a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, and a shower — all of which had big honking sphincters in the bottom of them — and the seal on the door around his refrigerator, if that's what you called it, appeared to be made out of slugs, or at least something that left an iridescent slime on you if you brushed up against it. There was also a toothed garbage disposal in the kitchen, which he wouldn't even go near. The worst of it was that the apartment didn't make any attempt to conceal that it was alive. His first day there, when the human crew from the whale ship had come by for a drink — a housewarming — there had been a scaly knob on the wall by the front door that when pushed would cause the door to open. After the crew left and Nate returned from his shower, the doorknob had healed over. There was a scar there in the shell, but that was all. Nate was locked in.

  There was a tom-tom thrumming of stones hitting his front picture window. Nate went to the window, looked out on the vast grotto and harbor, then down on the source of his torment. A pod of whaley-boy kids was winging stones at his window. Thump, thump-a, thump. The stones bounced off, leaving no mark. When Nate appeared at the window, the thumping became more furious, as the whaley kids picked up the pace and aimed right at him, as if a well-placed shot might drop him in a dunking tank.
/>   "There's a reason cetaceans don't have hands in the real world!" Nate screamed at them. "You are that reason! You little freaks!"

  Thump, thump-a, thump, thump, clack. Occasionally a missed throw hit the shell-like frame of the window, sounding like a marble hitting tile.

  I sound like Old Man Spangler yelling at my brother and me for raiding his apple trees, Nate thought. When did I turn into that guy? I don't want to be that guy.

  There was a soft knock on the shell of his front door. As he turned, the door flipped open like shutters, two pieces of shell retracting on muscles hidden in the wall. Nate felt like a surprised box turtle. Cielle Nuñez stood in the doorway with canvas shopping bags folded under her arm. She was a pleasant woman, attractive, competent, and non-threatening; Nate was sure that's why she'd been chosen to be his guide.

  "You ready to do some shopping, Nate? I called to tell you I was coming, but you didn't answer."

  The apartment had a speaking apparatus, a sort of ornate tube thing that whistled and buzzed green metallic beetle wings when there was a call. Nate was afraid of it.

  "Cielle, can we drop any pretense that we are just buddies out for the day? You lock me in here when you leave."

  "For your own safety."

  "Somehow that always seems to be the argument the jailer uses."

  "You want to go get some food and clothes or not?" Nate shrugged and followed her out the door. They walked along the perimeter of the grotto, which seemed a cross between an old English village and an Art Nouveau hobbit housing project: irregularly shaped doors and windows looking into shops that displayed baked goods and other prepared foods. Evidently the Goo wasn't big on having fire around for home cooking. All the cooked foods were prepared somewhere else in the complex. There was a warming cabinet in Nate's apartment that looked like a breadbox made out of a giant armadillo shell. It worked great. You rolled the top open, put the food in, then promptly lost your appetite.

  "Let's get you something to wear today," Cielle said. "Those khakis are on loan. Only the whale-ship crews are supposed to wear them."

  As they walked, a half dozen whaley kids followed them, chirping and giggling all the way.

  "So I'd get in trouble if I started kicking whaley kids down the street?"

  "Of course," Cielle laughed. "We have laws here, just like anywhere else."

  "Evidently not ones that forbid kidnapping and unjustified imprisonment."

  Nuñez stopped and grabbed his arm. "Look, what are you complaining about? This is a good place to be. You're not being mistreated. Everyone's been kind to you. What's the problem?"

  "What's the problem? The problem is that all you people were yanked out of your lives, taken away from your families and friends, taken from everything that you knew, and you all act like it doesn't bother you in the least. Well, it bothers me, Cielle. It fucking bothers me a lot. And I don't understand this whole colony, or city, or whatever this thing is. How does it even exist without anyone knowing about it? In all these years, why has no one gotten out and spoiled the secret of this place?"

  "I told you, we were all going to drown —»

  "Bullshit. I don't buy that for a second. That gratitude toward your rescuer only lasts for a short while. I've seen it. It doesn't take over your life. Everyone I've met is blissed out. You people worship the Goo, don't you?"

  "Nate, you don't want to be locked in, you won't be locked in. You can have the run of Gooville — go anywhere you want. There's hundreds of miles of passages. Some of them even I haven't seen. Go. Leave the grotto and go down any one of those passages. But you know what? You'll be back looking for your apartment tonight. You are not a prisoner, you're just living in a different place and a different way."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "The Goo is the source, Nate. You'll see. The Colonel —»

  "Fuck the Colonel. The Colonel is a fucking myth."

  "Should we get some coffee? You seem grumpy."

  "Damn it, Cielle, my caffeine headache is not relevant." Actually it was, sort of. He hadn't had any coffee today. "Besides, how do I know it's coffee we're drinking? It's probably some mutant sea otter/coffee bean hybrid beverage."

  "Is that what you want?"

  "No, that's not what I want. What I want is a doorknob. And not an organic nodule thing — I want a dead doorknob. One that always has been dead, too. Not something that you used to be friends with."

  Cielle Nuñez had backed away from him several feet, and the whaley kids who'd been following them had quieted down and gone into a defensive pod formation, the big kids on the outside. People who were out walking, and who normally made a point of nodding and smiling as they passed, took a wide detour around Nate. There was an inordinate amount of whistling among the milling whaley boys.

  "That going to do it for you?" Nuñez asked. "A doorknob. I get you a doorknob, you're a happy man?"

  Why should he be embarrassed? Because he'd scared the kids? Because he'd made his captors uncomfortable? Nevertheless, he was embarrassed.

  "I could use some earplugs, too, if you have them. For sleeping." For ten hours out of twenty-four, the grotto went dark. Cielle explained that this was for the comfort of the humans, to help them keep some semblance of their normal circadian rhythms. People needed day and night — without the change many people couldn't sleep. The problem was, the whaley boys didn't sleep. They rested, but they didn't sleep. So when the grotto went dark, they went on about their business. In the dark, however, they were all constantly emitting sonar clicks. At night the grotto sounded like it was being marched upon by an army of tap dancers. Consequently, so did Nate's apartment.

  Nuñez nodded. "We can probably do that. You want to go get a steaming hot cup of sea otter now?"

  "What?"

  "I'm just kidding. Lighten up, Nate."

  "I want to go home." He'd said it before he even realized it.

  "That's not going to happen. But I'll send word. I think it's time you met with the Colonel."

  They spent the day going to shops. Nate found some cotton slacks that fitted him, some socks and underwear, and a pile of T-shirts from one tiny shop. There was no currency exchanged. Nuñez would just nod to the shopkeeper, and Nate would take what he needed. There was little variety in any of the shops, and most of what they carried was goods from the real world: clothes, fabric, books, razor blades, shoes, and small electronics. But a few shops carried items that appeared to have been grown or made right there in Gooville: toothbrushes, soaps, lotions. All the packaging seemed to come out of the seventeenth century — the shopkeepers wrapped parcels in a ubiquitous oilcloth that Nate thought smelled vaguely of seaweed and indeed had the same olive color as giant kelp. Patrons brought their own jars to carry oils, pickles, and other soft goods. Nate had seen everything from a modern mayonnaise jar to hand-thrown crockery that had to have been made a hundred years ago.

  "How long, Cielle?" he asked as he watched a shopkeeper count sugared dates into a hand-blown glass jar and seal it with wax. "How long have people been down here?"

  She followed his gaze to the jar. "We get a lot of the surface goods from shipwrecks, so don't be impressed if you see antiques; the sea is a good preserver. We may have salvaged it only a week ago. A friend of mine keeps potatoes in a Grecian wine amphora that's two thousand years old."

  "Yeah, and I'm using the Holy Grail to catch my spare change. How long?"

  "You are so hostile today. I don't know how long, Nate. A long time."

  He had dozens, hundreds more questions, like where the hell did they get potatoes when they didn't have sunlight to grow anything? They weren't bringing potatoes up from a shipwreck. But Cielle was letting him get only so far before claiming ignorance.

  They had lunch at a four-stool lunch counter where the proprietor was a striking Irishwoman with stunning green eyes and a massive spill of red hair and who, like everyone, it seemed, knew Cielle and knew who Nate was.

  "Got you a Walkman then, Dr. Quinn? Whale
y boys will drive you to drink with that sonar at night."

  "We're going to get him some earplugs today, Brennan," Cielle said.

  "Music, that's the way to wash the whaley-boy whistles," the woman said. Then she was off to her kitchen. The walls of the cafe were decorated with a collection of antique beer trays, glued in place, as Nate had learned, with an adhesive that was similar to what barnacles secreted to fasten themselves to ships. Nailing things up was frowned upon, as the walls would bleed for a while if injured.

  Nate took a bite of his sandwich, meatballs and mozzarella on good crusty French bread.

  "How?" he asked Cielle, blowing crumbs on the counter. "How does any of this stuff get made if there's no flame?"

  Cielle shrugged. "No idea. A bakery, I'd guess. They make all the prepared food outside the grotto. I've never been there."

  "You don't know how? How can that be?"

  Cielle Nuñez put down her own sandwich and leaned on one elbow, smiling at Nate. She had remarkably kind eyes, and Nate had to remind himself that she had been ordered to be his friend. Interesting, he thought, that they'd choose a woman. Was she bait?

  "You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Nate?"

  "Of course, everybody does."

  "And that guy goes back to Camelot from the late nineteenth century and dazzles everyone with his scientific knowledge, mainly because he can make gunpowder, right?"

  "Yes, so?"

  "You're a scientist, so you might do better than most, but take your average citizen, a guy who works at a discount store, say. Drop him in the twelfth century, you know what he'll achieve?"

  "Make your point?"

  "Death by bacterial infection, more than likely. And the last words on his lips will probably be, 'There's such a thing as an antibiotic, really. My point is, I don't know how this stuff is made because I haven't needed to know. Nobody knows how to make the things they use. I suppose I could find out and get back to you, but I promise you I'm not holding out on you just to be mysterious. We do a lot of salvage on the whale ships, and we have a trade network into the real world that gets us a lot of our goods. When a freighter leaves pallets of goods for the people on remote islands in the Pacific, all they know is that they've been paid and they've delivered to shore. They don't stay to see who takes the goods away. The old-timers say that it used to be that the Goo provided everything. Nothing came in from the outside that wasn't on their backs when they got here."