The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  Chloe sought sanctuary, not among the dolphin pools this time—for they were tainted—but finally in the main telemetry room. Here, signals from the sonobuoys and sea-bed “ears” scattered over thousands of square miles of Pacific Ocean were being scanned and sorted.

  “Hi, Miss Patton, we’re just waiting for the word to be passed to your Jonah buddy.” The technician waved at the wall clock, which indicated 15.35. “Soon as they get the Star pattern confirmed, the Soviets’ll feed the data in. See, here’s the Russian trawler—the Marshall Zhukov.”

  The singing of the trawler’s propellers appeared as sharp vertical pips on his cathode-ray screen.

  Sixty similar oscilloscopes in the room were devoted to the scrutiny of leaping, slowly fading phosphorescent fleas. The great master oscilloscope, to the right of the clock, was inactive at present. Red lights blinking on a giant glass display map of the Cal-Mex offshore waters responded to whichever buoys or ears the various screens were reading, indicating by their clustering what a mass of hydrophonic gear must have been airdropped into the whale rendezvous zone in the last day. The techs manning the consoles switched frequently from one channel to another, hunting around the area. Characteristic signatures of pilot whales, bottlenose dolphins, and a humpback, scribbled themselves briefly on the green screens, were chopped off, to spring up again as one red light on the map died and another blinked alive. No sperm whales, yet.

  A tech periodically switched in the sound channel to confirm a particular signal. Chloe heard the characteristic loud smacking of a pilot whale overlaying the footsteps-on-broken-glass noise of the snapping shrimps; then the high wail of the humpback, with the sound of its own bottom-echo mixed in with the song; then the whistling and click-chattering of the dolphins.

  It was up to Russians on far-away Sakhalin to encode and decode the signals; but they could keep watch and ward here in San Diego.

  “We’re all rooting for Jonah, Miss,” whispered a tech as she trotted from screen to screen, peering in at the leaping squiggles of light.

  The Commander stood below the wall-map, hands clasped behind his back in a disapproving attitude. So Soviets had an agent dressed up in whale flesh, programmed with an ambiguous mission, only a metaphorical stone’s throw away from this very spot; and his staff hadn’t yet succeeded in pinpointing it, though the Russians had even told them where it should be. He found this personally humiliating, and intended to order an investigation and procedural overhaul.

  One of the techs finally turned his audio up confidently, and the room echoed with some unusually sparse clicks from two sperm whales. Judging by the wall-map, the sonobuoy floated only a few miles south-west of the Marshall Zhukov.

  “What the hell are they playing at, sneaking up so quiet?” the Commander growled.

  “Maybe saving their voices for later on, sir?”

  “Don’t be facetious, Donaldson. Whales need their sonar, to watch where they’re going. You’d better watch out too! This has hardly been an adequate surveillance operation. We shall have to smarten up.”

  Resentment replaced the humour in Donaldson’s tone.

  “At least we’ve a better notion what whales are up to, than what many of our own people are doing ashore…”

  A quartet of sperm whales was detected, off to the northwest of the trawler; finally, a singleton heading in from the west.

  “My screen’s gone deaf, sir—”

  “Mine too, signal just died—”

  The oscillating light tracks had flattened into horizontal wires. A few kinks and quavers still pocked them, though. Fish must be croaking and honking in their usual way. Before Chloe could point this out tactfully, the Commander arrived abrasively at the same conclusion.

  “The whales and dolphins have all plain shut up, you idiots!” he barked. “Damned evasive beasts!”

  All cetaceans had fallen silent, from the great baleen whale, down to the dolphins.

  The Star came together fifteen minutes later, three miles from the Marshall Zhukov, a quarter-mile from the closest sonobuoy monitor.

  The trawler had switched off its engines and was drifting now. It was 16.05 along the Western seaboard of the United States.

  Abruptly, amplified click trains and burst-pulses twanged and rattled round the room. Copied on to the master oscilloscope grid, now activated, the signals from the sonobuoy drew themselves in great jagged loops. Seven voices pulsed in parallel, then the composite click-song firmed and speeded up, the loops becoming a broad, glaring, pulsing band; while the audio broadcast a lacerating, grating groan, that swallowed up all sounds of individual clicks. Some vast slug weighing tons was dragging its way across a stone desert, agonizing with the effort. Such a noise as a glacier might make as it grated its way downhill, accelerated from geological to clock time! This muffled smashing boomed in their ears. Whatever organization it had eluded them: it even jammed the visual display, with a broad band of green light.

  The tech wearing headphones to eavesdrop on the trawler’s VHF band raised his hand.

  “Russians are sending to Jonah now, sir.”

  No way of telling what difference fresh input made, with the output drowned in that vast gonging, blinding blur…

  So this, thought Chloe, is the wisdom of the whales. They’ve been expounding their own abstract philosophies for how many thousand years: examining the harmonics and dissonances of Existence. When we spy on it, even with our finest equipment, it’s as solid as the voice of the glacier, or the waterfall. Yet every grain of ice, every atom of water, has special significance for them…

  The Russians are listening from their trawler in a smooth sea, their hydrophones unperturbed by the noises of their own vessel, the ropes grating, hull creaking, jangling cutlery in the galley. Probably they have sonobuoys out in the sea too. They’re faced by the same blank wall of noise. Their own symbolic code, however dense and elaborate to them, is plaintive plainsong from a different era of the world, as they wait for their loyal Jonah to beam the answer to the Hammond Theorem back to them in a mode that Man could understand.

  The whole noise output was being taped. It could all be slowed down, computer programmes could presumably be written to dissect it. All they could hope for right now was some simple general answer to the question Man had posed.

  Meanwhile, this great groaning door hinge ground on and on in their ears, without any sign of the door opening…

  The Star hung together twelve minutes, till 16.17 Pacific Standard Time.

  Total silence, then.

  The green band shrank abruptly to a single tight bright line neatly bisecting the screen. And this line bored on and on, seemingly frozen, as though time had halted for whales and men alike.

  Silence on the smaller screens, too—all those that were reading buoys in a radius of a dozen miles around the Star. Some tiny kinks of fish noise appeared on the left and scurried to the right, and that was all.

  Then the master screen came to life again. It wrote out a clear looping pulse. A fast series of clicks rattled in the room. The same shape and sound repeated themselves over and over.

  On the cathode tube the clicks resembled a written word, made up entirely of elongated, dipping and soaring ‘m’s and ‘w’s and ‘v’s, traced by a marvellously fluid, rapid hand.

  “Is that the answer? What’s it say?” someone asked, taken in by the illusion that there was an actual word there, capable of being spoken. A single simple solo word… mwvwm…

  But they’d all been taken by the same illusion; all been racking their brains to read it. Wishing and willing to make it into a word! mmvvmmw… vvwmvmm…

  Sporadic laughter greeted the remark—of a nervous, defensive character.

  “The answer’s got to be a radio message,” the tech monitoring the trawler’s VHF snapped, shamefacedly. He too had been staring at those loops on the screen, moving his lips, mouthing possible candidate words. “There’s no radio message.”

  “Sir,” interrupted Donaldson, “I know th
at profile. I’m sure that’s why it looks familiar. We’ve seen it before.”

  Other screens came alive with dancing signals as he spoke, as the noise of this click train radiated through the waters.

  While Donaldson was hunting through a pile of oscilloscope photos, Chloe hurried to the screen she’d last noticed listening in on dolphins. It had lit up with renewed signalling too, when the soundwaves reached it. She stared, horrified. Then fumbled for the audio control, past the operator.

  A simple two-part whistle pierced their ears.

  The frequency rose up high, then fell off rapidly, to be followed in turn by an ultrasonic squiggle so high that the oscilloscope could only trace it by damping and flattening the signal. The green blip scraped a curve sheer along the grid roof: an exponential function swivelled on its side. High-pass filters cut off the upper ends of this shriek, on audio; nevertheless the speaker spilled sounds into the telemetry room that set metal surfaces resonating, heads aching, stomachs curdling.

  The two-part whistle, again.

  The high scrape—

  Quickly the tech shut off the audio with a twist of his hand.

  “It’s the dolphin alarm call,” Chloe cried. “The SOS! Panic Stations—! You only hear it when a dolphin’s in mortal danger—”

  “It sure sounds like it!” the tech agreed, rubbing his ears. “Maybe we ought to play it all over town, scare sense into people.”

  “No, the alarm’s not meant to scare, it’s to bring help. But that’s only the whistle on its own. Not that banshee wail at the end—that’s never been any part of it.”

  “Traced it, sir,” called Donaldson, flourishing a photo. “Quote. Physeter alarm call. But there’s something else on the big screen. Miss Patton’s right, those last loops aren’t here. That’s alarm plus—”

  “It’s trans-species, the alarm call,” Chloe added swiftly. “Toothed whales of different species rally to help each other. We knew that even before the Russians told us how the sperm whales can get baleen whales to sing for them. We just didn’t realize the extent… Dolphins are passing on the call the sperm whales put out. But it isn’t an alarm, only. It’s the alarm modified by something else—an extra inflection. It might change the meaning entirely. Did somebody have a humpback on their screen?”

  “Cruising about twelve miles west of the trawler, Miss. Right now he’s quiet.”

  “He’s waiting to pass on the news, the decision, whatever. Watch him. Baleens are stupid as cows, but their songs carry thousands of miles. Their voices are the messenger pigeons of the sperm whale, even if they understand about as much of the message as a pigeon!”

  Shortly, the hundred-foot humpback began to sing. They heard a long, wailing eerie music. A message was even now heading out at five thousand feet a second across the Pacific, up towards the Arctic, down south towards Antarctica.

  • • •

  An hour later, the first of the toothed whales came ashore, north of San Diego…

  Twenty-Seven

  They came ashore at Kujirajima, a school of porpoises, a bottlenose whale, even a narwhal with the long twisted unicorn horn…

  Exhausted from hours of swimming towards land, they launched themselves on to the lava flow, continuing a parody of swimming as the sea receded, thrusting themselves a few more metres across the black naked honeycomb razors of stone, flensing their skins and blubber, opening rivulets of blood along their undersides.

  Waves returned, lapped around them, but couldn’t pull them back into the sea. Only their blood flowed back, while their frames settled on the lava, weight of their unbuoyed mass pressing down on their lungs.

  It was a heavy gravity planet for them, with a surface of serrated iron—and they blinked and sighed at the spectators who inhabited it, who were clutching cameras and baseball gloves and painting easels protectively, as though these toys might be confiscated by the strange beasts, in the way that much else had recently been confiscated by circumstances.

  Curiously mute, for spectators of such a strange occurrence…

  It had dawned on the people, that something more was being taken off them, which they could do nothing to forestall; namely, these dying porpoises, this bottlenose whale, this narwhal with his miraculous horn…

  So they put down their cameras which really had very little film in them) and their painting sets (with only a few squashed tubes left in them), and tried to lift the bleeding narwhal back into the sea, it being the rarest and strangest of the castaways.

  The narwhal stretched the length of three men laid head to toe. Its horn was another man’s length. Thousands of kilos it weighed. They only succeeded in sawing its wounds on the lava edges, provoking a low moan from the beast, and freeing fresh streams of blood to mingle with the oily, flotsam-spattered spume. One man stroked its jutting corkscrew, thinking fitfully of the virility charms sold in Chinese chemists’ shops along with pickled snakes and salamanders and ginseng roots; then his hand fell away. They retreated sadly from the beast.

  They daren’t even contemplate the bottlenose whale, with its giant-domed forehead that might have held two brains in it, and that expression of fixed imbecile amiability about the lines of its mouth—no matter what pain it was suffering. Huger than three elephants! With what mania it had levered itself on to land! With what swollen, amiable agony it now lay there, perched absurdly on the rocks.

  A man who had raced to the restaurant to telephone some newspaper returned crestfallen; news was already flooding in from a hundred other sources, of similar events.

  The restaurant proprietor accompanied him to marvel at such a tonnage of raw whalemeat. Then his heart too sank, for it seemed that this must be the very last banquet of all, laid out before him here on the lava. It spelt bankruptcy, not riches. From the people’s faces he knew that no one would compliment him on any meal made of this, however perfectly prepared, as freshest sashimi. Why, they weren’t even trying to haul the beasts up from the dirty grease of the tideline. They were actually trying to lift the meat back into the water—having switched their attempt by now from the impossible whales to the merely-mansize porpoises. They were almost succeeding in manhandling a slippery bleeding torpedo-tube of a body—till Captain Enozawa ran down the path from the Institute.

  He’d returned for the ceremonial cups of sake following the funeral of Dr Kato.

  Crisp in his dress uniform, he stopped them.

  “I’d set that iruka down. It’s really no use, what you’re doing. I’m sorry… they’ve tried lifting them back into the water elsewhere, already. They swim ashore again. Besides, those are injured. Damaged. Don’t you see, they’ve committed an honourable seppuku, so leave them to bleed. They have no knives to stab themselves, only the rocks of our shore.”

  So they set the porpoise gently down, having only succeeded in staining their holiday clothes with grease and blood; and Enozawa stood there contemplating this sea unicorn, and the massive bottlenosed elephant of the ocean next to it; with the rose blood washing from their wounds.

  Had Kato foreseen something of this, when he wrecked the preserving tanks, and carved his own body with those wedges of glass? An intuition?

  “What makes you call it a seppuku, sir?” one fellow asked—a small town shopkeeper. Cheap, awkwardly cut suit; shirt open down to the third button showing off a smooth ivory chest.

  Now, the way Mishima had done it… He’d had his loyal assistant to deliver the quick coup-de-grace, and stem the pain. Admittedly there’d been political considerations involved. If Mishima had been rushed to hospital and his wounds sewn up, he would have been discredited. Still, he was saved from the full path of pain. These whales and porpoises had no loyal kaishaku man waiting with a sword poised. They simply waited, sighing and looking landward and dying.

  “Because it has to be, fellow! When a situation is intolerable! We of all people should understand…”

  “Don’t whales sometimes run ashore in a panic, sir, by accident?” the shopkeeper asked tentativel
y.

  “Fool! Would you accept the invasion by alien beings of your soul? Beings who were poisoning your world?”

  “Invasion, eh? How do you mean, sir?”

  “Men have found ways into the minds of the whales.”

  How could it stay a secret for long, with all these bodies littering the beaches of the world? Oh, scientists might pretend that some heavy-metal pollutant in their nervous systems was responsible—mercury or cadmium had driven them mad! But it would be a pointless lie.

  “Well, sir, didn’t we Japanese feel much the same when America invaded us?” the shopkeeper observed lamely. “Our soul was breached. And our land has been poisoned since. And we imitate them—” Suddenly the man flushed with rage. He gestured helplessly at the baseball mitt he himself was wearing, some parasitic growth that had infested him—though he’d been pitching to his son across the lava happily enough half an hour ago. Now oil and porpoise blood smeared his glove.

  “Poisoned!” he hissed. “Ah, you’re right, sir! I believe you when you say it is possible to invade the whales, as America invaded us. If we were to go into the sea, and into the whales themselves—these may have acted correctly. Thank you for explaining, sir.”

  Flecks of blood flicked off the mitt on to the officer’s uniform, as the man tried to rid himself of it.

  The porpoise was wearing a glazed look in its eyes by now. A pained exhaustion, that appeared more fine and delicate to Enozawa than any porcelain he had ever admired. Brittle beauty of the pure and agonizing deed. Men must think about all this and reassess their values.

  Enozawa bowed summarily, muttering a leavetaking apology which the shopkeeper returned with a hoarse emphatic bark.—