"Oh, my God, you didn't get laid, did you?"
"I found a passion for life. I found something that drives me."
"I can't believe I fell for such a pathetic loser."
"Hey, I'm pretty good at this whale stuff. I'm respected in my field."
"But you're dead."
"Yeah, before then, I mean. Hey, did you say that you fell for me?"
"I said I fell for a pathetic loser, if the shoe fits…"
He kissed her. She kissed him back. That went on for a while. They both found it excellent. Then they stopped.
"You said you wanted to talk about our age difference," Nate said, because he always picked women who broke his heart, and, figuring that his heart was now into this whole thing far enough to be broken, he wanted to get on with it.
"Yeah, we probably should. Maybe we should sit down."
"Couch?"
"No, at the table. You might want a drink."
"No, I'm okay." Yep, heartbreak, he thought. They sat.
"So," she said, curling her legs up under her, sitting like a little kid, making him feel ever more the creepy old guy leching on the young girl, "you know that the whaley boys have been pulling people in here from shipwrecks and plane crashes for years, right?"
"That's what Cielle said."
"She wants you, I can tell, but that's beside the point. Do you know that they pulled whole crews off sunken submarines, plus they've yanked sonar guys out of port for years?"
"I didn't know that."
"Doesn't matter, has nothing to do with what I'm telling you. So you realize that some people who have been lost at sea, like the crew of the American sub Scorpion that sank back in 67, actually ended up here?"
"Okay. That makes sense. More of the Goo looking out for itself. Gaining knowledge."
"Yeah, but that's not the point. I mean, those guys helped put together a lot of the technology you saw on the whale ship, the human technology, but that doesn't matter. The important part is that the world thinks that the crew of the Scorpion is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, even though they're not. Got it?"
"Okay," Nate said, really slowly, the way he had spoken to the Colonel when he was losing the point — much the way he was waving in the conversational wind right now.
"And you realize that when I applied with you and Clay, that I gave my real name, which is Amy Earhart, and that Amy is short for Amelia?"
"Oh, my God," Nate said.
"Ha!" Amy said.
* * *
The ship broker found Clay's ship in the Philippines, in Manila Harbor. Clay bought it based on faxed photographs, a spec sheet, and a recent hull certification for just under $2 million of the Old Broad's money. It was a 180-foot-long U.S. Coast Guard fisheries patrol vessel built in the late fifties. It had been refitted several times since then, once in the seventies for fishing, once in the eighties for ocean survey, and finally in the nineties as a live-aboard dive boat for the adventure tourist. It had plenty of comfortable cabins as well as compressors, dive platforms, and cranes to raise and lower support vessels onto the rear deck, although, except for the lifeboats, it came with no support craft. Clay thought they could use the rear deck as a helicopter-landing pad, even if there wasn't a budget for a helicopter, but — you know — someone with a helicopter might want to land there, and it helped no end to have a big H painted on the deck. There was a budget for painting a big H. The ship had efficient, if not quite state-of-the-art, navigation equipment, radar, autopilot, and some old but functioning sonar arrays left over from its days as a fishing ship. It had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower diesel engines and could distill up to twenty tons of freshwater a day for the crew and passengers. There were cabins and support for forty. It was also rated a class-three icebreaker, which was a feature that Clay hoped they wouldn't have to test. He really didn't like cold water.
Through another broker Clay hired the crew of ten men, sight unseen, right off the docks of Manila: a group of brothers, cousins, and uncles with the last name of Mangabay, among whom the broker guaranteed that there were no murderers, or at least no convicted murderers, and only petty thieves. The eldest uncle, Ray Mangabay, who would be Clay's first mate, would sail the ship to Honolulu, where Clay would meet them.
"He's going to be driving my ship," Clay said to Clair after he'd gotten the news that he had a crew and a first mate.
"You have to let your ship go, Clay," Clair said. "If he sinks it, it wasn't really yours."
"But it's my ship."
"What are you going to call it?"
He was thinking about the Intrepid or the Merciless or some other big-dick, blow-shit-up kind of name. He was thinking about Loyal or Relentless or the Never Surrender, because he was determined now to find his friend, and he didn't mind putting that right on the bow. "Well, I was thinking about —»
"You were thinking deeply about it, weren't you?" Clair interrupted.
"Yes, I thought I'd call her the Beautiful Clair."
"Just the Clair will be fine, baby. You don't want the bow to look busy."
"Right. The Clair." Strangely enough, on second thought, that pretty much encompassed Intrepid, Merciless, Relentless, and Loyal. Plus, it had the underlying meaning of keeper of the booty, which was sort of a bonus in a ship name, he thought. "Yeah, that's a good name for her."
"How long before she gets here?"
"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."
"Well, now that she's called the Clair, I hope they bring her in safe."
"My ship," Clay said anxiously.
* * *
"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"
"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.
Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.
"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger — and decidedly luscious, I might add — woman had chosen you, right?"
"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?
"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent —»
"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.
"So the age thing? It's a problem?"
"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."
"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."
"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."
"I was just messin' with you. I'm her daughter. Ha!"
"Stop it! This isn't funny, Amy. If you're trying to make a point, you've made it. Yes, you're an attractive young woman, and maybe your youth's a part of why I'm attracted to you, but that's just biology. You can't blame me for that. I didn't make a move on you, I didn't harass you when we were working together. I treated you exactly as I would have treated any research assistant, except maybe you got away with more because I liked you. You can't ridicule me for responding to you sexually down here when you came on to me. The rules had changed."
"I'm not ridiculing you. Amelia Earhart really is my mother."
"Stop it."
"You want to meet her?"
/> Nate searched her face for signs of a grin or a tremble in her throat that might indicate the rise of an Amy Ha! Nothing there, just that little bit of sweetness that she usually tried to hide.
"So somehow, living down here, you haven't aged. Your mother?"
"We age, but not like on the surface. I was born in 1940. I'm about the same number of years older than you than you were older than me a half hour ago — kinda sorta. You going to dump me?"
"It's so hard to believe."
"Why, after you've seen all this? You've seen what the Goo can do. Why is it so hard to believe that I'm sixty-four?"
"Well, for one, you're so immature."
"Shut up. I'm young at heart."
"But for a second there I was so sure we were doomed." Nate rubbed his temples — trying to stretch them, maybe — to make his head bigger to hold the whole concept of Amy's being sixty-four.
"No, it's okay, we just haven't gotten to that yet. We're still doomed."
"Oh, thank goodness," Nate said. "I was worried."
* * *
Later, after they had pushed the world away for a while, made love and napped in each other's arms, Amy made a move to start another round, and Nate awoke to an immediate and uncertain anxiety.
"Are we really doomed?" he asked.
"Oh, goddamn it Nate!" She was straddling him, so she was able to get a good windup before thumping him hard in the chest with her fist. "That's just un-fucking-professional!"
Nate thought about how the praying mantis female will sometimes bite off the male's head during copulation and how the male's body continues to mate until the act is finished.
"Sorry," he said.
She rolled off him and stared up at dim strips of green luminescence on the ceiling. "It's okay. I didn't mean to bite your head off."
"Pardon?"
"Yes, we're probably doomed. We're doomed for the same reason that I look the way I do, that most of the Goos look much younger than we really are. Turn a gene on, you age; turn it off, you don't. I've even seen some people down here who seem to get younger. Flip a switch, pancreatic cancer at age twenty-two; flip another, you can smoke four packs a day and live to be a hundred. If the Goo thinks that the human race is a danger to it, it just has to flip a switch, pick a gene, make a virus, and the human race would blink out. I hadn't really thought about it as a threat before. My whole life I've worked for the Goo. Service, you know? It takes care of us. It's the source."
He didn't know what to say. Did he need to actually take the Colonel's request for help seriously? Did he need to help find a way to kill this amazing creature in order to save his own species? "Amy, I don't know what to do. Two days ago I just wanted to get out of here. Now? The Colonel and you both said I was lucky to be alive. Has the Goo killed people who were close to finding out about it?"
"Honestly, I don't know. I've never seen it or heard of it happening, but I — we — each just do our own part down here. We don't ask a lot of questions. Not because we're told not to or anything — it's just that you can live a long time without asking yourself big questions when your needs are looked after." For the first time Nate could see the experience of years in Amy's face, marked not by wrinkles but by a shadow in her eyes.
"I'm asking," he said.
"Do I think the Goo is ethically capable of killing the human race?"
"I guess."
"I don't even know if the Goo has ethics, Nate. According to the Colonel, it's just a vehicle for genes and we're just vehicles for memes and nature says that a head-on collision is inevitable. What if it's not? This battle has supposedly gone on for millions of years, and now the Colonel wants to force an endgame? What I do know is that you've got to talk him out of trying to kill it."
"But he's your leader."
"Yeah, but he didn't tell any of us about this. I think he's doubting his own judgment. So am I."
"But you said that it could kill everyone on the planet at the flick of a switch."
"Yeah." She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow. "You hungry? I'm hungry."
"I could eat."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Necrophiliacs Anonymous,
Gooville Chapter
Amy was carrying two stoppered porcelain bottles of beer when she entered the Colonel's chambers. The ruler of Gooville came sliding out of the pink wall as if it had given birth to him. He extended his arms to hug her, but instead of returning his embrace, Amy held up a beer.
"I brought you a beer."
"Amy, you know I don't really eat anymore."
"I thought you might like a beer, for old times' sake."
"Why are you here?"
"I hadn't seen you since I got back from Maui. I thought you'd want to debrief me or something."
"I've talked to Nathan Quinn."
"You have?"
"Don't be cute, Amy. I know what's going on between you two."
"I really don't have any choice, Colonel, I am cute. It's the burden I have to bear."
"He doesn't know what you are, does he?"
"Drink your beer, it's getting warm. Why do you keep it so steamy in here anyway?"
The Colonel accepted the beer from her and took a long pull. When he came up for air, he stared at the beer bottle with a look of surprise, as if it had just spoken to him.
"My, that's good. That's really good. I'd forgotten."
Amy toasted him with her own bottle and took a drink. "Colonel, we've known each other a long time. You've been like a father to me, but you are out of touch. I'm worried about you. I think you need to come out of here occasionally, like you used to. Walk around. Have some interaction with the people in town."
"Don't try to get in the way of what I'm doing, Amy."
"What are you talking about? I'm just worried about you."
The Colonel looked at the beer bottle in his hand again, as if it had just been teleported there, then he looked back to Amy with a little panic in his eyes. "Nate didn't tell you, then?"
"Tell me what? Nate doesn't have anything to do with this. You have lost touch."
The Colonel nodded, then leaned back into the wall of Goo behind him. It cradled him and formed a chaise longue, which he sat down on as he rubbed his temples. "Amy, did you ever do anything for a purpose greater than your own ambition? Did you ever feel a duty to something beyond yourself?"
"You mean, like persuading people that I'm something that I'm not to gain their trust so they could be kidnapped or killed in order to preserve my community? Yes, I have some concept of the idea of serving the greater good."
"I guess you do. I guess you do. Forgive me. Perhaps I do spend too much time alone."
"You think?"
"Could you leave me now? I do have to think."
"So you want to be alone now? That's what you're saying? This is how you're going to address the problem of spending too much time alone?"
"Go, Amy, and please don't interfere with Nate."
"Not yet."
"What do you mean, 'not yet'?"
"There's a deposit on that bottle. I'm not leaving without it."
"Then, Nate, he's not a problem? You're sure?" Here the Colonel forced a smile that looked much more like something menacing than an actual smile. "Because I will tell him about you if I must."
"The greater good," Amy said, returning the forced smile with a real one.
"Good," said the Colonel, draining the last of his beer. "Come back. And bring me another of these."
"You got it," Amy said. Then she took the bottle from him and left the chamber. Thin line between genius and full-blown batshit, she thought. Very thin line.
* * *
For two weeks the Colonel didn't send for Nate. Cielle Nuñez had stopped by the third morning that Amy was at Nate's apartment. "Well, you don't need me anymore," Cielle had said. "I'd just as soon get back to my ship anyway, although it doesn't look like we're going anywhere soon." Nate was disappointed that she hadn't been jealous.
"He's
afraid of the cupboards, the fridge, and the garbage disposal," Cielle told Amy, as if she were talking to the dog sitter. "And you'll need to take him to get his clothes cleaned. You know he's going to be terrified of the washing machines."
"I'm right here," Nate said. "And I'm not afraid of the appliances. I'm just cautious."
"Your mother will be thrilled for you two, Amy. Her ship should be back at base soon."
"No, she's not due in for another six weeks," Amy said.
"Not anymore. The Colonel's called all the ships back to base."
"All of them? Why?"
Cielle shrugged. "He's the Colonel. Ours is not to question why. Well, Nate, it's been a pleasure, really. I'll probably see you around. You're in good hands."
She hugged Nate quickly and started out the door.
"Cielle, wait. I want to ask you something. If you don't mind."
She turned. "Ask away."
"When did your husband's yacht sink?"
Cielle raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Amy. "It's okay," Amy said. "He knows."
"Nineteen twenty-seven, Nate. In retrospect it was a blessing of sorts. He died doing what he liked doing, and two years later he would have been wiped out when the stock market crashed. I'm not sure he would have survived that."
"Thanks. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Cal and I have a really good life."
"Cal? Cal from the ship? You didn't tell me that —»
"He's my husband? The Colonel thought you might be more comfortable with a single woman to orient you. Women down here have never taken their husband's surname, Nate."
"Females run the show in a whale society," Amy explained. "You know, as it should be."
Cielle Nuñez looked from Amy to Nate and smiled. "Oh, Nate, what have you gotten yourself into?" And then she snickered like a whaley boy and left.
"She wanted you," Amy said. "She hides it really well, but I could tell."
Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Page 26
