by Ian Watson
A stink of pungent grease drifted towards them from the beasts. They smelt rancid, despite innumerable dunkings as they shoved each other underwater in a shallow pond on the hill with massive playful paw clouts. Maybe they were in heat? In the fall?
As the breeze veered, the stink diminished; but catching a whiff of people the largest male reared up in turn, nose twitching and little gimlet eyes peering myopically at them.
“How do you like the bears, Georgi?” Pasko asked in a playful, tone, Tom Winterburn translating dutifully. The naval attaché was a lofty, bony, watery-eyed individual with long sharp icicle features which always seemed faintly blue at the extremities, with too little blood to feed the skin stretched out so tightly across his frame. He was perpetually sucking his cheeks in, collapsing and pursing them—transforming his already gaunt head into the deflated rubber lung of an anaesthetizer.
The boy stuttered:
“Gdyeh del’finy?”
“Is there a dolphinarium? He wants dolphins.”
“Gerry, you kept the tickets. There’s a plan of the zoo on the backs.”
Mercer consulted the rear of the long blue tickets hopelessly. The locations were all printed in Japanese.
“I can’t remember the character for dolphin,” he admitted finally—if he had ever known it.
“Here, give them over,” Parr said. “Dolphinarium won’t be written in characters. It’s a foreign word so it’ll be in the kana script.”
He hunted round the maze printed on the ticket, before triumphantly stabbing his finger at a short line of jagged simple shapes, like cuneiform.
“Do-ru-fi-na-ri-u-n,” he pronounced slowly. “That’s it. And we’re beside the bears. Bear is kuma, but…” He remembered a restaurant in the Shinjuku amusement area selling, or purporting to sell, roast bearmeat, with the character for kuma carved over the door; but the character swam in his mind’s eye indistinctly, changing shape all the time. He shrugged. “What’s next along here? Elephants… They’ll have to be written in kana… Yes, here we are. So we need to go on past the elephants, then turn right.”
Those elephants definitely were in heat. A black rubber cosh hung down behind the bull’s hind legs, two feet long. It stiffened as he nuzzled the cow with his trunk, though he didn’t seem to have the energy to do much more with his magnificent member than engorge it softly. They probably only fed them buckets of vitaminized rice, Parr thought. Inadequate diet. Who could afford to feed an elephant these days?
• • •
When they reached the dolphinarium, it consisted of an outdoor pool and a large grey building adjacent. A submarine channel connected them. Two dolphins were circling listlessly in the pool outside, beneath a hoop on a pole intended for them to leap through. Dozens of yellow bonnets crowded the parapet round the pool, calling for the dolphins to perform and throwing candy through the hoop, which the dolphins ignored as it hit the water and sank.
Nilin tugged violently away from the pool towards the grey building, crying “Vnutri, vnutri,” in his thin voice.
“He wants to see inside.”
Indoors, the dolphinarium was a grim dismal hall with a long plate glass window giving an underwater view of a large, deserted tank. The only enlivening feature of the tomblike place was a large mural depicting the family tree of the whales and dolphins with coloured drawings and captions in Latin and Japanese.
Nilin forced himself up against this clammy mural on tiptoes, then sagged back and indicated urgently that Mikhail should lift him. The tall Russian picked him up, and the boy drew a circle round one particular picture in the condensation damp with his fist—setting drops of water scurrying towards the floor. He swung back explosively in Mikhail’s grasp, twisted his face towards Pasko and shouted at him the one phrase:
“Jonah Kit!”
It was the sperm whale, Latin name Physeter Catodon, that he’d circled.
“That’s odd,” remarked Winterburn. “The Russian word for whale is kit But they don’t call that particular one a kit. A sperm whale is kachalot in Russian…”
“That’s the whale that swallowed Jonah?” Gerry asked brightly.
The child screamed a string of Russian words at them then, ending up by throwing his frail body at the mural, clawing it with his fingernails as if to burrow inside the picture. He would have hurt himself, if Mikhail hadn’t gently detached him—and when Mikhail did so, moving a few feet away, the boy’s face abruptly lost all expression. A switch was turned off. He went limp, catatonic.
“What did he say?” demanded Pasko.
“He said, the first printing is a baby, this is the second printing—”
“For God’s sake! They’re trying to brainwash kids into thinking they’re animals? So that’s the next stage after Nilin, is it? No wonder he defected…” The psychiatrist ran his hand through his curls. “But the ‘Wolf-child’ phenomenon is supposed to be just a popular myth to explain autistic reactions, damn it! Is this an even more radical treatment for deranged children they’re working on?”
“If you take him literally,” Parr pointed out, “you wouldn’t produce wolf children. You’d produce whale children. I hardly see the sense in that. You might persuade a kid to scamper about on all fours barking at the Moon, but this would be like telling him he’s a bird and expecting him to fly!”
“What’s special about a sperm whale, Tom?” Pasko asked thoughtfully.
“Dives deepest of any of the whales. Holds its breath the longest. I wonder… if this has got anything to do with autism at all? We’ve been training dolphins at San Diego for some time. But sperm whales? It’s incredible. Yet the Russians aren’t scientific idiots—unless they’re off on another Lysenko tack… Now let me think. The Russians performed a complete about turn on whaling policy a couple of years back. Began grumbling that the sperm whale was an endangered species and needed strict protection. They’re still happily slaughtering the other whales out of existence with their factory ships, but be damned if they didn’t railroad this through the Whaling Commission. The Japanese hated it. Normally the Russians and Japanese ignore any kind of whale quotas. But we had to support the Russians on this, of course, because we’d started the conservation scare in the first place…”
Schoolchildren chattered into the bleak hall, hooting echoes off the walls; then there were yellow bonnets everywhere—the luminous headgear reflecting the tank lights, a swarm of sulphurous jellyfish. Surging with panic, Parr bolted for the door.
Outside, he leant against a wall, feeling his heart thump.
Oh for Cape Cod, deserted winter beaches and bracing air, a lifetime ago!
Something that had struck him as odd at the time fell into place now—or rather, didn’t so much fall into place, as out of it. Mikhail had known exactly which whale the boy wanted to be held up to. Had held him directly in front of it. Yet the surly reticent peasant said nothing to them before about whales, only about children…
Eight
There would be no more casual outings to zoos. The Nilin affair had escalated to the level of an incident. When the meeting convened in Parr’s office two days later, it was a more serious affair.
“The Soviet Embassy is aware that we have the boy,” stated Captain Enozawa primly, stressing the word we faintly as reminder to the Americans of their status in Japan… a status constantly on the decline.
Once he’d been one of the bubble-gum-chewing crowd himself—on the morning when Japan’s greatest novelist, Yukio Mishima, invaded the Self Defence Force headquarters with his private bodyguard and tried to persuade the assembled soldiers to oust the Liberal Democrats and restore ancient values. He’d still been chewing gum derisively when Mishima slashed open his abdomen in ritual disgust, and was beheaded by a friend…
Enozawa had modified his values since then. Nowadays, as liaison officer for the Self Defence Force, he was hovering on the verge of outright hatred of America. The mood shift only betrayed itself as yet by a purging of American slang and accent from his
speech, however. And of gum from his mouth.
He wasn’t alone. In a thousand unobtrusive shifts of emphasis up and down the Home Islands, the novelist’s ritual suicide had registered, and was registering still—a slow earthquake, whose shock waves might take years to peak…
Enozawa appeared superficially a neat and scrupulous officer, with a sophistical turn of mind, presumably due to his education at Tokyo’s Jesuit-run Sophia University.
Quite wrong. This scrupulousness was an essential part of the new patriotism emerging in him. Patriotism had always been an aesthetic experience in Japan. Enozawa was pruning and cropping his spirit with all the subtle rigour of a bonsai gardener—all the neatness of a junior priest raking sand at the Ryoanji stone-garden temple. If these Americans could have seen the gum-chewing, Beatles-whistling cadet of a few years back…! Jesuits be damned.
“The Soviet Embassy attaches great importance to the boy. ‘Request’ is perhaps too delicate a term for their note requiring his return—along with boat and attendant. Do you suppose it is a coincidence that the Fisheries Conference has just been adjourned in Moscow? Remember the hardships we had in previous years. This has been used as a political lever before. Naturally it is a matter of priority to our government that the crab catch for the Northern waters is finalized—”
“A hilarious hassle you had over those damn crabs last time,” laughed Parr, in the belief that a little humour might help. “Your side arguing that the king crab leaps through the water and floats about like a Japanese paper fan. So it belongs to the open sea. Russians insisting it creeps along the sea bed, so it belongs to their own continental shelf as a Soviet citizen. Went on for six weeks, right?”
“Resulting in a quota discrepancy in our disfavour of five thousand tons,” Enozawa reproved. “We do not regard this as frivolous; Mr Parr—in view of the riots in Tsukiji fish market. Russia is applying pressure on a sensitive nerve. The boy should perhaps be repatriated immediately—
“Incidentally,” he added, “you refer to ‘their’ continental shelf. In the case of Kamchatka, yes. But Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands are quite another matter!”
“If they regard Nilin as so important,” suggested Gerry, “we have to face the likelihood he’s telling the truth. In which case, what the hell is going on, on Sakhalin?”
“There’s one strange thing I’ve discovered about their research station at Ozerskiy,” began Tom Winterburn.
“At Nagahama,” murmured Enozawa.
“Excuse me?”
“Nagahama is the correct Japanese name. Please remember, the whole Southern half of Sakhalin was simply confiscated from Japan in 1945—”
“Ozerskiy is what it says on the maps.”
“Whose maps? Not Japanese maps, Captain Winterburn.”
“Well, let’s not create unnecessary confusions!” The naval attaché consulted the file before him, embarrassedly. “It seems the research centre there has access to an American-made IBM 370-185 computer. I don’t know if you appreciate the significance of this—”
“A pretty advanced machine for fisheries research,” hazarded Mercer, the knot of his blue tie even tighter today—Enozawa watched this at least with tacit approval; but whether because it might garotte Mercer, or because it indicated a sharpening up of American sloppiness, was dubious…
“Who’s using what sort of hardware is a fair indicator of what’s going on in the world. The Israelis have an Elliot 503 and an IBM 360-80 they use for hagiography—they worked out that three separate prophets wrote the Book of Isaiah—and an IBM 370-154 to handle air defence. The Burmese have one clapped-out ICL 1902 doing census work. The Japanese—” he nodded deferentially at Enozawa—“well, let’s just say your homegrown computers and peripherals are competing very successfully on the US home market. Now, our own old front runner, IBM’s 370-165 series, can perform three million operations per second. But the best Soviet product, the BESM, can only handle five hundred thousand—one sixth of that number. Admittedly export licences are available for the Soviets to buy IBM 370-165 s from us since the Kissinger commitments—so long as they only want them to organize soap factories and that kind of consumer job. But the real big baby—the 370-185—isn’t to be had for love or money. Yet, they seem to have got hold of one by the back door method. Through some dummy organization in Vienna. The 370-185 can carry out six million operations a second. But the Soviet 370-185 hasn’t gone to the military—or the space programme. It seems to have ended up in that little village of Ozerskiy on Sakhalin—”
“Nagahama,” muttered Enozawa.
“Nagahama,” nodded Winterburn, with a curt inclination of the head which might have been charitably taken for an abbreviated bow. “Information’s scanty. Still, if the 370-185 job is there, and if this Nilin came from there and he’s got anything whatever to do with it, he’s not going straight back, dammit. Apologies to all your crab fishermen, but—”
“Gently,” advised Parr, realizing how flat his own attempt at humour had fallen with Enozawa.
Winterburn bit his lip softly; pursed his cheeks.
“Your fishermen aren’t being left out of this, Captain Enozawa. Obviously this concerns the whole Pacific basin. Resources, military—I can’t say for certain.” And the Japanese returned a smile faint and evasive as that on the face of a Noh mask.
“Getting back to whales,” Pasko reminded, “put a sperm whale and an IBM 370-185 computer together, what do you get?”
“An electronic whale?” suggested Parr facetiously.
“A programmed whale,” corrected Pasko. “But programmed with what? Nilin said he was a failure. The first print was a human baby—namely himself. The second print was—the whale. I’m just quoting him. I’ve been wondering increasingly if those junk items he puts together out of bits and scraps really do represent a standard autistic ‘mechanical boy’ reaction. Maybe they’re models of something he’s seen, on Sakhalin. He hasn’t the ability to describe verbally, or even draw a picture, but he can show us something obliquely—”
“We’re all edging round the subject,” Winterburn said impatiently. “I only see two possible interpretations, in view of the 370-185. Either the Soviets have developed a technique for programming sperm whales to do what they want. Or—in view of Nilin—some technique for printing the consciousness of one human being on to another brain! Human adult to human infant, initially. That explains Nilin. But now they’ve gone on to human adult on to whale!”
“A response to your deep submergence submarine for the ULMS missiles?” suggested Enozawa quietly.
“This certainly puts their crusading at the Whaling Commission in the proper perspective! The Soviets jumped on that ecological bandwagon awful fast. They haven’t cared before—apart from a bit of piety about Comrade Dolphin. The reason they gave for not needing to catch sperm whales any more was that now they’ve found an alternative source for sperm whale oil. Thousands of acres in Samarkand have been turned over to jojoba cultivation in the past couple of years. Jojoba’s a Mexican weed—the oil from its seeds is a perfect substitute for sperm whale oil. The Soviets have gone into full production. They imported tons of jojoba seeds from Mexico and now they’re growing masses of it in Central Asia.”
“How fortunate for them,” commented Enozawa acidly. “How unfortunate for us Japanese that we can find no such substitute for the whale as a vital foodstuff—when Russians and Americans band together to ban our fishing.”
“This puts their decision in a new light, Captain Enozawa. We were fooled. They’ve found a much better use for the sperm whale—that involves not killing any of them, indeed making it illegal under international law. They plan to programme the whales to control the sea bed!”
“So that’s that,” sighed Parr. “We have no choice but to kick this thing upstairs, fast.” He inspected Enozawa dubiously. “Can you possible stall the Soviet Embassy about Nilin—in view of all this?”
“Not my decision, Mr Parr! That is not how we Japanese—”<
br />
“Yeah, I understand that—a consensus of decisions…”
Parr raised a hand to rub his neck. It had been developing a fierce itch lately whenever he sat by the window. He blamed it on the Nikon. The dummy camera was still pointing remorselessly at him over the rooftops.
Nine
He swims northward towards a Star of Thought being convened for him.
The Great Singing Ones passed news of it through the ocean waveguides, from a score of swimdays off, to the old bull who now watches him constantly while he forges north with his females about him… The old bull passed the summons to him.
• • •
And the old bull tells him:
When Seven gather nose to nose and brow to brow in slack water, waving their flukes to stay in place, their seven melons of liquid wax cut off from the sea-world and look inward, not outward; become a closed system for their clicking thoughts. The pure ideas burst-pulsing in each other’s melons echo, reecho, combine, and interfere… weave patterns larger than the pattern of an idea carved in oil-wax in any single brow. So the Glyphs of Awareness are born—which only a new Star-Gathering can fully open up again, which nonetheless linger on in the individual’s memory in the meanwhile as foci.
For tens of thousands of sea-years Glyphs have been elaborating—passed on from Star to Star, down the swimming generations.
Our oil melon was much smaller once.
Did you guess that?
Now hugely enlarged, it lets us dive deep and hunt the Ten-Arms. It is both sound-screen and pressure-tank. But that is by the way!
In reality, we dived deeper and deeper, for generations, to force our melons to grow large—and not the other way about!
For an aeon Our Kind has been designing itself… so that we can come face to face with ourselves, carve out the Glyphs of Knowledge in oil-wax and click-songs…
Those Great Singing Ones? Who pass our click-songs on, a hundred or a thousand swimdays?
