Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, page 9
"Those guys are friends of mine," Hyland said.
"I've been monitoring the situation, Dr. Hyland. Our presence has not been requested, and, frankly, there is nothing this vessel could do to help. It sounds like they've lost some divers. It happens."
"This isn't war, Tarwater. We don't just lose people."
"Stay on mission. Any setback in Quinn's operation can only benefit this project."
"You asshole," Hyland said.
Back in the channel, the Count stood in the bow of the big Zodiac and watched as the Conservation and Resources Enforcement boat towed away the Constantly Baffled. He turned to his three researchers, who were trying to look busy in back of the boat. "Let that be a lesson to you all. The key to good science is making sure all the paperwork is in order. Now you can see why I'm such a stickler for you people having your IDs with you every morning."
"Yeah, in case some other researcher rats us out to the Conservation and Resources cops," one woman said.
"Science is a competitive sport, Ms. Wextler. If you're not willing to compete, you're welcome to take your undergrad degree and go baby-sit seasick tourists on a whale-watching boat. Nathan Quinn has attacked the credibility of this organization in the past. It's only fair play that I point out when he is not working within the rules of the sanctuary."
The ocean breeze carried the junior researchers' under-the-breath whispers of «asshole» away from the ears of Gilbert Box, over the channel to wash against the cliffs of Molokai.
* * *
Nate wrapped his arms around Clair and held her as she sobbed. As the downtime passed the first half hour, Nate felt a ball of fear, dread, and nausea forming in his own stomach. Only by trying to stay busy looking for signs of Clay and Amy was he able to keep from being ill. When Amy's downtime passed forty-five minutes, Clair started to sob. Clay might have been able to stay down that long with the re-breather, but with only the tiny rescue tank, there was no way Amy could still be breathing. Two divemasters from a nearby tour boat had already used up a full tank each searching. The problem was, in blue water it was a three-dimensional search. Rescue searches were usually done on the bottom, but not when it was six hundred feet down. With the currents in the channel… well, the search was little more than a gesture anyway.
Being a scientist, Nate liked true things, so after an hour he stopped telling Clair that everything was going to be all right. He didn't believe it, and grief was already descending on him like a flight of black arrows. In the past, when he had experienced loss or trauma or heartbreak, some survival mechanism had kicked in and allowed him to function for months before he'd actually begin feeling the pain, but this time it was immediate and deep and devastating. His best friend was dead. The woman that he — Well, he wasn't exactly sure what he'd felt about Amy, but even when he looked past the sexuality, the differences in their ages and positions, he liked her. He liked her a lot, and he'd become used to her presence after only a few weeks.
One of the divers came up near the boat and spit out his regulator. "There's nowhere to look. It's just blue to fucking infinity."
"Yeah," Nate said. "I know."
* * *
Clay saw blue-green breasts gently bobbing before his face and was convinced that he had, indeed, drowned. He felt himself being pulled upward and so closed his eyes and surrendered.
"No, no, no, son," said Papa. "You're not in heaven. The tits are not blue in heaven. You are still alive."
Papa's face was very much smashed against the glass of his helmet, wearing the sort of expression he might have had if he'd run full speed into a bulletproof window and someone had snapped a picture at maximum mash, yet Clay could see that his eyes were smiling.
"My little Cleandros, you know it is not time for you to join me?"
Clay nodded.
"And when it comes time for you to join me, it should be because you are old and tired and ready to go, not because the sea is wanting to crush you."
Clay nodded again, then opened his eyes. This time there was a stabbing pain in his head, but he squinted through it to see Amy's face through her dive mask. She held his regulator in his mouth and was gripping the back of his head to make him look at her. When she was sure that he was conscious and knew where he was, she gave him the okay signal and waited until he returned it. Amy then let go of Clay's regulator, and they swam slowly upward, to surface four hundred yards from where they'd first submerged.
Clay immediately looked around for the boat and found nothing where he expected it, the closest vessels being a group of boats too far away to be the Always Confused. He checked his dive computer. He'd been down for an hour and fifteen minutes. That couldn't be right.
"That's them," Amy said. She looked down into the water. "Oops. Let me get my top off of your face."
"Okay," Clay mumbled into the rebreather.
* * *
Kona was in tears, wailing like Bob Marley in a bear trap — inconsolable. "Clay gone. The Snowy Biscuit gone. And I was going to poke squid with her, too."
"You were not," said Nate.
But the artificial Hawaiian didn't hear. "There!" Kona shouted as he leaped onto the shoulders of the stocky whale cop to get a better view. "It's the white wahine! Praise to Jah! Thanks be to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Go there, Sheriff. A saving be needed."
"Handcuff this kid," said the cop.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Here's My Coupon, He Said,
Singing the Redemption Song
Normally, if the whale cops found an unauthorized person on a research vessel, they would simply record the violation, write a ticket, then remove the person from the boat and take him back to Lahaina Harbor. A fine was paid and violations were considered the following year when the permit came up for renewal. By contrast, Kona was delivered to the Maui county jail with both his wrists and ankles shackled and a swath of duct tape over his mouth.
Nate and Amy were waiting in the lobby of the Maui county jail in Wailuku, sitting in metal chairs designed to promote discomfort and waffled butt skin. "It's really okay if he has to stay in overnight," said Nate. "Or for a week or so if it would be easier."
Amy punched Nate in the shoulder. "You creep! I thought it was Kona that got them to let you come to us."
"Still, jail builds character. I've heard that. It might do him good to be off his herb for a few days." Kona had slipped his fanny pack full of pot and paraphernalia to Nate before he'd been taken away.
"Character? If he starts with his native-sovereignty speech stuff in there the real Hawaiians will pound him."
"He'll be okay. I'm worried about you. Don't you want to go get checked?" Clair had taken Clay to the hospital to get a CAT scan and have his scalp stitched up.
"I'm fine, Nate. I was only shaken up because I was worried about Clay."
"You were down a long time."
"Yes, and I went by Clay's dive computer. We decompressed completely. The worst part was I froze my ass off."
"I can't believe you had the presence of mind to decompress with Clay unconscious. I don't know if I would have. Hell, I couldn't have. I'd have run out of air in ten minutes. How did you manage —»
"I'm small, Nate. I don't use air like you. And I could tell that Clay was breathing okay. I could tell that the cut on his head wasn't that bad either. The biggest danger to both of us was decompression sickness, so I followed the computer, breathed off of Clay's rescue supply when I ran out, and nobody got hurt."
"I'm really impressed," said Nate.
"I just did what I was supposed to do. No big deal."
"I was really scared — I thought you — You had me worried." He patted her knee in a grandmotherly fashion, and she looked at his hand.
"Careful, I'll get all sniffly over here," Amy said.
* * *
They led the surfer into the holding tank, where everyone was wearing the same orange jumpsuit that he was. "Irie, bruddahs," Kona said, "we all shoutin' down Sheriff John Brown in these Great Pumpkin suits, Jah." They all looked up: a giant Samoan who had beaten an Oldsmobile to death with a softball bat when it stalled in the middle of the Kuihelani Freeway, an alcoholic white guy who had fallen asleep on the Four Seasons' private beach in Wailea and made the mistake of dropping his morning business in one of the cabanas, a bass player from Lahaina who had been brought in because at any given time a bass player is probably up to no good, an angry bruddah who had been caught doing a smash-and-grab from a rental car at La Perouse Bay, and two up-country pig hunters who had tried to back their four-wheeler full of pit bulls down a volcano after huffing two cans of spray paint. Kona could tell they were huffers by the glazed look in their eyes and the large red rings that covered their mouths and noses from the bag. "Hey, brah, Krylon?"
One of the pig hunters nodded and briefly lost control of the motion of his head.
"Nothin' like a quality red."
"I hear dat," said the pig hunter. "I hear dat."
Then Kona made his way to the corner of the cell, the guard locked the door, and everyone resumed looking at his shoes, except for the Samoan guy, who was waiting for Kona to make eye contact so he could kill him.
"Ye know, brah," Kona said to him in a friendly, if seriously flawed fake Jamaican accent, "I be learning from my science dreadies to look at tings with the critical eye, don't ya know. And I think I know what the problem with taking a stand against da man on Maui."
"Whad dat?" ask the Samoan.
"Well, it's an island, ain't it, mon? You got to be stone stupid going outlaw here wid nowhere to escape."
"You callin' me stupid, haole?"
"No, mon, just speaking the truth."
"An' what you in for, haole girl?"
"Failing to give a humpback whale the proper scientific handjob, I tink."
"Goin' ta fuck ya and kill ya now."
"Could ya kill me first?"
"Whadeva," said the Samoan, climbing to his feet and expanding to his full Godzilla proportions.
"Thanks, brah. Peace in Jah's mercy," said the doomed surfer.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, after Nate had filled out the requisite papers, the jailer, a compact Hawaiian with weightlifter shoulders, led Kona through the double steel doors into the waiting room. The surfer shuffled in, head down, looking ashamed and a little lopsided. Amy put her arm around his shoulders and patted his head.
"Oh, Sistah Amy, 'twas heinous." He put his arm around Amy, then let his hand slip to the curve of her bottom. "Heinous most true."
The jailer grinned. "Had a disagreement with a big Samoan guy. We stopped it before it got too far. The holding cells are monitored on closed-circuit video."
"Snatched half me dreads out." Kona pulled a handful of orphaned dreadlocks from the pocket of his surf shorts. "Going to cost some deep monies to hook these boys back up. I can feel my strength waning without them."
The jailer waived a finger under Kona's nose. "Just so you know, kid, if it had gone the other way — if the Samoan had decided to kill you second — I wouldn't have stepped in so early. You understand?"
"Yah, Sheriff."
"You stay out of my jail, or next time I tell him which end to start on, okay?" The jailer turned to Quinn. "They aren't filing any charges that merit incarceration. They just wanted to make a point." Then he leaned close to Nate and whispered, their height difference making it appear as if he were talking to the scientist's shirt pocket, "You need to get this kid some help. He thinks he's Hawaiian. I see these suburban Rasta boys all the time — hell, Paia's crawling with them — but this one, he's troubled. One of my boys goes that way, I'd pay for a shrink."
"He's not my kid."
"I know how you feel. His girlfriend is cute, though. Makes you wonder how they pick 'em, doesn't it?"
"Thanks, Officer," Nate said. Having shared all the paternal camaraderie he could handle, he turned and walked out into the blinding Maui sun. To Kona, Amy said, "You better now, baby?"
Kona nodded into her shoulder, where he'd been pretending to seek comfort in a nuzzle.
"Good. Then move your hand."
The surfer played his fingers over her bottom like anemones in a tidal wash, anchored yet flowing.
"That's it," Amy said. She snatched a handful of his remaining dreads and quickstepped through the double glass doors, dragging the bent-over surfer behind her.
"Ouch, ouch, ouch," Kona chanted in perfect four/four reggae rhythm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spirits in the Night
Nate spent the whole afternoon and most of the evening trying to analyze spectrograms of whale-song recordings, correlate behavior patterns, and then chart the corresponding patterns of interaction. The problem was figuring out what actually defined interaction for an eighty-thousand-pound animal? Were animals interacting when they were five hundred yards away? A thousand? A mile, ten miles? The song was certainly audible for miles; the low, subsonic frequencies could travel literally thousands of miles in deep ocean basins.
Nate tried to put himself in their world — no boundaries, no obstacles. They lived, for the most part, in a world of sound, yet they had acute eyesight, both in and out of the water, and special muscles in the eye that allowed them to change focus for either medium. You interacted with animals you could both see and not see. When Nate and Clay used satellite tags, of which they could afford only a few, or rented a helicopter, from which they could observe animals from a wide perspective, it appeared that the whales were indeed responding to each other from miles apart. How do you study an animal that is socializing over a distance of miles? The key had to be in the song, in the signal somewhere. If for no other reason than that was the only way to approach the problem.
Midnight found him sitting alone in the office, lit only by the glow of his computer monitor, having forgotten to eat, drink, or relieve himself for four hours, when Kona came in.
"What's that?" asked the surfer, pointing to the spectrograph that was scrolling across the screen.
Nate nearly jumped out of the chair, then caught himself and pulled the headphones down. "The part that's scrolling is the spectrograph of the humpback song. The different colors are frequency, or pitch. The wiggly line in this box is an oscilloscope. It shows frequency, too, but I can use it to isolate each range by clicking on it."
Kona was eating a banana. He handed another one to Nate without taking his eyes off the screen. "So this is what it looks like? The song?" Kona had forgotten to affect any of his accents, so Nate forgot to be sarcastic in reply.
"It's a way of looking at it. Humans are visual animals. Our brains are better suited to process visual information rather than acoustic information, so it's easier for us to think about sound by looking at it. A whale or a dolphin's brain is structured to process acoustics more than visuals."
"What are you looking for?"
"I'm not sure. I'm looking for a signal. For some pattern of information in the structure of the song."
"Like a message?"
"Maybe a message."
"And it's not in the musical parts?" Kona asked. "The difference in notes? Like a song? You know the prophet Bob Marley gave us the wisdom of HIM in song."
Quinn swiveled in his chair and paused in midbite of his banana. "HIM? What's that?"
"His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ on earth, son of God. His blessings upon us. Jah, mon."
"You mean Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king who died in the 1970s? That Haile Selassie?"
"Yah mon. HIM, the direct descendant of David as foretold in Isaiah, through the divine consort Solomon and Makeda, the queen of Sheba, and from their sons all the emperors of Ethiopia have come. So we Rastas believe that Haile Selassie is Jesus Christ alive on earth."
"But he's dead, how's that work?"
"It helps to be stoned."
"I see," Nate said. Well, that did explain a lot. "Anyway, to answer your question, yes, we've looked at the musical transmission, but despite Bob Marley I think the answer is here, in this low register, but only because it travels the farthest."
"Can you freeze this?" said Kona, pointing to the oscilloscope, a green line dancing on a field of black.
Nate clicked it and froze a jagged line on the screen. "Why?"
"Those teeth? See, there are tall ones and not so tall ones."
"They're called microoscillations. You can only see them if you have the wave stopped like this."
"What if the tall one is a one and the short one is a zero? What's that?"
"Binary?"
"Yah, mon, what if it's computer talk, like that?"
Nate was stunned. Not because he thought Kona was right, but because the kid had actually had the cognitive powers to come up with the question. Nate wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd walked in on a team of squirrels building a toaster oven. Maybe the kid had run out of pot, and this spike in intelligence was just a withdrawal symptom.
"That's not a bad guess, Kona, but the only way the whales would know about this would be if they had oscilloscopes."
"And they don't?"
"No, they don't."
"Oh, and that acoustic brain? That couldn't see this?"
"No," said Nate, not entirely sure that he hadn't just lied. He'd never thought of it before.
"Okay. I go for to sleep now. You need more grinds?"
"No. Thanks for the banana."
"Jah's blessing, mon. Thanks for getting me out for jail this day. We going go out next morning?"
"Maybe not everyone. We'll have to see how Clay feels tomorrow. He went right to his cabin when Clair brought him home from the hospital."
"Oh, Boss Clay got cool runnings, brah. He having sweet agonies with Sistah Clair. I hear them love jams as I'm coming over."
"Well, good," Nate said, thinking from Kona's tone and his smile that whatever he said must have been good. "Good night, Kona."
"Good night, boss."
