by Ian Watson
“No, it’s a way of signalling long distance, Ruthy,” he explained, trying to sound merely informative. “Can’t blame them with all these hills! That’s how they knew about the whales being on the move, all the way up there on the mountain.”
He demonstrated, pushing his finger in his mouth the way the boy had.
“You don’t use the vocal chords, just the tongue. Shove it into the right shape with your finger, then your larynx acts as a piston. Whistles carry five or six miles on a still day. That kid was probably warning folks: get out of the way, a car’s coming…”
“What do you know? Nice idea while it lasted—”
“You’d be surprised how similar these whistles and whale whistles look, on oscilloscope photos!” he enthused earnestly. “Maybe the Mezapico could whistle to the whales if they put their minds to it.” He laughed, awkwardly.
“Richard’s so well up on whales, Ruth,” grinned Paul. “He’d be running ’em through mazes for a hobby. If they weren’t so darned big…”
“Have the Indians got something religious about whales, then? Some myth, if they’re whistling about them?”
Richard shook his head.
“No, they’re just hoping one of the greys will blunder ashore, for its meat. Sometimes one gets marooned.”
“Why, what a feast!” She brightened—suddenly becoming gay and generous. “Why not whistle them ashore, to feed the Indians? Like the Sirens whistled Ulysses! There’s so much hunger in the world… Look at Africa. It’ll be as bad here soon. And Uncle Sam’s granary’s empty for hand-outs nowadays.”
“You mean, imitate the distress call?”
“Is there one? You know it?”
“Sure he does,” said Paul. “Richard listens to whale music like other folk listen to Bacharach.”
“A one-time banquet wouldn’t alter anything, Ruthy—only wipe out some whales. That’s no answer. You have to do something fundamental about the agriculture. Anyway, the climate’s stable here—it’s not like Africa. It’s always been the same as this.”
She gestured mockingly at the stony terraces of scrub marching down towards a rocky desert plain.
“So the Indians are supposed to groove on these rocks and dust? I wouldn’t mind a feast myself, in this place!”
Richard shook his head unhappily.
“So many humans, too few whales. It’s unfair. They’re remarkable creatures. We probably don’t realize just how remarkable, because their world’s so alien to ours. Some of them might be as intelligent as we are—”
Ruth leaned over the baby.
“D’you hear, Ally,” she whispered into the softly pulsing fontanelle—as though information was more easily conveyed to the baby’s brain by that route, “we’re going to see some genius whales. Like your Pa, only bigger.”
“Actually it’s the toothed whales that could be the clever ones. The sperm whales. The killers. Not the greys. They’re just grazers, and probably a bit dim.”
“Correction, Ally, we’re going to see some stupid whales.”
“I didn’t say that either!”
Impossible to be sure of anything with Ruth. He was beginning to loathe her deviousness. He concentrated on the idea of the whales as something wholesome, with integrity.
Meanwhile Alice gyrated her hands, grunted like a little cream pig, and flexed her spine in a series of violent jerks.
And Paul Hammond chuckled.
“Let’s get down to business, Richard. How to organize Max.”
Five
Ten-Arms discharges a fluid blob that disperses into a cloud of echoes, making the creature seem more daunting still. Arms are haloed in sleeves of illusion as they wave and flex. Inside that cloud waits steel strength, hard beak, a thousand ripping suckers.
It’s self-conscious too, in its own indefinite enigmatic way, this tough gelatinous lurker. A potent awareness. Its tiny ten-arm cousins of the surface are toys to it, squirting their way about in clouds of themselves, a dozen a mouthful—slithery mulch drink. The great Ten-Arms thinks cold, dark thoughts down here, transforming them into light patterns bright enough for his own kind’s bowl-eyes to read, printed out on blackness. Perhaps the Old Ones in the Star of Thought know something of Ten-Arms’ ideas and what their lights say. Just now, its lights are only transient arbitrary mosaics upon the surface of a sullen, ravening identity.
Ten-Arms can feed him half a day. Fought and subdued, it rips into delicious chunk bites. Its arms, robbed of their suction, slide down his throat to plump his belly. His faeces taste of the beast as they squeeze into the sea, later on… Already he savours it down to those last faecal traces.
But he doesn’t attack.
Eight-Arms is nesting in his head…
Ten-Arms flails a long thin tentacle, terminating in a broad fat swingle tip, towards him. Its other thicker arms splay out, sucker pads agape. And it pulses lights at him, buried in its flesh. Soft rose and blue jewels light up below its eyes. An emerald bulb blazes where the swingle flail joins the main tentacle strand. Tiny nacrous portholes line its body. Sapphires sit beneath its tail flaps. A shifting harlequin cloak of lights glows through the thinning fog, pulsating on and off.
Saying something? Luring?
Truth is, he barely sees these lights at all, only a faint, peripheral glow.
Long boneless fingers branch from around a mouth. A great flexing hand hangs there before him (carved in his melon), lopped off above the wrist so that flaps of flesh splay loose behind. Inset in the palm is a beaked mouth. Those staring dome-eyes replace the knuckles. Obscene, disembodied hand, floating in void, groping at him… Horror ghost of a hand!
The faint teasings of an itch begin to rasp his neck. Eight-Arms is restless. Its suckers need number-clicks to play with from the air…
So he must swing skyward on the long corkscrew climb sheer up canyon cliffs, empty-mouthed. As he surges, the beast flicks a thong at him that grazes his hide and sucks tight for a second, then tears free as his momentum carries him up. He catches a brief parting glimpse of its winking lights, from one eye. On and off—pink, silver, blue. Sees them in monochrome, hazy meaningless dots…
• • •
Surfacing, he snorts oily foam from his nostrils, acrid with the poisons dissolved in it. Blows, and blows again; and wallows, gasping in fresh air.
The itch grows harsher, till he humps himself high in the waves, and a click-train echoes in his head from nowhere. Eight-Arms in his mind faithfully records it, to tell him what it means. Ducking below the surface then, ravenously, he searches for a school of albacore sweetmeats or a cloud of tiny ten-arms.
Curiously, that noise-burst in his head is associated with tenderness now; and though he fled from a steel fish, only to meet an open hand of horror in the depths, the ghost fingers that brush his consciousness now are tender.
Eight-Arms nesting at the back of his head is himself. An aspect… He accepts that, for the moment. It tells him things he needs to know. He tells it things to signal. They collaborate. He cannot count, as it can. Without being able to count, he couldn’t signal. He counts upon it, yes! For a time he feels quite euphoric.
But who is he signalling to, out there in the air?
The only way he can touch fingers, that once touched him—to which he owes a duty of love.
• • •
Leaving the mountain range behind him, he scans out across open sea till he catches up with a sweetmeat school and feasts on half a dozen members of it, tossing oily succulent meat back with his tongue…
• • •
Once again, the spasm in his head has been witnessed. It puzzles the bull cruising by, whose melon overheard the faint fast train of clicks.
Six
The cliffs beyond San Pedro fell sheer to a narrow stony beach raked by foaming waves. In a few places they had eroded into scree slides like tailings from a mine, and precarious paths wound down these.
Several hundred yards offshore, the Californian greys swam by on the
first leg of their four-and-a-half-thousand-mile migration from the warm Mexican breeding lagoons to the Arctic.
“They don’t look grey to me,” Ruth remarked in a hurt, cheated voice as she held Alice aloft pointlessly to see the view.
“Well, Richard?” laughed Dr Paul. He seemed in an ebullient, generous mood now that he imagined he had successfully imposed his view of Max on Richard. Richard had promised to visit Max this evening to talk things over; however, now that he’d heard Paul out, Richard felt rather more sympathetic to Max Berg’s viewpoint. Far back on Mezapico Mountain the radio bowl caught and focused the Sun: from this angle, with its gleaming superstructure, it seemed a table lamp plugged into the scenery, switched on to lure giant moths. Did the priests in San Pedro ever worry in case it upstaged their glittering wedding cake in the popular imagination? Its sheer size and silence made it so ambiguous an artefact. If Dr Paul had his way—the Christiaan Barnard of Radio Astronomy, performing a “soul transplant” of God into Science—religion and technology would soon enough be bedfellows. And a second Nobel Prize for the discoverer of Hammond Waves would be just a reach away…
Richard lifted his binoculars to watch the whales.
“The grey bits are just patches of barnacles,” he explained. “The skin’s black, basically. But most whales are misnamed, anyway. Killer whales aren’t psychotic murderers. They can be as tame and friendly as you like. The sperm whale hasn’t got gallons of sperm in that great head of its—the early whalers just called it sperm. Nobody really knows what the stuff’s for even now—”
Dozens of mottled black backs ploughed northward through blue waves, presenting smooth, gently humped profiles as they cut the water, blowing low spouts like garden sprinklers switching on and off. Rose trees, woven temporarily out of spray: a fluid garden sprouting from the Pacific.
“Why are you so keen on whales?” Ruth asked him, nodding at the ocean, and those dark spouting shapes cleaving it so purposefully. “I mean, you’re an astronomer. What’s the connection?”
Dr Paul chuckled.
“The connection, my dear, is the concept of intelligent life in the universe. There was a very wasteful, diversionary conference at Princeton a while ago about methods of eavesdropping on supposed advanced civilizations out in space. What a frivolity! Fortunately the dolphin buffs were there, arguing that we already have our own home-grown aliens here on Earth—these whales and whatnot—and we can’t even communicate with them yet… Which neatly shot down the proposal for an international listening project. That wasn’t their intention, of course. But that was the upshot.” Paul cracked his knuckles, smugly. “Personally, I don’t give a damn about dolphins. Or nearby stars. Or anything that happened in the past billion years. In my book the only knowledge worth knowing is way out there at the beginning of time—or the edge of space, whichever you prefer—in the background radiation supposedly left over from the fireball. Eh, Richard?”
Damn you, Paul Hammond, smarted Richard. In the midst of soliciting my support, you still find time to pour scorn on my “hobby”—my “eccentric amusement”…
“Paul’s always hankered after finding the original Fiat Lux written out somewhere in the sky—scientifically,” he said sarcastically to Ruth. “ ‘Let There Be Light.’ So now he’s found it. And to think, if I hadn’t been at that conference I wouldn’t be here now, and part of it! No wonder I love whales and feel protective—they brought us all together…”
“That’s where I hired Richard, right,” nodded Paul, ignoring whales and ocean—staring steadfastly inland towards his telescope. “Richard performed some rather elegant Ph.D. work—radio map of part of the Milky Way in the infra-red. Good apprentice stuff. Nice sense of chutzpah, too. A thesis exactly one page long! Admittedly the page measured six foot by three foot and took two years to do. Still, it must be great telling people who’ve written whole volumes that you got your doctorate for a one-page thesis—I envy you, Richard…”
“I still don’t get why you were there, Rich,” grumbled Ruth.
Richard smiled thinly.
“I published a piece about the radio clicks we hear from the stars, and the clicks the sperm whales make. Both, considered as pure mathematical information. I suggested at the conference maybe we could invent a cosmic syntax out of whale-talk, to speak to the stars—if we ever located anything, anywhere, to talk to.”
“Now that was naughty of you,” reproved Hammond. “Fortunately nobody pays any attention to the Worm Runners Digest. It’s just a spoof journal—Mad magazine for scientists.”
“It contains spoofs. But serious stuff too. That’s why it has two titles, the other one being Journal of Biological Psychology, remember?”
“To be sure, to be sure…” conceded Paul, wandering off impatiently, as Baby Alice started up a grunting wheeze that rapidly climaxed in shrill cries of hunger. He hunkered down twenty yards away and began figuring on the back of an envelope.
“Damn it, it was a serious piece!” Richard shouted after him. “It just happens to be the sort of adventurous serious piece you have to present as a spoof, or you’ve got no reputation left. Unless your name’s Hammond, of course!”
Dr Paul looked up and nodded in full agreement. Richard’s interest in whales was precisely the professional flaw that made him an acceptable colleague, in Paul’s eyes: perfectly competent as a radio astronomer, but with this deviant skeleton in his mental cupboard.
“Didn’t we bring some beer?” he called out.
“It’s in back, in the Koolpak,” muttered Ruth. “Will you oblige, Rich? While I see to Ally—”
Richard tugged the rear door open and stripped three cans of Nochebuena from the six-pack in the refrigerated box. Propping the cans on the engine hood, he ripped the tabs off and flicked them away among the stones where they glinted like tinfoil flowers. The cans were already slippery with mist from the sudden change of temperature. He handed one to Ruth who was sitting in shade with her back up against the front wheel. She held Alice splayed on her knees—the baby alternately gobbling milk from a disposable feed bottle and jerking her head aside, grunting and rejecting it.
The second can he carried over to Dr Paul and stuck into his field of vision, midway between his face and the envelope, so as to avoid having to stoop or else stand by like a waiter.
The envelope, he saw, had the letters “MB”, no doubt for Max Berg, ringed at the centre, surrounded by mathematical doodles which obviously had some private code significance for Paul. “RK”, he noticed—Richard Kimble?—was off somewhere at the edge of the envelope, enclosed within brackets shaped suspiciously like a large fish, or whale…
Paul Hammond was figuring out his algebra of people, and how to organize them.
He seemed unperturbed by Richard’s scrutiny—as though some law of nature prevented Richard from understanding the mathematics of his own manipulation. Accepting the beer, Paul set it down, then fiercely slit the envelope open with one finger and flattened it out. The name Hammond, contained in the address, abruptly entered the world of his calculations then, as deus ex machina, bulking large. Paul drew a long line out to it and circled it with an ellipse—an elliptical galaxy, no less—and grinned quickly and complacently up at Richard, as though to show he had been three steps ahead of his thoughts all the time. Defeated, Richard withdrew.
The feed bottle lay duly disposed of on the ground—to end up in some shanty by nightfall, be used and re-used by some enterprising Indian’ mother, till her child died of enteritis… Stooping, Richard picked the plastic bottle up and squeezed it between his palms till it cracked open, before tossing it far away.
“It isn’t like handing on used clothes,” he explained gently to Ruth. But all she said was:
“Someone’s snooping on us, Rich.”
Sure enough, a hundred yards further along the cliff-top beyond Paul, unnoticed till now, an Indian squatted motionless in a dingy sarape and straw hat blending him in perfectly with the scenery. Indeed he was scenery, compa
red with Dr Paul.
“So watch him back,” he laughed, pushing the binoculars towards her.
“But what’s he doing?” she insisted, a note of panic in her voice. She clutched the binoculars briefly, her fingers an apprehensive starfish that suckered tight then detached themselves, unwilling to use such an instrument—she must hate all breeds of the genus telescope by now.
“Same as us, I guess. Whale viewing.” Richard surveyed the Indian through the glasses. An old fellow with the collapsing, varnished features of a mummy—basted by years in a slow oven.
“No strength for work any more, so they sent him out here in case a grey gets stranded—”
“Rich, let’s tell him the distress call?” she begged suddenly. “Give him the jackpot!”
“No, I told you. Anyway, it’s on tape in my room, not in my head…”
Fortunately Alice began fretting again. They had to take turns pretend-walking her along, an inch above the ground, to appease her. Richard was able to slip off Ruth’s hook.
The baby’s legs kicked woodenly in a puppet parody of tasks they’d only be able to accomplish many months later. Yet Alice was already sensing the freedoms of the future, as teasing ghosts producing a mixture of joy and frustration.
“Must be hell being a baby,” muttered Ruth, sympathetically. “Locked up in this thing is a human being wanting to be let out.” Subsiding on the ground by the cliff edge, she perched Alice on her knee.
“Hullo sea, hullo whales,” she sang.
Alice stared down at her own hands, pouching her cheeks large in the process; then began slapping her fists about violently, striking rubbery blows at her mother and herself.
“How stupid are babies, Rich? I mean, biologically. Lord, it’s sickening—”
