Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 26

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Picking the Lock to

Davy Jones's Locker

" 'Bite me'?" Libby Quinn said, reading the tail.

The whale tail slowly twisted in space, pixel by pixel, as the computer extrapolated the new angle. Margaret Painborne sat at the computer. Clay and Libby stood behind her. Kona was working across the room on Quinn's reassembled machine.

" 'Bite me'?" Clay repeated. "That can't be right." He thought about what Nate had said about seeing a tail just like this and shivered.

Margaret hit a few keys on the keyboard, then swiveled in Clay's chair. "This some kind of joke, Clay?"

"Not mine. That was raw footage, Margaret." As attractive as Clay found Libby, he found Margaret equally scary. Maybe the latter because of the former. It was complex. "The tail image before you shifted it is exactly what I saw when I was down there."

"You've all been saying how sophisticated their communication ability was," said Kona, trying to sound scientific but essentially just pissing everyone off.

"How?" said Libby. "Even if you wanted to, how would you paint a whale's flukes like that?"

Margaret and Clay just shook their heads.

"Rust-Oleum," suggested Kona, and they all turned and glared at him. "Don't give me the stink-eye. You'd need the waterproof, huh?"

"Did you finish inputting those pages?" Clay said.

"Yah, mon."

"Well, save them and go rake something or mow something or something."

"Save as a binary," Margaret added quickly, but Kona had already saved the file, and the screen was clear.

Margaret wheeled her chair across the office, her gray hair trailing out behind her like the Flying Sorceress of Clerical Island. She pushed Kona aside. "Crap," she said.

"What?" asked Clay.

"What?" asked Libby.

"You said save it," Kona said.

"He saved it as an ASCII file, a text file, not a binary. Crap. I'll see if it's okay." She opened the file, and text appeared on the screen. Her hand went to her mouth, and she sat back slowly in Clay's chair. "Oh, my God."

"What?" came the chorus.

"Are you sure you put this in, just as it came off the graphs?" she asked Kona without looking at him.

"Truth," said Kona.

"What?" said Libby and Clay.

"This has got to be some sort of joke," said Margaret.

Clay and Libby ran across the room to look at the screen. "What!"

"It's English," Margaret said, pointing to the text. "How is that possible?"

"That's not possible," Libby said. "Kona, what did you do?"

"Not me, I just typed ones and ohs."

Margaret grabbed one of the legal pages with the ones and ohs and began typing the numbers into a new file. When she had three lines, she saved it, then reopened the file as text. It read, WILL SCUTTLE SECOND BOAT TO__

"It can't be."

"It is." Clay jumped into Margaret's lap and started scrolling through the text from Kona's transcription. "Look, it goes on for a while, then it's just gobbledygook, then it goes on some more."

Margaret looked back at Libby with Save me in her eyes. "There is no way that the song is carrying a message in English. Binary was a stretch, but I refuse to believe that humpbacks are using ASCII and English to communicate."

Libby looked over to Kona. "You guys took these off of Nate's tapes, exactly the way you showed me?"

Kona nodded.

"Kids, look at this," Clay said. "These are all progress reports. Longitude and latitude, times, dates. There are instructions here to sink my boat. These fuckers sank my boat?"

"What fuckers?" Margaret said. "A humpback with 'Bite me' on his flukes?" She was trying to look around Clay's broad back. "If this were possible, then the navy would have been using it a long time ago."

Now Clay jumped up to face Kona. "What tape is this last part from?"

"The last one Nate and Amy made, the day Nate drown. Why?"

Clay sat back on Margaret's lap, looking stunned. He pointed to a line of text on the screen. They all leaned in to read: QUINN ON BOARD__WILL RENDEZVOUS WITH BLUE-6__AGREED COORDINATES__1600 TUESDAY__NO PASTRAMI

"The sandwich," Clay said ominously.

Just then Clair, home from school, stepped into the office to discover an impromptu dog pile of action nerds in front of Quinn's computer. "All you bastards want to be part of a sandwich, and you don't even know what to do with one woman."

"Not the spoon!" squealed Kona, his hand going to the goose egg on his forehead.

Nathan Quinn awoke feeling as if he needed to crawl out of his skin. If he hadn't felt it before, he would have thought he had the generic heebie-jeebies (scientifically speaking), but he recognized the feeling as being hit with heavy subsonic sound waves. The blue-whale ship was calling. Just because it was below the frequency of his hearing didn't mean it wasn't loud. Blue-whale calls could travel ten thousand miles, he assumed that the ship was putting out similar sounds.

Nate slipped out of his bunk and nearly fell reaching for his shirt. Another thing he hadn't noticed immediately  -  the ship wasn't moving, and he still had his sea legs on.

He dressed quickly and headed down the corridor to the bridge. There was a large console that spanned the area between the two whaley-boy pilots that hadn't been there before. Unlike the rest of the ship, it appeared to be man-made, metal and plastic. Sonar scopes, computers, equipment that Quinn didn't even recognize. Nuñez and the blond woman, Jane, were standing at the sonar screens wearing headphones. Tim was seated beside one of the whaley boys at the center of the console in front of two monitors. Tim was wearing headphones and typing. The whaley boy appeared to be just watching.

Nuñez saw Nate come in, smiled, and motioned for him to come forward. These people were completely incompetent as captors, Nate thought. Not a measure of terror among them, the humans anyway. If not for the subsonic heebie-jeebies, he would have felt right at home.

"Where did this come from?"

The electronics looked incredibly crude next to the elegant organic design of the whale ship, the whaley boys, and, for that matter, the human crew. The idea of comparing designs between human-built devices and biological systems hadn't really occurred to Nate before because he'd been conditioned never to think of animals as designed. The whale ship was putting a deep dent in his Darwin.

"These are our toys," Nuñez said. "The console stays below the floor unless we need to see it. Totally unnecessary for the whaley boys, since they have direct interface with the ship, but it makes us feel like we know what's going on."

"And they can't type for shit," said Tim, tucking his thumbs under and making a slamming-the-keys gesture. "Tiny thumbs."

The whaley boy next to him trumpeted a raspberry all over Tim's monitor, leaving large dots of color magnified in the whaley spit. He chirped twice, and Tim nodded and typed into the computer.

"Can they read?" Nate asked.

"Read, kind of write, and most of them understand at least two human languages, although, as you probably noticed, they're not big talkers."

"No vocal cords," said Nuñez. "They have air chambers in their heads that produce the sounds they make, but they have a hard time forming the words."

"But they can talk. I've heard Em  -  I mean, them."

"Best that you just learn whaleyspeak. It's basically what they use to talk to each other, except they keep it in the range of our hearing. It's easier to learn if you've learned other tonal-sensitive languages like Navajo or Chinese."

"I'm afraid not," Nate said. "So the ship is calling?"

Tim pulled off his headphones and handed them to Nate. "The pitch is raised into our range. You'll be able to hear it through there."

Nate held a headphone to one ear. Now that he could hear the signal, he could also feel it start and stop more acutely in his chest. If anything, it relieved the discomfort, because he could hear it coming. "Is this a message?"

"Yep," said Jane, pulling up a headphone. "Just as you suspected. We type it in, the computer puts the message into peaks and troughs on the waveform, we play the waveform for the whaley boys, and they make the whale sing that waveform. We've calibrated it over the years."

Nate noticed that the whaley boy at the metal console had one hand in an organic socket fitted into the front of the console  -  like a flesh cable that ran to the whale ship through the console's base, similar to the ones on the flesh consoles the pilots used.

"Why the computers and stuff at all if the whaley boys do it all by... what? Instinct?"

The whaley boy at the console grinned up at Nate, squeaked, then performed the international signal for a hand job.

"It's the only way we can be in the loop," Jane said. "Believe me, for a long time we were just along for the ride. The whaley boys have the same navigational sense that the whales themselves do. We don't understand it at all. It's some sort of magnetic vocabulary. It wasn't until the Dirts  -  that's you  -  developed computers and we got some people who could run them that we became part of the process. Now we can surface and pull a GPS coordinate, transmit it, communicate with the other crews. We have some idea of what we're doing."

"You said for a long time? How long?"

Jane looked nervously at Nuñez, who looked nervously back. Nate thought for a moment that they might have to dash off to the bathroom together, which in his experience was what women did right before they made any major decisions, like about which shoes to buy or whether or not they were ever going to sleep with him again.

"A long time, Nate. We're not sure how long. Before computers, okay?"

By which she meant she wasn't going to tell him and if he pressed it, she'd just lie to him. Nate suddenly felt more like a prisoner, and, as a prisoner, he felt as though his first obligation was to escape. He was sure that was your first obligation as a prisoner. He'd seen it in a movie. Although his earlier plan of leaping out the back orifice into the deep ocean now seemed a tad hasty, with some perspective.

He said, "So how deep are we?"

"We usually send at about two thousand feet. That puts us pretty squarely in the SOFAR channel, no matter where we are geographically."

The SOFAR channel (sound fixing and ranging) was a natural combination of pressure and temperature at certain depths that cause a path of least resistance in which sound could travel many thousands of miles. The theory had been that blues and humpbacks used it to communicate with each other over long distances for navigational purposes. Evidently whaley boys and the people who worked their ships did, too.

"So does this signal replicate a natural blue-whale call?"

"Yes," said Tim. "That's one of the advantages of communicating in English within the waveform. When the whaley boys were doing the direct communication, there was a lot more variation in the call, but our signal is hidden, more or less. Except for a few busybodies who may run across it."

"Like me?"

"Yes, like you. We're a little worried about some of the acoustic people at Woods Hole and Hatfield Marine Center in Oregon. People who spend way too much time looking at spectrograms of underwater sound."

"You realize," said Nate, "that I might never have found out about your ships. I didn't make any sort of intuitive leap to look at a binary signal in the call. It was a stoned kid who came up with that."

"Yeah," said Jane. "If it makes you feel any better, you can blame him for your being here. We were on hold until you started to look in the signal for binary. That's when they called you in, so to speak."

Nate sincerely wished he could blame Kona, but since it appeared that he might never see civilization again, having someone to blame didn't seem particularly pertinent right now. Besides, the kid had been right. "How'd you know? I didn't exactly put out a press release."

"We have ways," said Nuñez, trying not to sound spooky but failing. This evidently amused the whaley boy at the console and the two pilots no end, and they nearly wheezed themselves out of their seats.

"Oh, fuck you guys," said Nuñez. "It's not like you guys are a bunch of geniuses."

"And you guys were the nightwalkers that Tako Man was talking about," Nate said to the pilots. "You guys sank Clay's boat."

The pilots raised their arms over their heads in a menacing scary-monster pose, then bared their teeth and made some fake growling noises, then collapsed into what Nate was starting to think of as whale giggles. The whaley boy at the console started clapping and laughing as well.

"Franklin! We're not done here. Can we get the interface back?"

Franklin, obviously the whaley boy who had been working the console, slumped and put his hand back in the socket. "Sorry," came a tiny voice from his blowhole.

"Bitch," came another tiny voice from one of the pilots, followed by whaley snickering.

"Let's send one more time. I want base to know we'll be there in the morning," Nuñez said.

"Morale's not a problem, then?" asked Nate, grinning at Nuñez's loss of temper.

"Oh, they're like fucking children," Nuñez said. "They're like dolphins: You dump them in the middle of the ocean with a red ball and they'll just play all day long, stopping only long enough to eat and screw. I'm telling you, it's like baby-sitting a bunch of horny toddlers."

Franklin squeaked and clicked a response, and this time Tim and Jane joined in the laughter with the whaley boys.

"What? What?" asked Nate.

"I do not just need to get laid!" shouted Nuñez. "Jane, you got this?"

"Sure," said the blonde.

"I'm going to quarters." She left the bridge to the snickering of the whaley boys.

Tim looked back at Nate and nodded toward the sonar screen and headset that Nuñez had vacated. "Want to stand in?"

"I'm a prisoner," said Nate.

"Yeah, but in a nice way," said Jane.

That was true. Everyone since he'd come on board had been very kind to him, seeing to his every need, even some he didn't want seen to. He didn't feel like a prisoner. Nate wasn't sure that he wasn't experiencing the Helsinki syndrome, where you sympathized with your captors  -  or was that the Stockholm syndrome? Yeah, the Helsinki syndrome had something to do with hair loss. It was definitely the Stockholm syndrome.

He stepped up to the sonar screen and put on the headset. Immediately he heard the distant song of a humpback. He looked at Tim, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, See.

"So tell me," Nate said, "what's the singing mean?" It was worth a shot.

"We were just going to ask you," said Jane.

"Swell," said Nate. Suddenly he didn't feel so well. After all this, even people who traveled inside whales didn't know what the song meant?

"Are you all right, Nate?" Jane asked. "You don't look so good."

"I think I have Stockholm syndrome."

"Don't be silly," said Tim. "You've got plenty of hair."

"You want some Pepto?" asked Jane, the ship's doctor.

Yes, he thought, escape would seem a priority. He was pretty sure that if he didn't get away, he was going to snap and kill some folks, or at least be incredibly stern with them.

Funny, he thought, how your priorities could change with circumstances. You go along for the greater part of your life thinking you want something  -  to understand the humpback song, for instance. So you pursue that with dogged single-mindedness at the expense of everything else in your life, only to be distracted into thinking maybe you want something in addition to that  -  Amy, for instance. And that becomes a diversion up until the time when circumstances make you realize what it is you really want, and that is  -  strangely enough  -  to get the fuck out of a whale. Funny, Nate thought.

"Settle down, Kona," Clair said, dropping her purse by the door, "I don't have a spoon."

Clay jumped off Margaret's lap. He and Kona watched as Clair crossed the room and exchanged hugs with Margaret and Libby, lingering a bit while hugging Libby and winking over her shoulder at Clay.

"So nice to see you guys," Clair said.

"I'm not going out to get the pizza, mon. No way," said Kona, still looking a bit terrified.

"What are you guys doing?" Clair asked.

And so Margaret took it upon herself to explain what they had discovered over the last few hours, with Kona filling in the pertinent and personal details. Meanwhile, Clay sat down in the kitchen and pondered the facts. Pondering, he felt, was called for.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feel pulled to. Margaret and Libby were scientists, used to jamming their facts into the appropriate slots as quickly as possible, and Kona... well, a thought rolling around in his mind was rather like a tennis ball in a coffee can  -  it was just a little too fuzzy to make any impact  -  and Clair was just catching up. No, the pondering fell to Clay, and he sipped a dark beer from a sweating bottle on a high stool in the kitchen and waited for the roulette ball to fall. Which it did, right about the time that Margaret Painborne was reaching a conclusion to her story.

"This obviously has something to do with defense," Margaret said. "No one else would have a reason  -  hell, they can't even have a good reason. But I say we write our senators tonight and confront Captain Tarwater in the morning. He's got to know something about it."

"And that's where you're completely wrong," Clay said. And they all turned. "I've been pondering this"  -  here he paused for impact  -  "and it occurs to me that two of our friends disappeared right about the time they found out about this stuff. And that everything from the break-in to the sinking of my boat"  -  and here he paused for a moment of silence  -  "has had something to do with someone not wanting us to know this stuff. So I think it would be reckless of us to run around trying to tell everybody what we know before we know what we know is."

"That can't be right," said Libby.

" 'Before we know what we know is'?" quoted Margaret. "No, that's not right."

"Is making perfect sense to me," said Kona.

"No, Clay," said Clair, "I'm fine with you and the girl-on-girl action, and I'm fine with a haole Rasta boy preaching sovereignty, but I'm telling you I won't stand for that kind of grammatical abuse. I am a schoolteacher, after all."

"We can't tell anyone!" Clay screamed.

"Better," said Clair.

"No need to shout," Libby said. "Margaret was just being a radical hippie reactionist feminist lesbian communist cetacean biologist, weren't you, dear?" Libby Quinn grinned at her partner.

"I'll have an acronym for that in a second," mumbled Clair, counting off words on her fingers. "Jeez, your business card must be the size of a throw rug."

Margaret glared at Libby, then turned to Clay. "You really think we could be in danger?"

"Seems that way. Look, I know we wouldn't know this without your help, but I just don't want anyone hurt. We may already be in trouble."

"We can keep it quiet if you feel that's the way to go," said Libby, making the decision for the pair, "but I think in the meantime we need to look at a lot more audio files  -  see how far back this goes. Figure out why sometimes it's just noise and sometimes it's a message."

Margaret was furiously braiding and unbraiding her hair and staring blankly into the air in front of her as she thought. "They must use the whale song as camouflage so enemy submarines don't detect the communication. We need more data. Recordings from other populations of humpbacks, out of American waters. Just to see how far they've gone with this thing."

"And we need to look at blue-, fin-, and sei-whale calls," said Libby. "If they're using subsonic, then it only makes sense that they'll imitate the big whales. I'll call Chris Wolf at Oregon State tomorrow. He monitors the navy's old sonar matrix that they set up to catch Russian submarines. He'll have recordings of everything we need."

"No," said Clay. "No one outside this room."

"Come on, Clay. You're being paranoid."

"Say that again, Libby. He monitors whose old sonar matrix? The military still keeps a hand in on that SOSUS array."

"So you think it is military?"

Clay shook his head. "I don't know. I'm damned if I can think of a reason the navy would paint 'Bite me' on the tail of a whale. I just know that people who find out about this stuff disappear, and someone sent a message saying that Nate was safe after we all thought he was dead."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Find him," Clay said.

"Well, that's going to totally screw up the funeral," said Clair.

PART THREE

The Source

We are built as gene machines and

cultured as meme machines, but we have

the power to turn against our creators.

We, alone on earth, can rebel against

the tyranny of selfish replicators.

-  RICHARD DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene

Ninety-five percent of all the species

that have ever existed are now extinct,

so don't look so goddamn smug.

-  GERARD RYDER

***