Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

by Christopher Moore

  Nate listened, trying to weigh what it really meant in the bigger picture, but he couldn't think of anything except that he wanted her to go with him, wanted her to be with him, no matter what she said she was. "I don't care, Amy. It doesn't matter. Look, I got over all this" — he gestured to all that — "and the fact that you're sixty-four years old and your mother is a famous dead aviatrix. As long as you don't start liking girls, I'll be fine."

  "That's not the point, Nate. I can't leave here, not for long anyway. None of us can. Even the ones who weren't born here. The Goo becomes part of you. It takes care of you, but you become attached to it, almost literally. Like an addiction. It gets in your tissues by contact. That's how my mother had me. I've been gone a lot already this year. If I left now, or if I left for longer that a few months at a time, I'd get sick. I'd probably die."

  At that moment a yellow research submersible bubbled up to the surface of the lagoon, a dozen headlights blazing into the grotto around a great Plexiglas bubble in the front.

  "That's it, then. I'll stay. I don't mind, Amy. I'll stay here. We can live here. I could spend a lifetime learning about this place, the Goo."

  "You can't do that either. It will become part of you, too. If you stay too long, you won't be able to leave either. You had to have noticed that first night we got drunk together, how fast you recovered from the hangover."

  Nate thought about how quickly his wounds had healed, too — weeks, maybe months of healing overnight. There was no other explanation. He thought about spending his life with only fleeting glimpses of sunlight, and he said, "I don't care. I'll stay."

  "No you won't. I won't let you. You have things to do." She shoved the specimen jar in his pocket, then kissed him hard. He kissed her back, for a long time.

  The hatch at the top of the dry exit tower on the sub opened, and Clay popped up to see Nate and Amy for the first time since they'd both disappeared.

  "Well, that's unprofessional," Clay said.

  Amy broke the kiss and whispered, "You go. Take that with you." She patted his pocket. Then she turned to Clay as she checked her watch again. "You're late!"

  "Hey, missy, I set a time when I'd be at the coordinates you sent — six hundred and twenty-three feet below sea level — and I was there. You didn't mention that I had another mile of submarine cave with some of the scariest-looking rock formations I've ever seen." He glanced at Nate. "They looked alive."

  "They are alive," Amy said.

  "Are we close to the surface? The pressure is —»

  "I'll explain on the way," Nate said. "We'd better go." Nate stepped onto the sub as Clay slipped down inside the hatch to allow him to pass. Nate crawled into the hatch and looked back to Amy before he closed it.

  "I'll stay, Amy. I don't care. For you I'll stay. I love you. You know that, right?"

  She nodded and brushed tears out of her eyes. "Yeah," she said, Then she spun around quickly and started walking away. "You take care of yourself, Nathan Quinn," she shouted over her shoulder, and Nate heard her voice break when she said his name.

  He climbed down into the sub and secured the hatch above him.

  Clay had watched Amy walk away from the big, half-submerged Plexiglas bubble in the front of the sub.

  "Where's Amy going?"

  "She can't come home, Clay."

  "She's okay, though?"

  "She's okay."

  "You okay?"

  "I've been better."

  They were quiet for the long ride through the pressure locks to the outside ocean, just the sound of the electric motors and the low hum of instruments all around them. The lights of the sub barely reached out to the walls of the cave, but every hundred yards or so they would come to a large, pink disk of living tissue, like a giant sea anemone, which would fold back to let them pass, then expand to fill the passageway once they had gone through. Nate watched the pressure gauge rise one atmosphere every time they passed through one of the gates, and it was then that he realized he wasn't escaping at all. The Goo knew exactly where and what they were, and it was letting him go.

  "You're going to explain what all this is, right?" Clay said, not even looking away from the controls.

  Nate was startled out of his reverie. "Clay, I can't believe — I mean, I believe it, but — Thanks for coming to get me."

  "I never told you, you know — it's not really appropriate or anything — but I have pretty strong feelings about loyalty."

  "Well, I respect that, Clay, and I appreciate it."

  "Yeah, well, don't mention it."

  Then they were both a bit embarrassed and both pretended that something was irritating their throats and they had to cough and pay attention to their breathing for a while, even though the air in the little submarine was filtered and humidified and perfectly clean.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Pirates

  Nate was standing with Clay on the flying bridge of the Clair as she steamed into the Au'au Channel.

  "You'd better put on some sunscreen, Nate."

  Nate looked down at his forearms. He'd lost most of his color while in Gooville, and he could feel the sun cooking him, even through his T-shirt.

  "Yeah." He looked off toward Lahaina, the harbor he'd piloted into a thousand times. They'd have to anchor far outside the breakwater with a ship this size, but it still had the feeling of coming home. The wind was warm and sweet, the water the heartbreak blue of a newborn's eyes. A humpback fluked about eight hundred yards to the north of them, its tail glistening in the sun as if it were covered with sequins.

  "There's still a month left of the season," Clay said. "We can still get some work done."

  "Clay, I've been thinking. Maybe we can be a little more purposeful in what we're doing. Maybe a little more active, conservation-wise."

  "I could go for that. I like whales."

  "I mean, we have the resources now, and even if I could prove the meaning of the song — somehow decipher the vocabulary of it — I could never prove the purpose. You know, without compromising Gooville."

  "Not a good idea." During the trip home Nate had explained it all.

  "I mean, there's no reason we can't do good science and still, you know —»

  "Kick some ass."

  "Well, yeah."

  Clay affected an exaggerated Greek accent. "Sometimes, boss, you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble."

  "Zorba?"

  "Yeah." Clay grinned.

  "Great book," Nate said. "Is that the Always Confused?"

  Clay pulled up a pair of binoculars and focused on a speedboat that was rounding the Lahaina breakwater, showing more wake than she should in the harbor. Kona was driving the Always Confused.

  "My boat," Clay said, somewhat distressed.

  "You need to get over that, Clay."

  The speedboat came around to a parallel course with the Clair as the ship cut her engines in preparation to drop anchor. Kona was waving and screaming like a madman. "Irie, Bwana Nate! Irie! The lion come home! Praise Jah's mercy. Irie!"

  Nate came down the steps from the flying bridge to the deck. Whatever resentment he might have had for the surfer at one time was gone. Whatever threat he might have felt from the boy had melted away. Whatever irrelevancy Kona's youth and strength might have underscored in his own character was irrelevant. Maybe it was time to be an example instead of a competitor. Besides, he was genuinely glad to see the kid. "Hey, kid, how you doing?"

  "Jammin' now, don't you know."

  "That's good. How'd you like to go be a pirate?"

  * * *

  Because the Navy didn't maintain permanent offices on Maui, Captain L. J. Tarwater had been given a small office that the navy sublet for him in the Coast Guard building, which meant that, unlike on a naval base, here the public could pretty much come and go as they wished. So Tarwater wasn't that surprised to see someone come strolling through his office door. What he was surprised by was that it was Nathan Quinn, whom he thought quite drowned,
and who was carrying a four-gallon glass jar full of some clear liquid.

  "Quinn, I thought you were lost at sea."

  "I was. I'm found now. We need to have a chat." He set the jar on Tarwater's desk, leaving a wet ring on some papers there, then went back and shut the door to the outer offices.

  "Look, Quinn, if this is some kind of stunt, like spray-painting fur, you're wasting your time. You guys act like the military is the great Satan. I'm here to study these animals. I grew up in the same generation you did, and so did most of the people in the navy who do what I do. We don't want to hurt these animals."

  "Okay," Nate said. "We only have two things to talk about here. Then I'll show you something."

  "What's in the jar? That better not be kerosene or anything."

  "It's seawater. I got it at the beach about ten minutes ago. Don't worry about it. Look, first you're going to finish your study and you're going to strongly recommend that the navy's torpedo range not be moved into the sanctuary. You will not let that happen. The animals do dive to depths where they can be hurt by the explosions, and they will be hurt by the explosions, which you'll be setting off not to defend the country but just so you guys can practice."

  "There's no evidence that they ever dive deeper than two hundred feet."

  "There will be. I've got data tags coming in from the mainland, I'll have data in a month."

  "Still…"

  "Shut up," Nate said, then thought better of it and added, "Please." Then he continued. "Second, you need to do everything in your power to back off of testing low-frequency active sonar. We know that it kills deepwater hunters like beaked whales, and there's probably some chance that it also injures the humpbacks, and under no circumstances do you want to do that."

  "And why would that be?"

  "You know what my work has been for the last twenty-five years, right?"

  "You've been studying the humpback song. What, trying to figure its purpose?"

  "I found it, Tarwater. It's a prayer. The singers are praying."

  "That's preposterous. There's no way you could know that."

  "I'm positive of it. Absolutely positive. I know it's a prayer, and that the torpedo base and LFA will harm a God-fearing animal." Nate paused to let it sink in, but Tarwater just looked at him like he was an annoying rodent that had crawled in from the cane fields.

  "How could you possibly know that, Quinn?"

  "Because their prayers are answered." Nate took a portable tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and set it on the desk next to the seawater, into which he'd already mixed part of the Goo that Amy had given him. He pushed the «play» button, and the sound of humpback-whale song filled the office.

  "This is ridiculous," Tarwater said.

  "Watch," Nate said, pointing to the water, which began to swirl, a tiny pink vortex forming in the middle.

  "Get out of here. I'm not impressed with your Mr. Wizard tricks, Quinn."

  "Watch," Nate said again. As they watched, the pink vortex expanded while the whale song played, until half the jar was filled with a moving pink stain. Then Nate turned off the tape.

  "So what?" Tarwater said.

  "Look more closely." Nate opened the jar, reached in, strained out some of the pink, and threw it on Tarwater's desk. Tiny shrimp — each only an inch long — flipped about on the blotter. "Krill," Nate said.

  Tarwater didn't say anything. He just looked at the krill, then scraped a couple into his hand and examined them more closely. "They are krill."

  "Uh-huh."

  "What, it's like Sea Monkees, right? You had brine-shrimp eggs in there."

  "No, Captain Tarwater, I did not. The humpbacks are praying, and God is answering them, giving them food. We could run this little experiment a hundred times, and that water would be clear when we started and full of krill when we ended. Trust me, I've done it." And he had. The little bit of Goo in the water created the krill out of the other life in there, the ubiquitous SAR-11 bacteria that existed in every liter of seawater on the planet.

  Tarwater held up the krill. "But I thought they didn't eat when they were here."

  "You're thinking on too small a scale. They don't feed for four months, and then they do nothing but feed. They're thinking in advance — the way you might think about breakfast before you go to bed at night. Doesn't matter, really. What you need to do, Captain, is everything in your power and influence to stop the range and the LFA testing."

  Tarwater looked stunned now. "I'm just a captain."

  "But you're an ambitious captain. I can have a jar of seawater on the secretary of the navy's desk in ten hours. Do you really want to be the one to explain to this administration that you're hurting an animal that prays to God? Particularly this administration?"

  "No, sir, I do not," said Tarwater, looking decidedly more frightened than he had been just a second before.

  "I thought you were an intelligent man. I trust you'll handle this, and this will be the last anyone will hear of my jar."

  "Yes, sir," Tarwater said, more out of habit than respect.

  Nate took his tape recorder and his jar and walked out, grinning to himself, thinking about the praying humpbacks. Of course, it's not your particular God, he thought, but they do pray, and their god does feed them.

  He headed back to Papa Lani to make the calls and write the paper that would torpedo any hope of Jon Thomas Fuller's ever building a captive dolphin petting zoo on Maui.

  A pirate's work is never done.

  * * *

  Three months later the Clair cruised into the cold coastal waters off Chile on her way to Antarctica to intercept, stop, harass, and generally make business difficult for the Japanese whaling ship Kyo Maru. Clay was at the helm, and when the ship reached a precise point on the GPS receiver, he ordered the engines cut. It was a sunny day, unusually calm for this part of the Pacific. The water was so dark blue it almost appeared black.

  Clair was below in their cabin. She'd been seasick for most of the voyage, but she had insisted on coming along despite the nausea, using her saber-edged persuasive skills on the captain. ("Who's got the pirate booty? All right, then, help me pack.")

  Nate stood on the deck at the bow, his arm around Elizabeth Robinson. Above them swung an eighteen-foot rigid-hull Zodiac on a crane, ready to drop into the water whenever it was needed. There was another one on the stern, where once the submarine had been stowed. Up on the flying bridge, Kona scanned the sea around them with a pair of «big-eye» binoculars on a heavy iron mount that was welded to the railing.

  "There's one, a thousand yards."

  Clay came out onto the walkway beside Kona. They all looked to starboard, where the residual cloud of a whale blow was hanging over the calm water.

  "Another one!" Clay shouted, pointing to a second blow closer to the ship off the port bow.

  Then they started firing into the air as if triggered by a chained fuse: whale blows of different shapes, heights, and angles — great explosions of spray erupting so close to the ship now that the decks started to glisten with the moisture. Then the backs of the great whales rolled in the water around them, gray and black and blue, hills of slick flesh on all sides, moving slowly, then lying in the water. Nate and Elizabeth moved up to the bow railing and watched a group of sperm whales lolling in the water like logs just a few feet off the bow. Next to them a wide right whale floated, bobbing gently in the swell, only a slow wave of the tail revealing that the creature was alive. It rolled to one side, and its eye bulged as it looked at them.

  "You okay?" Nate asked Elizabeth, squeezing her shoulder. This was the first time she'd been out on the water in over forty years. In her hands she clutched a brown paper lunch bag.

  "They're still amazing up close. I'd forgotten."

  "Just wait."

  There were probably a hundred animals of different species around the ship now, most rolled on their side, one eye bulged out to focus in the air. Their blows settled into a syncopated rhythm, like cylinders of some grea
t engine firing in succession.

  Kona jumped up and down next to Clay, praising Jah and laughing as each animal breathed or flicked a tail. "Irie, my whaley friends!" he shouted, waving to the animals close to the boat. Clay desperately resisted the urge to grab up cameras and start blasting film or digital video. It felt like he had to pee, really badly, from his eyes.

  "Nate," Clay called, and he pointed to a bubble net forming just outside the ring of floating whales. They'd seen them dozens of times in Alaska and Canada, one humpback circling and releasing a stream of bubbles to corral a school of fish while others plunged up through the middle to catch them. The circle of bubbles became more pronounced on the surface, as if the water were boiling, and then a single humpback breached through the ring, cleared the water completely, and landed on its side in white crater of splash and spray.

  "Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth said. Flustered, she pressed her face into Nate's jacket, then looked back quickly, lest she miss something.

  "They're showing off," Clay said.

  The lolling whales lazily paddled out of the way, opening a corridor to the ship. The humpback motorboated toward the bow, its knobby face riding on top of the water. When it was only ten yards from the bow, the animal rose up in the water and opened its mouth. Amy stood up, and next to her stood James Poynter Robinson.

  "Hey, can we get a ladder down here?" Amy shouted.

  "Praise Jah's mercy," Kona said, "the Snowy Biscuit has come home."

  Nate threw a cargo net over the side, then climbed halfway down and pulled Amy up onto the net. He held her there as the ship moved in the swell, and she tried to kiss him and nearly chipped a tooth.

  "Help me with Elizabeth," Nate said.

  Together they got the Old Broad down the cargo net and handed her to her husband, who stood on the tongue of a whale and hugged his bride after not seeing her for four decades.

  "You look so young," Elizabeth said.

  "We can fix that," he said.

  "You'll get old?"

  "Nope." He looked back to Nate and saluted. Nate could hear whaley-boy pilots snickering inside the whale.