Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

CHAPTER ONE Big and Wet Next Question?

Amy called the whale punkin.

He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in the blue Hawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on the whale. "Good morning, punkin," she said.

Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck from the cuteness of it, of her, while surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy about it. Science can be complex. Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts, scientifically speaking.

Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to buzz. Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song they called the «green» themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying — Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their breakfasts around at seven in the morning: No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang.

"He's into his ribbits," Amy said, identifying a section of the whale's song that usually came right before the animal was about to surface. The scientific term for this noise was «ribbits» because that's what they sounded like. Science can be simple.

Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head down in the water about fifty feet below them. His flukes and pectoral fins were white and described a crystal-blue chevron in the deep blue water. So still was the great beast that he might have been floating in space, the last beacon of some long-dead space-traveling race — except that he was making croaky noises that would have sounded more appropriate coming out of a two-inch tree frog than the archaic remnant of a superrace. Nate smiled. He liked ribbits. The whale flicked his tail once and shot out of Nate's field of vision. "He's coming up," Nate said.

Amy tore off her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter lens. Nate quickly pulled up the hydrophone, allowing the wet cord to spool into a coil at his feet, then turned to the console and started the engine. Then they waited.

There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun around to see the column of water vapor hanging in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them — too far away to be their whale. That was the problem with the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked: There were so many whales that you often had a hard time distinguishing the one you were studying from the hundreds of others. The abundance of animals was a both a blessing and a curse. "That our guy?" Amy asked. All the singers were guys. As far as they knew anyway. The DNA tests had proven that.

"Nope."

There was another blow to their left, this one much closer. Nate could see the white flukes or blades of his tail under the water, even from a hundred meters away. Amy hit the stop button on her watch. Nate pushed the throttle forward and they were off. Amy braced a knee against the console to steady herself, keeping the camera pointed toward the whale as the boat bounced along. He would blow three, maybe four times, then fluke and dive. Amy had to be ready when the whale dove to get a clear shot of his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged. When they were within thirty yards of the whale, Nate backed the throttle down and held them in position. The whale blew again, and they were close enough to catch some of the mist. There was none of the dead fish and massive morning-mouth smell that they would have encountered in Alaska. Humpbacks didn't feed while they were in Hawaii.

The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon.

"Good boy," Amy said to the whale. She hit the lap timer button on her watch.

Nate cut the engine and the speedboat settled into the gentle swell. He threw the hydrophone overboard, then hit the record button on the recorder that was bungee-corded to the console. Amy set the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook out of a waterproof pouch.

"He's right on sixteen minutes," Amy said, checking the time and recording it in the notebook. She wrote the time and the frame numbers of the film she had just shot. Nate read her the footage number off the recorder, then the longitude and latitude from the portable GPS (global positioning system) device. She put down the notebook, and they listened. They weren't right on top of the whale as they had been before, but they could hear him singing through the recorder's speaker. Nate put on the headphones and sat back to listen.

That's how field research was. Moments of frantic activity followed by long periods of waiting. (Nate's first ex-wife had once commented that their sex life could be described in exactly the same way, but that was after they had separated, and she was just being snotty.) Actually, the wait here in Maui wasn't bad — ten, fifteen minutes at a throw. When he'd been studying right whales in the North Atlantic, Nate had sometimes waited weeks before he found a whale to study. Usually he liked to use the downtime (literally, the time the whale was down) to think about how he should've gotten a real job, one where you made real money and had weekends off, or at least gotten into a branch of the field where the results of his work were more palpable, like sinking whaling ships — a pirate. You know, security.

Today Nate was actively trying not to watch Amy put on sunscreen. Amy was a snowflake in the land of the tanned. Most whale researchers spent a great deal of time outdoors, at sea. They were, for the most part, an intrepid, outdoorsy bunch who wore wind- and sunburn like battle scars, and there were few who didn't sport a semipermanent sunglasses raccoon tan and sun-bleached hair or a scaly bald spot. Amy, on the other hand, had milk-white skin and straight, short black hair so dark that the highlights appeared blue in the Hawaiian sun. She was wearing maroon lipstick, which was so wildly inappropriate and out of character for this setting that it approached the comical and made her seem like the goth geek of the Pacific, which was, in fact, one of the reasons her presence so disturbed Nate. (He reasoned: A well-formed bottom hanging in space is just a well-formed bottom, but you hook up a well-formed bottom to a whip-smart woman and apply a dash of the awkward and what you've got yourself is… well, trouble.)

Nate did not watch her rub the SPF50 on her legs, over her ankles and feet. He did not watch her strip to her bikini top and apply the sunscreen over her chest and shoulders. (Tropical sun can fry you even through a shirt.) Nate especially did not notice when she grabbed his hand, squirted lotion into it, then turned, indicating that he should apply it to her back, which he did — not noticing anything about her in the process. Professional courtesy. He was working. He was a scientist. He was listening to the song of Megaptera novaeangliae ("big wings of New England," a scientist had named the whale, thus proving that scientists drink), and he was not intrigued by her intriguing bottom because he had encountered and analyzed similar data in the past. According to Nate's analysis, research assistants with intriguing bottoms turned into wives 66.666 percent of the time, and wives turned into ex-wives exactly 100 percent of the time — plus or minus 5 percent factored for post-divorce comfort sex.)

"Want me to do you?" Amy asked, holding out her preferred sunscreen-slathering hand.

You just don't go there, thought Nate, not even in a joke. One incorrect response to a line like that and you could lose your university position, if you had one, which Nate didn't, but still… You don't even think about it.

"No thanks, this shirt has UV protection woven in," he said, thinking about what it would be like to have Amy do him.

Amy looked suspiciously at his faded WE LIKE WHALES CONFERENCE 89 T-shirt and wiped the remaining sunscreen on her leg. " 'Kay," she said.

"You know, I sure wish I could figure out why these guys sing," Nate said, the hummingbird of his mind having tasted all the flowers in the garden to return to that one plastic daisy that would just not give up the nectar.

"No kidding?" Amy said, deadpan, smiling. "But if you figure it out, what would we do tomorrow?"

"Show off," Nate said, grinning.

"I'd be typing all day, analyzing research, matching photographs, filing song tapes —»

"Bringing us doughnuts," Nate added, trying to help.

Amy continued, counting down the list on her fingers, "- picking up blank tapes, washing down the trucks and the boats, running to the photo lab —»

"Not so fast," Nate interrupted.

"What, you're going to deprive me the joy of running to the photo lab while you bask in scientific glory?"

"No, you can still go to the photo lab, but Clay hired a guy to wash the trucks and boats."

A delicate hand went to her forehead as she swooned, the southern belle in hiking shorts, taken with the vapors. "If I faint and fall overboard, don't let me drown."

"You know, Amy," Nate said as he undressed the crossbow, "I don't know how it was at Boston doing survey, but in behavior, research assistants are only supposed to bitch about the humiliating grunt work and lowly status to other research assistants. It was that way when I was doing it, it was that way going back centuries, it has always been that way. Darwin himself had someone on the Beagle to file dead birds and sort index cards."

"He did not. I've never read anything about that."

"Of course you didn't. Nobody writes about research assistants." Nate grinned again, celebration for a small victory. He realized he wasn't working up to standards on managing this research assistant. His partner, Clay, had hired her almost two weeks ago, and by now he should have had her terrorized. Instead she was working him like a Starbucks froth slave.

"Ten minutes," Amy said, checking the timer on her watch. "You going to shoot him?"

"Unless you want to?" Nate notched the arrow into the crossbow. He tucked the windbreaker they used to «dress» the crossbow under the console. It was very politically incorrect to carry a weapon for shooting whales through the crowded Lahaina harbor, so they carried it inside the windbreaker, making it appear that they had a jacket on a hanger.

Amy shook her head violently. "I'll drive the boat."

"You should learn to do it."

"I'll drive the boat," Amy said.

"No one drives the boat." No one but Nate drove the boat. Granted, the Constantly Baffled was only a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat, and an agile four-year-old could pilot it on a calm day like today. Still, no one else drove the boat. It was a man thing, being inherently uncomfortable with the thought of a woman operating a boat or a television remote control.

"Up sounds," Nate said. They had a recording of the full sixteen-minute cycle of the song now — all the way through twice, in fact. He stopped the recorder and pulled up the hydrophone, then started the engine.

"There," Amy said, pointing to the white fins and flukes moving under the water. The whale blew only twenty yards off the bow. Nate buried the throttle. Amy was wrenched off her feet and just caught herself on the railing next to the wheel console as the boat shot forward. Nate pulled up on the right side of the whale, no more than ten yards away as the whale came up for the second time. He steadied the wheel with his hip, pulled up the crossbow, and fired. The bolt bounced off the whale's rubbery back, the hollow surgical steel arrowhead taking out a cookie-cutter plug of skin and blubber the size of a pencil eraser before the wide plastic tip stopped the penetration.

The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air, making a sound like a giant knuckle cracking as the massive tail muscles contracted.

"He's pissed," Nate said. "Let's go for a measurement."

"Now?" Amy questioned. Normally they would wait for another dive cycle. Obviously Nate thought that because of their taking the skin sample the whale might start traveling. They could lose him before getting a measurement.

"Now. I'll shoot, you work the rangefinder."

Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the camera frame when the whale dove. Amy grabbed the laser rangefinder, which looked very much like a pair of binoculars made for a cyclops. By taking a distance measurement from the animal's tail with the rangefinder and comparing the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relative size of the entire animal. Nate had come up with an algorithm that, so far, gave them the length of a whale with 98 percent accuracy. Just a few years ago they would've had to have been in an aircraft to measure the length of a whale.

"Ready," Amy said.

The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers had named them humpbacks in the first place). Amy fixed the rangefinder on the whale's back; Nate trained the camera's telephoto on the same spot, and the autofocus motors made tiny adjustments with the movement of the boat.

The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were — spelled out in foot-high black letters across the white — the words BITE ME!

Nate hit the shutter button. Shocked, he fell into the captain's chair, pulling back the throttle as he slumped. He let the Nikon sag in his lap.

"Holy shit!" Nate said. "Did you see that?"

"See what? I got seventy-three feet," Amy said, pulling down the rangefinder. "Probably seventy-six from where you are. What were your frame numbers?" She was reaching for the notebook as she looked back at Nate. "Are you okay?"

"Fine. Frame twenty-six, but I missed it," he lied. His mind was shuffling though a huge stack of index cards, searching a million article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what he'd just seen. It couldn't possibly have been real. The film would show it. "You didn't see any unusual markings when you did the ID photo?"

"No, did you?"

"No, never mind."

"Don't sweat it, Nate. We'll get it next time he comes up," Amy said.

"Let's go in."

"You don't want to try again for a measurement?" To make the data sample complete, they needed an ID photo, a recording of at least a full cycle of the song, a skin sample for DNA and toxin figures, and a measurement. The morning was wasted without the measurement.

"Let's go back to Lahaina," Nate said, staring down at the camera in his lap. "You drive."

CHAPTER TWO Maui No Ka Oi (Maui Is the Best)

At first it was that old trickster Maui who cast his fishing line from his canoe and pulled the islands up from the bottom of the sea. When he was done fishing, he looked at those islands he had pulled up, and smack in the middle of the chain was one that was made up of two big volcanoes, sitting there together like the friendly, lopsided bosoms of the sea. Between them was a deep valley that Maui thought looked very much like cleavage, which he very much liked. And so, to that bumpy-bits island Maui gave his name, and its nickname became "The Cleavage Island," which it stayed until some missionaries came along and renamed it "The Valley Island" (because if there's anything missionaries do well, it's seek out and destroy fun). Then Maui landed his canoe at a calm little beach on the west coast of his new island and said to himself, "I could do with a few cocktails and some nookie. I shall go into Lahaina and get some."

Well, time passed and some whalers came to the island, bringing steel tools and syphilis and other wonders from the West, and before anyone knew what was happening, they, too, were thinking that they wouldn't mind a few cocktails and a measure of nookie. So rather than sail back around the Horn to Nantucket to hoist noggins of grog and the skirts of the odd Hester, Millicent, or Prudence (so fast the dear woman would think she'd fallen down a chimney and landed on a zucchini), they pulled into Lahaina, drawn by the drunken sex magic of old Maui. They didn't come to Maui for the whales, they came for the party.

And so Lahaina became a whaling town. The irony of it was that even though the humpbacks had starting coming to birth their calves and sing their songs only a few years earlier, and in those days the Hawaiian channels were teeming with the big-winged singers, it was not for the humpbacks that the whalers came. Humpbacks, like their other rorqual brothers — the streamlined blue, fin, sei, minke, and Bryde's whales — were just too fast to catch in sailing ships and man-powered whaling boats. No, the whalers came to Lahaina to rest and recreate along their way to Japanese waters where they hunted the great sperm whale, who would literally float there like a big, dumb log while you rowed up to it and stuck a harpoon in its head. It would take the advent of steamships and the decimation of the big, floaty-fat right whales (so named because they did float when dead and therefore were the «right» whales to kill) before the hunters would turn their harpoons on the humpbacks.

Following the whalers came the missionaries, the sugar farmers, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Portuguese who all worked the sugar plantations, and Mark Twain. Mark Twain went home. Everyone else stayed. In the meantime, King Kamehameha I united the islands through the clever application of firearms against wooden spears and moved Hawaii's capital to Lahaina. Sometime after that Amy came cruising into the Lahaina harbor at the wheel of a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat with a tall, stunned-looking Ph.D. sprawled across the bow seat.

The radio chirped. Amy picked it up and keyed the mike. "Go ahead, Clay."

"Something wrong?" Clay Demodocus was obviously in the harbor and could see them coming in. It wasn't even eight in the morning. He was probably still preparing his boat to go out.

"I'm not sure. Nate just decided to call it a day. I'll ask him why." To Nate she said, "Clay wants to know why."

"Anomalous data," Nate said.

"Anomalous data," Amy repeated into the radio.

There was a pause. Then Clay said, "Uh, right, understood. That stuff gets into everything."

The harbor at Lahaina is not large. Only a hundred or so vessels can dock behind her breakwater. Most are sizable, fifty- to seventy-foot cruisers and catamarans, boats full of sunscreen-basted tourists out on the water for anything from dinner cruises to sport fishing to snorkeling at the half-sunken crater of Molokini to, of course, whale watching. Jet-skiing, parasailing, and waterskiing were all banned from December until April, while the humpbacks were in these waters, so many of the smaller boats that would normally be used to terrorize marine life in the name of recreation were leased by whale researchers for the season. On any given winter morning down at the harbor at Lahaina, you couldn't throw a coconut without conking a Ph.D. in cetacean biology (and you stood a good chance of winging two Masters of Science working on dissertations with the rebound).

Clay Demodocus was engaged in a bit of research liars poker with a Ph.D. and a naval officer when Amy backed the Mako into the slip they shared with three tender zodiacs from sailing yachts anchored outside the breakwater, a thirty-two-foot motor-sailor, and the Maui Whale Research Foundation's other boat (Clay's boat), the Always Confused, a brand-new twenty-two-foot Grady White Fisherman, center console. (Slips were hard to come by in Lahaina, and circumstances this season had dictated that the Maui Whale Research Foundation — Nate and Clay — perform a nautical dog pile with six other small craft every day. You do what you have to do if you want to poke whales.)

"Shame," Clay said as Amy threw him the stern line. "Nice calm day, too."

"We got everything but a measurement on one singer," Amy said.

The scientist and the naval officer on the dock behind Clay nodded as if they understood completely. Clifford Hyland, a grizzled, gray-haired whale researcher from Iowa stood next to the young, razor-creased, snowy-white-uniformed Captain L. J. Tarwater, who was there to see that Hyland spent the navy's money appropriately. Hyland looked a little embarrassed at the whole thing and wouldn't make eye contact with Amy or Nate. Money was money, and a researcher took it where he could get it, but navy money, it was so… so nasty.

"Morning Amy," said Tarwater, dazzling a perfectly even, perfectly white smile. He was lean and dark and frighteningly efficient-looking. Next to him, Clay and the scientists looked as if they'd been run through the dryer with a bag of lava rock.

"Good morning, Captain. Morning Cliff."

"Hey, Amy," Cliff Hyland said. "Hey, Nate."

Nathan Quinn shook off his confusion like a retriever who had just heard his name uttered in context with food. "What? What? Oh, hi, Cliff. What?"

Hyland and Quinn had both been part of a group of thirteen scientists who had first come to Lahaina in the seventies ("The Killer Elite," Clay still called them, as they had all gone on to distinguish themselves as leaders in their fields). Actually, the original intention hadn't been for them to be a group, but they nevertheless became one early on when they all realized that the only way they could afford to stay on the island was if they pooled their resources and lived together. So for years thirteen of them — and sometimes more if they could afford assistants, wives, or girlfriends — lived every season in a two-bedroom house they rented in Lahaina. Hyland understood Quinn's tendency to submerge himself in his research to the point of oblivion, so he wasn't surprised that once again the rangy researcher had spaced out.

"Anomalous data, huh?" Cliff asked, figuring that was what had sent Nate into the ozone.

"Uh, nothing I can be sure of. I mean, actually, the recorder isn't working right. Something dragging. Probably just needs to be cleaned."

And everyone, including Amy, looked at Quinn for a moment as if to say, Well, you lying satchel of walrus spit, that is the weakest story I've ever heard, and you're not fooling anyone.

"Shame," Clay said. "Nice day to miss out on the water. Maybe you can get back with the other recorder and get out again before the wind comes up." Clay knew something was up with Nate, but he also trusted his judgment enough not to press it. Nate would tell him when he thought he should know.

"Speaking of that," Hyland said, "we'd better get going." He headed down the dock toward his own boat. Tarwater stared at Nate just long enough to convey disgust before turning on his heel and marching after Hyland.

When they were gone, Amy said, "Tarwater is a creep."

"He's all right. He's got a job to do is all," Clay said. "What's with the recorder?"

"The recorder is fine," Nate said.

"Then what gives? It's a perfect day." Clay liked to state the obvious when it was positive. It was sunny, calm, with no wind, and the underwater visibility was two hundred feet. It was a perfect day to research whales.

Nate started handing waterproof cases of equipment to Clay. "I don't know. I may have seen something out there, Clay. I have to think about it and see the pictures. I'm going to drop some film off at the lab, then go back to Papa Lani and write up some research until the film's ready."

Clay flinched, just a tad. It was Amy's job to drop off film and write up research. "Okay. How 'bout you, kiddo?" Clay said to Amy. "My new guy doesn't look like he's going to show, and I need someone topside while I'm under."

Amy looked to Nate for some kind of approval, but when he simply kept unloading cases without a reaction, she just shrugged. "Sure, I'd love to."

Clay suddenly became self-conscious and shuffled in his flip-flops, looking for a second more like a five-year-old kid than a barrel-chested, fifty-year-old man. "By calling you 'kiddo' I didn't mean to dimmish you by age or anything, you know."

"I know," Amy said.

"And I wasn't making any sort of comment on your competency either."

"I understand, Clay."

Clay cleared his throat unnecessarily. "Okay," he said.

"Okay," Amy said. She grabbed two Pelican cases full of equipment, stepped up onto the dock, and started schlepping the stuff to the parking area so it could be loaded into Nate's pickup. Over her shoulder she said, "You guys both so need to get laid."

"I think that's reverse harassment," Clay said to Nate.

"I may be having hallucinations," said Nate.

"No, she really said that," Clay said.

After Quinn had left, Amy climbed into the Always Confused and began untying the stern line. She glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot cabin cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent — Bumstick Go-Be-Bright, perhaps.

"Clay, you ever heard of a uniformed naval officer accompanying a researcher into the field before?"

Clay looked up from doing a battery check on the GPS. "Not unless the researcher was working from a navy vessel. Once I was along on a destroyer for a study on the effects of high explosives on resident populations of southern sea lions in the Falkland Islands. They wanted to see what would happen if you set off a ten-thousand-pound charge in proximity to a sea lion colony. There was a uniformed officer in charge of that."

Amy cast the line back to the dock and turned to face Clay. "What was the effect?"

"Well, it blew them the fuck up, didn't it? I mean, that's a lot of explosives."

"They let you film that for National Science?"

"Just stills," Clay said. "I don't think they anticipated it going the way it did. I got some great shots of it raining seal meat." Clay started the engine.

"Yuck." Amy untied the bumpers and pulled them into the boat. "But you've never seen a uniformed officer working here? Before now, I mean."

"Nowhere else," Clay said. He pulled down the gear lever. There was a thump, and the boat began to creep forward.

Amy pushed them away from the surrounding boats with a padded boat hook. "What do you think they're doing?"

"I was trying to find out this morning when you guys came in. They loaded an awfully big case before you got here. I asked what it was, and Tarwater got all sketchy. Cliff said it was some acoustics stuff."

"Directional array?" Amy asked. Researchers sometimes towed large arrays of hydrophones that could, unlike a single hydrophone, detect the direction from which sound was traveling.

"Could be," Clay said. "Except they don't have a winch on their boat.

"A wench? What are you trying to say, Clay?" Amy feigned being offended. "Are you calling me a wench?"

Clay grinned at her. "Amy, I am old and have a girlfriend, and therefore I am immune to your hotness. Please cease your useless attempts to make me uncomfortable."

"Let's follow them."

"They've been working on the lee side of Lanai. I don't want to take the Confused past the wind line."

"So you were trying to find out what they're up to?"

"I fished. No bites. Cliff's not going to say anything with Tarwater standing there."

"So let's follow them."

"We actually may get some work done today. It's a good day, after all, and we might not get a dozen windless days all season here. We can't afford to lose a day, Amy. Which reminds me, what's up with Nate? Not like him to blow off a good field day."

"You know, he's nuts," Amy said, as if it were understood. "Too much time thinking about whales."

"Oh, right. I forgot." As they motored out of the harbor, Clay waved to a group of researchers who had gathered at the fuel station to buy coffee. Twenty universities and a dozen foundations were represented in that group. Clay was single-handedly responsible for making the scientists who worked out of Lahaina into a social community. He knew them all, and he couldn't help it — he liked people who worked with whales — and he just liked it when people got along.

He'd started weekly meetings and presentations of papers at the Pacific Whale Sanctuary building in Kihei, which brought all the scientists together to socialize, trade information, and, for some, to try to weasel some useful data out of someone without the burden of field research.

Amy waved to the group, too, as she dug into one of the orange Pelican waterproof cases. "Come on, Clay, let's follow Tarwater and see what he's up to." She pulled a huge pair of twenty-power binoculars out of the case and showed them to Clay. "We can watch from a distance."

"You might want to go up in the bow and look for whales, Amy."

"Whales? They're big and wet. What else do you need to know?"

"You scientists never cease to amaze me," Clay said. "Come hold the wheel while I get a pencil to write that down."

"Let's follow Tarwater."

CHAPTER THREE A Little Razor Wire Around Heaven

The gate to the Papa Lani compound was hanging open when Nate drove up. Not good. Clay was adamant about their always replacing the big Masterlock on the gate when they left the compound.

Papa Lani was a group of wood-frame buildings on two acres northeast of Lahaina in the middle of a half dozen sugarcane fields that had been donated to Maui Whale by a wealthy woman Clay and Nate affectionately referred to as the "Old Broad." The property consisted of six small bungalows that had once been used to board plantation workers but had long since been converted to housing, laboratory, and office space for Clay, Nate, and any assistants, researchers, or film crews who might be working with them for the season. Getting the compound had been a godsend for Maui Whale, given the cost of housing and storage in Lahaina. Clay had named the compound Papa Lani (Hawaiian for "heaven") in honor of their good fortune, but someone had left the gate to heaven open, and from what Nate could tell as he drove in, the angel shit had hit the fan.

Before he even got out of the truck, Nate saw a beat-up green BMW parked in the compound and a trail of papers leading out of the building they used for an office. He snatched a few of them up as he ran across the sand driveway and up the steps into the little bungalow. Inside was chaos: drawers torn out of filing cabinets, toppled racks of cassette tape — the tapes strewn across the room in great streamers — computers overturned, the sides of their cases open, trailing wires. Nate stood among the mess, not really knowing what to do or even what to look at, feeling violated and on the verge of throwing up. Even if nothing was missing, a lifetime of research had been typhooned around the room.

"Oh, Jah's sweet mercy," came a voice from behind him. "This a bit of fuckery most heinous for sure, mon."

Nate spun and dropped into a martial-arts stance, notwithstanding the fact that he didn't know any martial arts and that he had loosed a little-girl shriek in the process. The serpent-haired figure of a gorgon was silhouetted in the doorway, and Nate would have screamed again if the figure hadn't stepped into the light, revealing a lean, bare-chested teenager in surfer shorts and flip-flops, sporting a giant tangle of blond dreadlocks and about six hundred nose rings.

"Cool head main ting, brah, cool head," the kid almost sang. There was pot and steel drums in his voice, bemusement and youth and two joints' worth of separation from the rest of reality.

Nate went from fear to confusion in an instant. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Relax, brah, no make li'dat. Kona and I come help out."

Nate thought he might feel better if he strangled this kid — just a little frustration strangle to vent some of the shock of the wrecked lab, not a full choke — but instead he said, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"Kona," the kid said. "Dat boss name Clay hire me for the boats dat day before."

"You're the kid Clay hired to work with us on the boats?"

"Shoots, mon, I just said that? What, you a ninja, brah?"

The kid nodded, his dreads sweeping around his shoulders, and Nate was about to scream at him again when he realized that he was still crouched into his pseudo combat stance and probably looked like a total loon.

He stood up, shrugged, then pretended to stretch his neck and roll his head in a cocky way he'd seen boxers do, as if he had just disarmed a very dangerous enemy or something. "You were supposed to meet Clay down at the dock an hour ago."

"Some rippin' sets North Shore, they be callin' to me this morning." The kid shrugged. What could he do? Rippin' sets had called to him.

Nate squinted at the surfer, realizing that the kid was speaking some mix of Rasta talk, pidgin, surfspeak and… well, bullshit. "Stop talking that way, or you're fired right now."

"So you ichiban big whale kahuna, like Clay say, hey?"

"Yeah," Nate said. "I'm the number-one whale kahuna. You're fired."

"Bummah, mon," The kid said. He shrugged again, turned, and started out the door. "Jah's love to ye, brah. Cool runnings," he sang over his shoulder.

"Wait," Nate said.

The kid spun around, his dreads enveloping his face like a furry octopus attacking a crab. He sputtered a dreadlock out of his mouth and was about to speak.

Quinn held up a finger to signal silence. "Not a word of pidgin, Hawaiian, or Rasta talk, or you're done."

"Okay." The kid waited.

Quinn composed himself and looked around at the mess, then at the kid. "There are papers strewn around all over outside, hanging in the fences, in the bushes. I need you to gather them up and stack them as neatly as you can. Bring them here. Can you do that?"

The kid nodded.

"Excellent. I'm Nathan Quinn." Nate extended his hand to shake.

The kid moved across the room and caught Nate's hand in a powerful grip. The scientist almost winced but instead returned the pressure and tried to smile.

"Pelekekona," said the kid. "Call me Kona."

"Welcome aboard, Kona."

The kid looked around now, looking as if by giving his name he had relinquished some of his power and was suddenly weak, despite the muscles that rippled across his chest and abdomen. "Who did this?"

"No idea." Nate picked up a cassette tape that had been pulled out of the spools and wadded into a bird's nest of brown plastic. "You go get those papers. I'm going to call the police. That a problem?"

Kona shook his head. "Why would it be?"

"No reason. Grab those papers now. Nothing is trash until I look at it, eh?"

"Overstood, brah," Kona said, grinning back at Nate as he headed out into sun. Once outside, he turned and called, "Hey, Kahuna Quinn."

"What?"

"How come them humpies sing like dat?"

"What do you think?" Nate asked, and in the asking there was hope. Despite the fact that the kid was young and irritating and probably stoned, the biologist truly hoped that Kona — unburdened by too much knowledge — would give him the answer. He didn't care where it came from or how it came (and it would still have to be proved); he just wanted to know, which is what set him apart from the hacks, the wannabes, the backstabbers, and the ego jockeys in the field. Nate just wanted to know.

"I think they trying to shout down Babylon, maybe."

"You'll have to explain to me what that means."

"We fix this fuckery, then we fire up a spliff and think over it, brah."

Five hours later Clay came through the door talking. "We got some amazing stuff today, Nate. Some of the best cow/calf stuff I've ever shot." Clay was still so excited he almost skipped into the room.

"Okay," Nate said with a zombielike lack of enthusiasm. He sat in front of his patched-together computer at one of the desks. The office was mostly put back in order, but the open computer case sitting on the desk with wires spread out to a diaspora of refugee drive units told a tale of data gone wild. "Someone broke in. Tore apart the office."

Clay didn't want to be concerned. He had great videotape to edit. Suddenly, looking at the fans and wires, it occurred to him that someone might have broken his editing setup. He whirled around to see his forty-two-inch flat-panel monitor leaning against the wall, a long diagonal crack bisected the glass. "Oh," he said. "Oh, jeez."

Amy walked in smiling, "Nate you won't believe the — " She pulled up, saw Clay staring at his broken monitor, the computer scattered over Nate's desk, files stacked here and there where they shouldn't be. "Oh," she said.

"Someone broke in," Clay said forlornly.

She put her hand on Clay's shoulder. "Today? In broad daylight?"

Nate swiveled around in his chair. "They went through our living quarters, too. The police have already been here." He saw Clay staring at his monitor. "Oh, and that. Sorry, Clay."

"You guys have insurance, right?" Amy said.

Clay didn't look away from his broken monitor. "Dr. Quinn, did you pay the insurance?" Clay called Nate «doctor» only when he wanted to remind him of just how official and absolutely professional they really ought to be.

"Last week. Went out with the boat insurance."

"Well, then, we're okay," Amy said, jostling Clay, squeezing his shoulder, punching his arm, pinching his butt. "We can order a new monitor tonight, ya big palooka." she chirped, looking like a goth version of the bluebird of happiness.

"Hey!" Clay grinned, "Yeah, we're okay." He turned to Nate, smiling. "Anything else broken? Anything missing?"

Nate pointed to the wastebasket where a virtual haystack of audiotape was spilling over in tangles. "That was spread all over the compound along with all the files. We lost most of the tape, going back two years."

Amy stopped being cheerful and looked appropriately concerned. "What about the digitals?" She elbowed Clay, who was still grinning, and he joined her in gravity. They frowned. (Nate recorded all the audio on analog tape, then transferred it to the computer for analysis. Theoretically, there should be digital copies of everything.)

"These hard drives have been erased. I can't pull up anything from them." Nate took a deep breath, sighed, then spun back around in his chair and let his forehead fall against the desk with a thud that shook the whole bungalow.

Amy and Clay winced. There were a lot of screws on that desk. Clay said, "Well, it couldn't have been that bad, Nate. You got it all cleaned up pretty quickly."

"The guy you hired showed up late and helped me." Nate was speaking into the desk, his face right where it had landed.

"Kona? Where is he?"

"I sent him to the lab. I had some film I want to see right away."

"I knew he wouldn't stand us up on his first day."

"Clay, I need to talk to you. Amy, could you excuse us a minute, please?"

"Sure," Amy said. "I'll go see if anything's missing from my cabin." She left.

Clay said, "You going to look up? Or should I get down on the floor so I can see your face?"

"Could you grab the first-aid kit while we talk?"

"Screws embedded in your forehead?"

"Feels like four, maybe five."

"They're small, though, those little drive-mount screws."

"Clay, you're always trying to cheer me up."

"It's who I am," Clay said.

CHAPTER FOUR Whale Men of Maui

Who Clay was, was a guy who liked things — liked people, liked animals, liked cars, liked boats — who had an almost supernatural ability to spot the likability in almost anyone or anything. When he walked down the streets of Lahaina, he would nod and say hello to sunburned tourist couples in matching aloha wear (people generally considered to be a waste of humanity by most locals), but by the same token he would trade a backhanded hang-loose shaka (thumb and fingers extended, three middle fingers tucked, always backhand if you're a local) with a crash of native bruddahs in the parking lot of the ABC Store and get no scowls or pidgin curses, as would most haoles. People could sense that Clay liked them, as could animals, which was probably why Clay was still alive. Twenty-five years in the water with hunters and giants, and the worst he'd come out of it was to get a close tail-wash from a southern right whale that tumbled him like a cartoon into the idling prop of a Zodiac. (Oh, there were the two times he was drowned and the hypothermia, but that stuff wasn't caused by the animals; that was the sea, and she'll kill you whether you liked her or not, which Clay did.) Doing what he wanted to do and his boundless affinity for everything made Clay Demodocus a happy guy, but he was also shrewd enough not to be too open about his happiness. Animals might put up with that smiley shit, but people will eventually kill you for it.

"How's the new kid?" Clay said, trying to distract from the iodine he was applying to Nate's forehead while simultaneously calculating the time to ship his new monitor over to Maui from the discount house in Seattle. Clay liked gadgets.

"He's a criminal," Nate said.

"He'll come around. He's a water guy." For Clay this said it all. You were a water guy or you weren't. If you weren't… well, you were pretty much useless, weren't you?

"He was an hour late, and he showed up in the wrong place."

"He's a native. He'll help us deal with the whale cops."

"He's not a native, he's blond, Clay. He's more of a haole than you are, for Christ's sake."

"He'll come around. I was right about Amy, wasn't I?" Clay said. He liked the new kid, Kona, despite the employment interview, which had gone like this:

Clay sat with the forty-two-inch monitor at his back, his world-famous photographs of whales and pinnipeds playing in a slide show behind him. Since he was conducting a job interview, he had put on his very best $5.99 ABC Store flip-flops. Kona stood in the middle of the office wearing sunglasses, his baggies, and, since he was applying for a job, a red-dirt-dyed shirt.

"Your application says that your name is Pelke — ah, Pelekekona Ke — " Clay threw his hands up in surrender.

"I be called Pelekekona Keohokalole — da warrior kine — Lion of Zion, brah."

"Can I call you Pele?"

"Kona," Kona said.

"It says on your driver's license that your name is Preston Applebaum and you're from New Jersey."

"I be one hundred percent Hawaiian. Kona the best boat hand in the Island, yeah. I figga I be number-one good man for to keep track haole science boss's isms and skisms while he out oppressing the native bruddahs and stealing our land and the best wahines. Sovereignty now, but after a bruddah make his rent, don't you know?"

Clay grinned at the blond kid. "You're just a mess, aren't you?"

Kona lost his Rastafarian, laid-backness. "Look, I was born here when my parents were on vacation. I really am Hawaiian, kinda, and I really need this job. I'm going to lose my place to live if I don't make some money this week. I can't live on the beach in Paia again. All my shit got stolen last time."

"It says here that you last worked as a forensic calligrapher. What's that, handwriting analysis?"

"Uh, no, actually, it was a business I started where I would write people's suicide notes for them." Not a hint of pidgin in his speech, not a skankin' smidgen of reggae. "It didn't do that well. No one wants to kill himself in Hawaii. I think if I'd started it back in New Jersey, or maybe Portland, it would have gone over really well. You know business: location, location, location."

"I thought that was real estate." Clay actually felt a twinge of missed opportunity, here, for although he had spent his life having adventures, doing exactly what he wanted to do, and although he often felt like the dumbest guy in the room (because he'd surrounded himself with scientists), now, talking to Kona, he realized that he had never realized his full potential as a self-deluded blockhead. Ahhh… wistful regrets. Clay liked this kid.

"Look, I'm a water guy," Kona said. "I know boats, I know tides, I know waves, I love the ocean."

"You afraid of it?" Clay asked.

"Terrified."

"Good. Meet me at the dock tomorrow morning at eight-thirty."

Now Nate rubbed at the crisscrrossed band-aids on his forehead as Clay went through the Pelican cases of camera equipment under the table across the room. The break-in and subsequent shit storm of activity had sidetracked him from what he'd seen this morning. It started to settle on him again like a black cloud of self-doubt, and he wondered whether he should even mention what he saw to Clay. In the world of behavioral biology, nothing existed until it was published. It didn't matter how much you knew — it wasn't real if it didn't appear in a scientific journal. But when it came to day-to-day life, publication was secondary. If he told Clay what he'd seen, it would suddenly become real. As with his attraction for Amy and the realization that years' worth of research was gone, he wasn't sure he wanted it to be real.

"So why did you need to send Amy out?" Clay asked.

"Clay, I don't see things I don't see, right? I mean, in all the time we've worked together, I haven't called something before the data backed it up, right?"

Clay looked up from his inventory to see the expression of consternation on his friend's face. "Look, Nate, if the kid bothers you that much, we can find someone else —»

"It's not the kid." Nate seemed to be weighing what he was going to say, not sure if he should say it, then blurted out, "Clay, I think I saw writing on the tail flukes of that singer this morning."

"What, like a pattern of scars that look like letters? I've seen that. I have a dolphin shot that shows tooth rakings on the animal's side that appear to spell out the word 'zap. »

"No it was different. Not scars. It said, 'Bite me. "

"Uh-huh," Clay said, trying not to make it sound as if he thought his friend was nuts. "Well, this break-in, Nate, it's shaken us all up."

"This was before that. Oh, I don't know. Look, I think it's on the film I shot. That's why I came in to take the film to the lab. Then I found this mess, so I sent the kid to the lab with my truck, even though I'm pretty sure he's a criminal. Let's table it until he gets back with the film, okay?" Nate turned and stared at the deskful of wires and parts, as if he'd quickly floated off into his own thoughts.

Clay nodded. He'd spent whole days in the same twenty-three-foot boat with the lanky scientist, and nothing more had passed between the two than the exchange of "Sandwich?" "Thanks."

When Nate was ready to tell him more, he would. In the meantime he would not press. You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate.

"What are you thinking?" Clay asked. Okay, he could be inconsiderate sometimes. His giant monitor was broken, and he was traumatized.

"I'm thinking that we're going to have to start over on a lot of these studies. Every piece of magnetic media in this place has been scrambled, but as far as I can tell, nothing is missing. Why would someone do that, Clay?"

"Kids," Clay said, inspecting a Nikon lens for damage. "None of my stuff is missing, and except for the monitor it seems okay."

"Right, your stuff."

"Yeah, my stuff."

"Your stuff is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Clay. Why wouldn't kids take your stuff? No one doesn't know that Nikon equipment is expensive, and no one on the island doesn't know that underwater housings are expensive, so who would just destroy the tapes and disks and leave everything?"

Clay put down the lens and stood up. "Wrong question."

"How is that the wrong question?"

"The question is, who could possibly care about our research other than us, the Old Broad, and a dozen or so biologists and whale huggers in the entire world? Face it, Nate, no one gives a damn about singing whales. There's no motive. The question is, who cares?"

Nate slumped in his chair. Clay was right. No one did care. People, the world, cared about the numbers of whales, so the survey guys, the whale counters, they actually collected data that people cared about. Why? Because if you knew how many whales you had, you knew how many you could or could not kill. People loved and understood and thought they could prove points and make money with the numbers. Behavior… well, behavior was squishy stuff used to entertain fourth-graders on Cable in the Classroom.

"We were really close, Clay," Nate said. "There's something in the song that we're missing. But without the tapes…"

Clay shrugged. "You heard one song, you heard 'em all." Which was also true. All the males sang the same song each season. The song might change from season to season, or even evolve through the season somewhat, but in any given population of humpbacks, they were all singing the same tune. No one had figured out exactly why.

"We'll get new samples."

"I'd already cleaned up the spectrographs, filtered them, analyzed them. It was all on the hard disks. That work was for specific samples."

"We'll do it again, Nate. We have time. No one is waiting. No one cares."

"You don't have to keep saying that."

"Well, it's starting to bother me, too, now," Clay said. "Who in the hell cares whether you figure out what's going on with humpback song?"

A kicked-off flip-flop flew into the room followed by the singsong Rastafarian-bruddah pomp of Kona returning, "Irie, Clay, me dready. I be bringing films and herb for the evening to welcome to Jah's mercy, mon. Peace."

Kona stood there, an envelope of negatives and contact sheet in one hand, a film can held high above his head in the other. He was looking up to it as if it held the elixir of life.

"You have any idea what he said?" Nate asked. He quickly crossed the room and snatched the negatives away from Kona.

"I think it's from the 'Jabberwocky, " Clay replied. "You gave him cash to get the film processed? You can't give him cash."

"And this lonely stash can to fill with the sacred herb," Kona said. "I'll find me papers, and we can take the ship home to Zion, mon."

"You can't give him money and an empty film can, Nate. He sees it as a religious duty to fill it up."

Nate had pulled the contact sheet out of the envelope and was examining it with a loupe. He checked it twice, counting each frame, checking the registry numbers along the edge. Frame twenty-six wasn't there. He held the plastic page of negatives up to the light, looked through the images twice and the registry numbers on the edges three times before he threw them down, checked the earlier frames that Amy had shot of the whale tail, then crossed the room and grabbed Kona by the shoulders. "Where's frame twenty-six, goddamn it? What did you do with it?"

"This just like I get it, mon. I didn't do nothing."

"He's a criminal, Clay," Nate said. Then he grabbed the phone and called the lab.

All they could tell him was that the film had been processed normally and picked up from the bin in front. A machine cut the negatives before they went into the sleeves — perhaps it had snipped off the frame. They'd be happy to give Nate a fresh roll of film for his trouble.

Two hours later Nate sat at the desk, holding a pen and looking at a sheet of paper. Just looking at it. The room was dark except for the desk lamp, which reached out just far enough to leave darkness in all the corners where the unknown could hide. There was a nightstand, the desk, the chair, and a single bed with a trunk set at its end, a blanket on top as a cushion. Nathan Quinn was a tall man, and his feet hung off the end of the bed. He found that if he removed the supporting trunk, he dreamed of foundering in blue-water ocean and woke up gasping. The trunk was full of books, journals, and blankets, none of which had ever been removed since he'd shipped them to the island nine years ago. A centipede the size of a Pontiac had once lived in the bottom-right corner of the trunk but had long since moved on once he realized that no one was ever going to bother him, so he could stand up on his hind hundred feet, hiss like a pissed cat, and deliver a deadly bite to a naked foot. There was a small television, a clock radio, a small kitchenette with two burners and a microwave, two full bookshelves under the window that looked out onto the compound, and a yellowed print of two of Gauguin's Tahitian girls between the windows over the bed. At one time, before the plantations had been automated, ten people probably slept in this room. In grad school at UC Santa Cruz, Nathan Quinn had lived in quarters about this same size. Progress.

The paper on Nate's desk was empty, the bottle of Myers's Dark Rum beside it half empty. The door and windows were open, and Nate could hear the warm trades rattling the fronds of two tall coconut palms out front. There was a tap on the door, and Nate looked up to see Amy silhouetted in the doorway. She stepped into the light.

"Nathan, can I come in?" She was wearing a T-shirt dress that hit her about midthigh.

Nate put his hand over the paper, embarrassed that there was nothing written on it. "I was just trying to put a plan together for — " He looked past the paper to the bottle, then back at Amy. "Do you want a drink?" He picked up the bottle, looked around for a glass, then just held the bottle out to her.

Amy shook her head. "Are you all right?"

"I started this work when I was your age. I don't know if I have the energy to start it all over again."

"It's a lot of work. I'm really sorry this happened."

"Why? You didn't do it. I was close, Amy. There's something that I've been missing, but I was close."

"It will still be there. You know, we have the field notes from the last couple of years. I'll help you put as much of it back together as I can."

"I know you will, but Clay's right. Nobody cares. I should have gone into biochemistry or become an ecowarrior or something."

"I care."

Nate looked at her feet to avoid looking her in the eye. "I know you do. But without the recordings… well — then…" He shrugged and took a sip from the rum bottle. "You can't drink, you know," he said, now the professor, now the Ph.D., now the head researcher. "You can't do anything or have anything in your life that gets in the way of researching whales."

"Okay," Amy said. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."

"Yeah, I'm okay."

"We'll get started putting it back together tomorrow. Good night, Nate." She backed out the door.

"Night, Amy." Nate noticed that she wasn't wearing anything under the T-shirt dress and felt sleazy for it. He turned his attention back to his blank piece of paper, and before he could figure out why, he wrote BITE ME in big block letters and underlined it so hard that he ripped the page.

CHAPTER FIVE Hey, Buddy, Why the Big Brain?

The next morning the four of them stood in a row on the front of the old Pioneer Hotel, looking across the Lahaina Harbor at the whitecaps in the channel. Wind was whipping the palm trees. Down by the breakwater two little girls were trying to surf waves whose faces were bumpy with wind chop and whose curls blew back over the crests like the hair of a sprinter.

"It could calm down," Amy said. She was standing next to Kona, thinking, This guy's pecs are so cut you could stick business cards under them and they'd stay. And my, is he tan. Where Amy came from, no one was tan, and she hadn't been in Hawaii long enough to realize that a good tan was just a function of showing up.

"Supposed to stay like this for the next three days," Nate said. As disappointed as he appeared to be, he was extraordinarily relieved that they wouldn't be going out this morning. He had a rogue hangover, and his eyes were bloodred behind his sunglasses. Self-loathing had set in, and he thought, My life's work is shit, and if we went out there today and I didn't spend the morning retching over the side, I'd be tempted to drown myself. He would rather have been thinking about whales, which is what he usually thought about. Then he noticed Amy sneaking glances at Kona's bare chest and felt even worse.

"Ya, mon. Kona can spark up a spliff and calm down that bumpy brine for all me new science dreadies. We can take the boat no matter what the wind be," Kona said. He was thinking, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I really want to get out there with the whales.

"Breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks," Clay said. He was thinking, We'll have breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks.

None of them moved. They just stood there, looking out at the blowout channel. Occasionally a whale would blow, and the mist would run over the water like a frightened ghost.

"I'm buying," Clay said.

And they all headed up Front Street to Longee's restaurant, a two-story gray-and-white building, done in a New England architecture with shiplap siding and huge open windows that looked across Front Street, over the stone seawall, and out onto the Au' au Channel. By way of a shirt, Kona slipped on a tattered Nautica windbreaker he'd had knotted around his waist.

"You do a lot of sailing?" Amy asked, nodding to the Nautica logo. She intended the remark as dig, a return for Kona's saying, "And who be this snowy biscuit?" when they'd first met. At the time Amy had just introduced herself, but in retrospect she realized that she should probably have taken some offense to being called both snowy and a biscuit — those things were objectifying, right?

"Shark bait kit, me Snowy Biscuit," Kona answered, meaning that the windbreaker had come from a tourist. The Paia surfing community on the North Shore, from which Kona had recently come, had an economy based entirely on petty theft, mostly smash-and-grabs from rental cars.

As the host led them through the crowded dining room to a table by the windows, Clay leaned over Amy's shoulder and whispered, "A biscuit is a good thing."

"I knew that," Amy whispered back. "Like a tomato, right?"

"Heads up," Clay said, just as Amy plowed into a khaki package of balding ambition known as Jon Thomas Fuller, CEO of Hawaii Whale Inc., a nonprofit corporation with assets in the tens of millions that disguised itself as a research organization. Fuller had pushed his chair back to intercept Amy.

"Jon Thomas!" Clay smiled and reached around the flustered Amy to shake Fuller's hand. Fuller ignored Clay and took Amy by the waist, steadying her. "Hey, hey, there," Fuller said. "If you wanted to meet me, all you had to do was introduce yourself."

Amy grabbed his wrists and guided his hands to the table in front of him, then stepped back. "Hi, I'm Amy Earhart."

"I know who you are," said Fuller, standing now. He was only a little taller than Arny, very tan and very lean, with a hawk nose and a receding hairline like a knife. "What I don't know is why you haven't come to see me about a job."

Meanwhile, Nate, who had been thinking about whale song, had taken his seat, opened a menu, ordered coffee, and completely missed the fact that he was alone at the table. He looked up to see Jon Thomas Fuller holding his assistant by the waist. He dropped his menu and headed back to the site of the intercept.

"Well, partly" — Amy smiled at the three young women sitting at Fuller's table — "partly because I have some self-respect" — she curtsied — "and partly because you're a louse and a jamoke."

Fuller's dazzling grin dropped a level of magnitude. The women at his table, all dressed in khaki safari wear to approximate the Discovery Channel ideal of what a scientist should look like, made great shows of looking elsewhere, wiping their mouths, sipping water — not noticing their boss getting verbally bitch-slapped by a vicious research pixie.

"Nate," Fuller said, noticing that Nate had joined the group, "I heard about the break-in at your place. Nothing important missing, I hope."

"We're fine. Lost some recordings," Nate said.

"Ah, well, good. A lot of lowlifes on this island now." Fuller looked at Kona.

The surfer grinned. "Shoots, brah, you make me blush."

Fuller grinned. "How you doing, Kona?"

"All cool runnings, brah. Bwana Fuller got his evil on?"

There were neck-snapping double takes all around. Fuller nodded, then looked back at Quinn. "Anything we can do, Nate? There are a lot of our song recordings for sale in the shops, if those will help out. You guys get professional discount. We're all in this together."

"Thanks," Nate said just as Fuller sat down, then turned his back on all of them and resumed eating his breakfast, dismissing them. The women at the table looked embarrassed.

"Breakfast?" Clay said. He herded his team to their table.

They ordered and drank coffee in silence, each looking out across the street to the ocean, avoiding eye contact until Fuller and his group had left.

Nate turned to Amy. "A jamoke? What are you, living in a Cagney movie?"

"Who is that guy?" Amy asked. She snapped the corner off a piece of toast with more violence than was really necessary.

"What's a jamoke?" Kona asked.

"It's a flavor of ice cream, right?" Clay said.

Nate looked at Kona. "How do you know Fuller?" Nate held up his ringer and shot a cautionary glare, the now understood signal for no Rasta/pidgin/bullshit.

"I worked the Jet Ski concession for him at Kaanapali."

Nate looked to Clay, as if to say, You knew this?

"Who is that guy?" Amy asked.

"He's the head of Hawaii Whale," Clay said. "Commerce masquerading as science. They use their permit to get three sixty-five-foot tourist boats right up next to the whales."

"That guy is a scientist?"

"He has a Ph.D. in biology, but I wouldn't call him a scientist. Those women he was with are his naturalists. I guess today was even too windy for them to go out. He's got shops all over the island — sells whale crap, nonprofit. Hawaii Whale was the only research group to oppose the Jet Ski ban during whale season."

"Because Fuller had money in the Jet Ski business," Nate added.

"I made six bucks an hour," Kona said.

"Nate's work was instrumental in getting the Jet Ski parasail ban done," Clay said. "Fuller doesn't like us."

"The sanctuary may take his research permit next," said Nate. "What science they do is bad science."

"And he blames you for that?" Amy asked.

"I — we have done the most behavioral stuff as it relates to sound in these waters. The sanctuary gave us some money to find out if the high-frequency noise from Jet Skis and parasail boats affected the behavior of the whales. We concluded that it did. Fuller didn't like it. It cost him."

"He's going to build a dolphin swim park, up La Perouse Bay way," Kona said.

"What?" Nate said.

"What?" said Clay.

"A swim-with-the-dolphins park?" said Amy.

"Ya, mon. Let you come from Ohio and get in the water with them bottlenose fellahs for two hundred dollar."

"You guys didn't know about this?" Amy was looking at Clay. He always seemed to know everything that was going on in the whale world.

"First I've heard of it, but they're not going to let him do it without some studies." He looked to Nate. "Are they?"

"It'll never happen if he loses his research permit," Nate said. "There'll be a review."

"And you'll be on the review board?" asked Amy.

"Nate's name would solidify it," Clay said. "They'll ask him."

"Not you?" Kona asked.

"I'm just the photographer." Clay looked out at the whitecaps in the channel. "Doesn't look like we'll be getting out today. Finish your breakfast, and then we'll go pay your rent."

Nate looked at Clay quizzically.

"I can't give him money," Clay said. "He'll just smoke it. I'm going to go pay his rent."

"Truth." Kona nodded.

"You don't still work for Fuller, do you, Kona?" Nate asked.

"Nate!" Amy admonished.

"Well, he was there when I found the office ransacked."

"Leave him alone," Amy said. "He's too cute to be bad."

"Truth," said Kona. "Sistah Biscuit speak nothin' but the truth. I be massive cute."

Clay set a stack of bills on the table. "By the way, Nate, you have a lecture at the sanctuary on Tuesday. Four days. You and Amy might want to use the downtime to put something together."

Nate felt as if he'd been smacked. "Four days? There's nothing there. It was all on those hard drives."

"Like I said, you might want to use the downtime."

CHAPTER SIX Whale Wahine

As a biologist, Nate had a tendency to draw analogies between human behavior and animal behavior — probably a little more often than was strictly healthy. For instance, as he considered his attraction to Amy, he wondered why it had to be so complex. Why there had to be so many subtleties to the human mating ritual. Why can't we be more like common squid? he thought. The male squid simply swims up to the female squid, hands her a neat package of sperm, she tucks it under her mantle at her leisure, and they go on their separate ways, their duty to the species done. Simple, elegant, no nuance…

Nate held the paper cup out to Amy. "I poured some coffee for you."

"I'm all coffeed out, thanks," said Amy.

Nate set the cup down on the desk next to his own. He sat in front of the computer. Amy was perched on a high stool to his left going through the hardbound field journals covering the last four years. "Are you going to be able to put together a lecture out of this?" she asked.

Nate rubbed his temples. Despite a handful of aspirin and six cups of coffee, his head was still throbbing. "A lecture? About what?"

"Well, what were you planning to do a talk on before the office was ransacked? Maybe we can reconstruct it from the field notes and memory."

"I don't have that good a memory."

"Yes you do, you just need some mnemonics, which we have here in the field notes."

Her expression was as open and hopeful as a child's. She waited for something from him, just a word to set her searching for what he needed. The problem was, what he needed right now was not going to be found in biology field notes. He needed answers of another kind. It bothered him that Fuller had known about the break-in at the compound. It was too soon for him to have found out. It also bothered him that anyone could hold him in the sort of disdain that Fuller obviously did. Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually — coincidentally — in French.) Nate was neither French-Canadian nor much of a hockey player, so the idea of having invoked enmity enough in someone to have that person ruin his research… He was mortified by it.

"Amy," he said, having spaced out and returned to the room in a matter of seconds, he hoped, "is there something that I'm missing about our work? Is there something in the data that I'm not seeing?"

Amy assumed the pose of Rodin's The Thinker on her stool, her chin teed up on her hand, her brow furrowed into moguls of earnest contemplation. "Well, Dr. Quinn, I would be able to answer that if you had shared the data with me, but since I only know what I've collected or what I've analyzed personally, I'd have to say, scientifically speaking, beats me."

"Thanks," Nate said. He smiled in spite of himself.

"You said there was something there that you were close to finding. In the song, I mean. What is it?"

"Well, if I knew that, it would be found, wouldn't it?"

"You must suspect. You have to have a theory. Tell me, and let's apply the data to the theory. I'm willing to do the work, reconstruct the data, but you've got to trust me."

"No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while."

"So you don't really have a theory?"

"Clueless."

"You lying bag of fish heads."

"I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?"

"I'm not getting paid."

"See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact."

"So fire me." No longer The Thinker, Amy had taken on the aspect of a dark and evil elf.

"I think they're communicating," Nate said.

"Of course they're communicating, you maroon. You think they're singing because they like the sound of their own voices?"

"There's more to it than that."

"Well, tell me!"

"Who calls someone a maroon? What the hell is maroon?"

"It's a mook with a Ph.D. Don't change the subject."

"It doesn't matter. Without the acoustic data I can't even show you what I was thinking. Besides, I'm not sure that my cognitive powers aren't breaking down."

"Meaning what?"

Meaning that I'm starting to see things, he thought. Meaning that despite the fact that you're yelling at me, I really want to grab you and kiss you, he thought. Oh, I am so fucked, he thought. "Meaning I'm still a little hungover. I'm sorry. Let's see what we can put together from the notes."

Amy slipped off the stool and gathered the field journals in her arms.

"Where are you going?" Nate said. Had he somehow offended her?

"We have four days to put together a lecture. I'm going to go to my cabin and do it."

"How? On what?"

"I'm thinking, 'Humpbacks: Our Wet and Wondrous Pals of the Deep — »

"There's going to be a lot of researchers there. Biologists — " Nate interrupted.

" - and Why We Should Poke Them with Sticks. »

"Better," Nate said.

"I got it covered," she said, and she walked out.

For some reason he felt hopeful. Excited. Just for a second. Then, after he'd watched her walk out, a wave of melancholy swept over him and for the thirtieth time that day he regretted that he hadn't just become a pharmacist, or a charter captain, or something that made you feel more alive, like a pirate.

The old broad lived on a volcano and believed that the whales talked to her. She called about noon, and Nate knew it was her before he even answered. He knew, because she always called when it was too windy to go out.

"Nathan, why aren't you out in the channel?" the Old Broad said.

"Hello, Elizabeth, how are you today?"

"Don't change the subject. They told me that they want to talk to you. Today. Why aren't you out there?"

"You know why I'm not out there, Elizabeth. It's too windy. You can see the whitecaps as well as I can." From the slope of Haleakala, the Old Broad watched the activity in the channel with a two-hundred-power celestial telescope and a pair of "big eyes" binoculars that looked like stereo bazookas on precision mounts that were anchored into a ton of concrete.

"Well, they're upset that you're not out there. That's why I called."

"And I appreciate your calling, Elizabeth, but I'm in the middle of something."

Nate hoped he didn't sound too rude. The Old Broad meant well. And they, in a way, were all at the mercy of her generosity, for although she had «donated» the Papa Lani compound, she hadn't exactly signed it over to them. They were in a sort of permanent lease situation. Elizabeth Robinson was, however, very generous and very kindhearted indeed, even if she was a total loon.

"Nathan, I am not a total loon," she said.

Oh yes you are, he thought. "I know you're not," he said. "But I really have to get some work done today."

"What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.

"I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days." Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer.

"That shouldn't be hard. You've done that before, what, twenty times?"

"Yes, but someone broke in to the compound yesterday, Elizabeth. All my notes, the tapes, the analysis — it's all destroyed."

There was silence on the line for a moment. Nate could hear the Old Broad breathing. Finally, "I'm really sorry, Nathan. Is everyone all right?"

"Yes, it happened while we were out working."

"Is there anything I can do? I mean, I can't send much, but if — "

"No, we're all right. It's just a lot of work that I have to start over." The Old Broad might have been loaded at one time, and she certainly would be again if she sold the land where Papa Lani stood, but Nate didn't think that she had a lot of money to spare after the last bear market. Even if she did, this wasn't a problem that could be solved with cash.

"Well, then, you get back to work, but try to get out tomorrow. There's a big male out there who told me he wants you to bring him a hot pastrami on rye."

Nate grinned and almost snorted into the phone. "Elizabeth, you know they don't eat while they're in these waters."

"I'm just relaying the message, Nathan. Don't you snicker at me. He's a big male, broad, like he just came down from Alaska — frankly, I don't know why he'd be hungry, he's as big as a house. But anyway, Swiss and hot English mustard, he was very clear about that. He has very unusual markings on his flukes. I couldn't see them from here, but he says you'll know him."

Nate felt his face go numb with something approximating shock. "Elizabeth —»

"Call if you need anything, Nathan. My love to Clay. Aloha."

Nathan Quinn let the phone slip from his fingers, then zombie-stumbled out of the office and back to his own cabin, where he decided he was going to nap and keep napping until he woke up to a world that wasn't so irritatingly weird.

Right on the edge of a dream where he was gleefully steering a sixty-foot cabin cruiser up Second Street in downtown Seattle, plowing aside slow-moving vehicles while Amy, clad in a silver bikini and looking uncharacteristically tan, stood in the bow and waved to people who had come to the windows of their second-story offices to marvel at the freedom and power of the Mighty Quinn — right on the edge of a perfect dream, Clay burst into the room. Talking.

"Kona's moving into cabin six."

"Get some lines in the water, Amy," Nate said from the drears of morpheum opus. "We're coming up on Pike's Place Market, and there's fish to be had."

Clay waited, not quite smiling, not quite not, while Nate sat up and rubbed sleep from his eyes. "Driving a boat on the street?" Clay said, nodding. All skippers had that dream.

"Seattle," said Nate. "The Zodiac lives in cabin six."

"We haven't used the Zodiac in ten years, it won't hold air." Clay went to the closet that acted as a divider between the living/sleeping area and the kitchen. He pulled down a stack of sheets, then towels. "You wouldn't believe how they had this kid living, Nate. It was a tin industrial building, out by the airport. Twenty, thirty of them, in little stalls with cots and not enough room to swing a dead cat. The wiring was extension cords draped over the tops of the stalls. Six hundred a month for that."

Nate shrugged. "So? We lived that way the first couple of years. It's what you do. We might need cabin six for something. Storage or something."

"Nope," said Clay. "That place was a sweat box and a fire hazard. He's not living there. He's our guy."

"But Clay, he's only been with us for a day. He's probably a criminal."

"He's our guy," said Clay, and that was that. Clay had very strong views on loyalty. If Clay had decided that Kona was their guy, he was their guy.

"Okay," said Nate, feeling as if he had just invited the Medusa in for a sandwich. "The Old Broad called."

"How is she?"

"Still nuts."

"How're you?"

"Getting there."

CHAPTER SEVEN Sanctuary, Sanctuary, Cried the Humpback

When a visitor first drives into the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary — five baby blue shiplap buildings trimmed out in cobalt, crouching on the edge of the huge Maalaea Bay and overlooking the ruins of an ancient saltwater fish pond — his first reaction is usually "Hey, not much of a sanctuary. You could get maybe three whales in those buildings, tops." Soon, however, he realizes that these buildings are simply the offices and visitor centers. The sanctuary itself covers the channels that run from Molokai to the Big Island of Hawaii, between Maui, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, as well as the north shores of Oahu and Kauai, in which there is plenty of room for a whole bunch of whales, which is why they are kept there.

There were about a hundred people milling around outside the lecture hall when Nate and Amy pulled into the parking lot in the pickup.

"Looks like a good turnout?" Amy said. She'd attended only one of the sanctuary's weekly lectures, and that one had been given by Gilbert Box, an ill-tempered biologist doing survey work under a grant for the International Whaling Commission, who droned through numbers and graphs until the ten people in attendance would have killed a whale themselves just to shut him up.

"It's about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We're the sexy ones," Nate said with a grin.

Amy snorted. "Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world."

"We're action nerds," Nate said. "Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance."

"Nerds," Amy said.

Nate could see the skeletal Gilbert Box standing off to the side of the crowd under a straw hat whose brim was so wide it could have afforded shade for three additional people and behind a pair of enormous wraparound sunglasses suitable for welding or as a shield from nuclear flash. His gaunt face was still smeared with residue of the white zinc oxide he used for sun protection when out on the water. He wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers and leaned on a white sun umbrella that he was never seen without. It was a half hour before sunset, a warm breeze was coming off Maalaea Bay, and Gilbert Box looked like Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a few million lucky winners.

Nate had given Box the nickname "the Count," after the Sesame Street vampire with the obsessive-compulsive need to count things. (Nate had been too old for Sesame Street as a preschooler, but he'd watched it through grade ten while baby-sitting his younger brother, Sam.) People agreed that the Count was the perfect name for a survey guy with an aversion to water and sunlight, and the name had caught on even outside Nate and Clay's immediate sphere of influence.

Panic rattled up Nate's spine. "They're going to know we're faking it. The Count will call us on it the first time I say something that we don't have the data to back up."

"How's he going to know? You had the data a week ago. Besides, what's this 'we'? I'm just running the projector."

"Thanks."

"There's Tarwater," Amy said. "Who are those women he's talking to?"

"Probably just some whale huggers," Nate said, pretending that all of his mental faculties were required for him to squeeze the pickup into the four adjacent empty parking spaces. The women Tarwater was talking to were Margaret Painborne, Ph.D., and Elizabeth «Libby» Quinn, Ph.D. They worked together with a couple of very butch young women studying cow/calf behavior and social vocalizations. They were doing good work, Nate thought, even if it appeared to have a gender-based agenda. Margaret was in her late forties, short and round, with long gray hair that she kept perpetually tied back in a braid. Libby was almost a decade younger, long-legged and lean, blond hair going gray, cut short, and she had once, not too long ago, been Nathan Quinn's third wife. A second and totally different wave of anxiety swept over Quinn. This was the first time he'd encountered Libby since Amy joined the team.

"They don't look like whale huggers," Amy said. "They look like researchers."

"How is that?"

"They look like action nerds." Amy snorted again and crawled out of the truck.

"That's not very professional," Nate said, "that snorting-laugh thing you do." But Amy had already walked off toward the lecture hall, a carousel of slides under her arm.

Nate counted more than thirty researchers in the crowd as he walked up. And those were just the ones he was acquainted with. New people would be coming back and forth from the mainland all season — grad students, film crews, reporters, National Fisheries people, patrons — all hitchhiking on the very few research permits that were issued for the sanctuary.

For some reason Amy made a beeline for Cliff Hyland and his navy watchdog, Tarwater, who was out of uniform in Dockers and a Tommy Bahama shirt, but still out of place because his clothes were ironed to razor creases — his Topsiders had been spit-shined, and he stood as if there were a cold length of rebar wired to his spine.

"Hey, Amy," Cliff said. "Sorry to hear about the break-in. Bad?"

"We'll be all right," Amy said.

Nate strolled up behind Amy. "Hey, Cliff. Captain." He nodded to each.

"Sorry to hear about the break-in, Nate," Cliff said again. "Hope you guys didn't lose anything important."

"We're fucked," Nate said.

And Tarwater smiled — for the first time ever, Nate thought.

"We're fine." Amy grinned and brandished her carousel of slides like a talisman of power.

"I'm thinking about getting a job at Starbucks," Nate said.

"Hey, Cliff, what are you guys working on?" Amy asked, having somehow moved close enough into Cliff Hyland's personal space to have to look up at him with big, girly-blue eyes and the aspect of a fascinated child.

Nate cringed. It was… well, it was just not done. You didn't ask, not outright like that.

"Just some stuff for the navy," Cliff said, obviously wanting to back away from Amy, but knowing that if he did, somehow he'd lose face.

Nate watched while Amy grated his friend's middle-aged irrelevance against his male ego merely by stepping a foot closer. There, too, was a reaction from Tarwater, as the younger man seemed to be irritated by the fact that Amy was paying attention to Cliff. Or maybe he was just irritated with Amy because she was irritating. Sometimes Nate had to remind himself not to think like a biologist.

"You know, Cliff," Amy said, "I was looking at a map the other day — and I want you to brace yourself, because this may come as a shock — but there's no coastline in Iowa. I mean, doesn't that get in the way of studying marine mammals?"

"Sure, now you bring that up," Cliff said. "Where were you ten years ago when I accepted the position?"

"Middle school," Amy said. "What's in the big case on your boat? Sonar array? You guys doing another LFA study?"

Tarwater coughed.

"Amy," Nate interrupted, "we'd better get set up."

"Right," Amy said. "Nice seeing you guys."

She moved on. Nate grinned, just for a second. "Sorry, you know how it is?"

"Yeah." Cliff Hyland smiled. "We've got two grad students working with us this season."

"But we left our grommets at home, to analyze data," Tarwater added.

Nate and Cliff looked at each other like two old broken-toothed lions long driven from the pride — tired, but secure in the knowledge that if they teamed up, they could eat the younger male alive. Cliff shrugged, almost imperceptibly, that small gesture communicating, Sorry, Nate, I know he's an asshole, but what am I going to do? It's funding.

"I'd better go in," Nate said, patting the notes in his shirt pocket. He passed a couple more acquaintances, saying hello as he went by, then inside the door ran right into a minor nightmare: Amy talking to his ex-wife, Libby, and her partner, Margaret.

It had been like this: They'd met ten years ago, summer in Alaska, a remote lodge on Baranof Island on the Chatham Strait, where scientists were given access to a couple of rigid-hulled Zodiacs and all the canned beans, smoked salmon, and Russian vodka they could consume. Nate had come to observe the feeding behavior of his beloved humpbacks and record social sounds that might help him to interpret the song they sang when in Hawaii. Libby was doing biopsies on the population of resident (fish-eating) killer whales to prove that all the different pods were indeed part of one clan related by blood. He was two years divorced from his second wife. Libby, at thirty, was two months from finishing her doctoral dissertation in cetacean biology. Consequently, since high school she hadn't had time for anything but research — seasonal affairs with boat skippers, senior researchers, grad students, fishermen, and the occasional photographer or documentary filmmaker. She wasn't particularly promiscuous, but there was a sea of men you were set adrift in if you were going to study whales, and if you didn't want to spend your life alone, you pulled into a convenient, if scruffy, port from time to time. The transience of the work drove a lot of women out of the field. On the other hand, Nate tried to solve the male side of the equation by marrying other whale researchers, reasoning that only someone who was equally obsessed, distracted, and single-minded would be able to tolerate those qualities in a mate. That sort of reasoning, of course, was testament to the victory of romanticism over reason, irony over rationality, and pure foolishness over common sense. The only thing that being married to another scientist had gotten Nate was a reprieve from being asked what he was thinking about while lying in bed in a postcoital cuddle. They knew what he was thinking about, because they were thinking about the same thing: whales.

They were both lean and blond and weather-beaten, and one evening, as they were portaging gear from their respective Zodiacs, Libby unzipped her survival suit and tied the sleeves around her waist so she could move more freely. Nate said, "You look good in that."

No one, absolutely no one, looks good in a survival suit (unless a Day-Glo orange marshmallow man is your idea of a hot date), but Libby didn't even make the effort to roll her eyes. "I have vodka and a shower in my cabin," she said.

"I have a shower in my cabin, too," Nate said.

Libby just shook her head and trudged up the path to the lodge. Over her shoulder she called, "In five minutes there's going to be a naked woman in my shower. You got one of those?"

"Oh," said Nate.

They were both still lean, but no longer blond. Nate was completely gray, and Libby was getting there. She smiled when he approached. "We heard about the break-in, Nate. I meant to call you."

"That's okay," he said. "Not much you can do."

"That's what you think," Amy said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet as if she were going to explode or Tigger off across the room any second.

"I think these might mitigate the loss a little," Libby said. She slung her day pack off her shoulder, reached in, and came out with a handful of CDs in paper sleeves. "You forgot about these, I'll bet? You loaned them to us last season so we could pull off any social noises in the background."

"It's all the singer recordings from the last ten years," Amy said. "Isn't that great!"

Nate felt as if he might faint. To lose ten years' work, then reconcile the loss, only to have it handed back to him. He put his hand on Libby's shoulder to steady himself. "I don't know what to say. I thought you gave those back."

"We made copies." Margaret stepped over to Quinn and in doing so got a foot between him and his ex-wife. "You said it would be okay. We were only using them for comparison to our own samples."

"No, it's okay," Nate said. He almost patted her shoulder, but as he moved in that direction she flinched and he let his hand drop. "Thank you, Margaret."

Margaret had interposed herself completely between Nate and Libby, making a barrier of her own body (behavior she'd obviously picked up from her cow/calf studies — a humpback mother did the same thing when boats or amorous males approached her calf).

Amy snatched the handful of CDs from Libby. "I'd better go through these. I can probably come up with a few relevant samples to play along with the slides if I hurry."

"I'll go with you," Margaret said, eyeing Amy. "My handwriting on the catalog numbers leaves something to be desired."

And off they went toward the projection station in the middle of the hall, leaving Nate standing with Libby, wondering exactly what had just transpired.

"She really does have an extraordinary ass, Nate," Libby said as she watched Amy walk away.

"Yep," Nate said, not wanting to have this conversation. "She's very bright, too."

Sometime in the last week a tiny voice in his head had started asking, Could this get any weirder? In two minutes he'd gone from anxiety to embarrassment to anxiety to relief to gratitude to scoping chicks with his ex-wife. Oh, yes, little voice, it can always get weirder.

"I think Margaret may be on a recruiting mission," Libby said. "I hope she checked our budget before she left."

"Amy's working for free," Nate said.

Libby leaned up on tiptoes and whispered, "I believe that a starting position on the all-girl team has just opened up." Then she kissed his cheek. "You knock 'em dead tonight, Nate." And she was off after Amy and Margaret.

Clay and Kona arrived just as Libby walked away, and, irritatingly, Kona was checking out Libby from behind.

"Irie, Boss Nate. Who's the biscuit auntie suckin' face with ya?" (Like many authentic Hawaiians, Kona called any woman a generation older "auntie," even if he was horning after her.)

"You brought him here," Nate said to Clay without turning to face him.

"He's got to learn," Clay said. "Libby seemed friendly."

"She's chasing Amy."

"Oh, she a blackheart thief that would take a man's Snowy Biscuit to have a punaani nosh. That Snowy Biscuit belong our tribe."

"Libby was Nate's third wife," Clay volunteered, as if that would somehow immediately illuminate why the blackheart Libby was trying to steal the Snowy Biscuit from their tribe.

"Truth?" Kona said, shaking his great gorgonation of dreadlocks in rag-doll confusion. "You married a lesbian?"

"Whale willies," said Clay, adding neither insight nor illumination.

"I should go over my notes," Nate said.

CHAPTER EIGHT A Rippin' Talk

"Biology," said the pseudo Hawaiian, "dat bitch make sex puppets of everyone." Clay had just told him the story. The story was this:

Five years into her marriage to Nathan Quinn, Libby had gone for the summer to the Bering Sea to put satellite-tracking tags on female right whales. She had already begun working with Margaret Painborne, who was at the time trying to find out more about the mating and gestation behavior of right whales. The best way to do that was to keep constant tabs on the females. Now, sexing whales can be an incredibly difficult task, as their genitalia, for hydrodynamic reasons, are all internal. Without a biopsy or without being in the water with the animal (which means death in three minutes in the Bering Sea), about the only way to determine sex is to catch a female when she is with her calf or while the animals are mating. Libby and Margaret had decided to tag the animals while they were mating. Their base ship was an eighty-foot schooner loaned to the project by Scripps, but to do the actually tagging they used a nimble twelve-foot Zodiac with a forty-horse engine.

They'd spotted a female trying to evade the advances of two giant males. The right whale is one of the few animals in the world that uses a washout strategy for mating. That is, the females mate with several males, but the one who can wash out the others' seed most efficiently will pass his genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the guy with the largest tackle often wins, and male right whales have the biggest tackle in the world, with testes that weigh up to a ton and ten-foot penises that are not only long but prehensile, able to reach around a female from the side and introduce themselves on the sly.

Libby took the front of the boat, where she braced herself with a fifteen-foot fiberglass pole tipped with a barbed stainless point attached to the satellite unit. Margaret steered the outboard, maneuvering over frigid seven-foot seas, into the position where Libby could set the tag. Right whales are not particularly fast (whalers caught them in rowboats, for Christ's sake), but they are big and broad, and in the frenzy of a mating chase, a small Zodiac provides about as much protection from their thrashing, sixty-ton bodies as would wearing aluminum-foil armor to a joust. And noble Libby, action-girl nerd that she was, did look somewhat like a gallant knight in Day-Glo orange, her lance ready to strike as her trusty warhorse, Evinrude, powered her over the waves.

And as they approached the big female, a male on either side of her, the two sandwiching her so she could not escape, she rolled over onto her back, presenting her genitals to the sky. At that she slowed, and Margaret steered between the two tails of the males so Libby could set the tag. The female stopped then and floated up under the Zodiac. Margaret powered down the motor so as not to rake the animal with the prop.

"Shit!" Libby screamed. "Get us off! Get us off!" A swipe from the flukes of any of the animals would put them in the water, minutes from hypothermia and death. Libby had rolled her survival suit down so she could maneuver the harpoon. She'd be pulled under in seconds.

Suddenly, out of the water on either side of them came two huge penises, the males searching for their mark, moving closer to the female, producing waves that knocked the two women into the floor of the boat. Above them the two pink towers curved around looking for their target, feeling the edges of the boat, running slime across the rubber, over the biologists, poking, beating about, and generally abusing the women. The female now had the Zodiac centered exactly over her genitals, using the rubber boat as an ad hoc diaphragm. Then the two giant whale willies encountered one another in the middle of the Zodiac, and each evidently thinking that the other had found his target and not wanting to be left out, they let loose with great gushing gouts of sticky whale semen, filling the boat, covering the equipment, the scientists, washing the gunwales, swamping the motor, generally leaving everything but the gal whale completely and disgustingly jizzed. Mission accomplished, off they swam to strain a little postcoital krill out of the fray. Margaret suffered a concussion and a partially detached retina, Libby a dislocated shoulder and various scrapes and bruises, but the real trauma could not be assuaged with snaps, slings, and Betadine.

Several weeks later Libby rejoined Nate, who was down at the Chatham Strait with Clay filming feeding behavior. She walked into his cabin, hugged him, then stepped back and said, "Nate, I don't think I want to be married anymore." But what she really meant was "I'm done with penises forever, Nate, and pleasant as you are, I know that you are still attached to one. I've had my fill, so to speak. I'm moving on."

"Okay," Nate said. He told Clay later that for hours he had been feeling hungry and kept telling himself that he should stop working and go eat, but after Libby showed up, then left, he realized that he hadn't been hungry at all. The emptiness inside was from feeling lonesome. And Nate had stayed relatively lonesome and mostly heartbroken since that day (although he didn't whine about it, he just wore it). Clay didn't tell Kona this part. Confessions made over whiskey and campfires were privileged communication. Loyalty.

"So," said Nate, "Since the song appears, in most cases, to actually draw the attention of other males, who often join up with the singer, it would seem that the song cannot be directly connected to mating activity, other than it happens in the mating season. And since no one has actually observed humpbacks mating, even this assumption could be in error. If, indeed, the song is the male attempting to define his territory, it would seem ineffective, since other males tend to join singers, even those escorting cow/calf pairs. The study recommends that more studies be done to find out if there is, as previously thought, any direct correlation between humpback song and mating activity. Thank you. I'll take your questions."

Hands went up. Here it came: the crystal gazers, the whale buggers, the hippies, the hunters, the tourists, the developers, the wackos, the researchers (God help us, the researchers), and the idly curious. Nate didn't mind the curious. They were the only ones without an agenda. Everyone else was looking for confirmations, not answers. Should he go to a researcher first? Get it out of the way? Might as well go right to the dark side.

"Yes, Gilbert." He pointed to the Count. The tall researcher had taken off his sunglasses but had pulled down the brim of his hat as if to conceal the glowing red coals of his eyes. Or maybe Nate was just imagining that.

The Count said, "So with these small samplings — what was it, five instances of interactions among singers and others? — there's no real conclusion that you can reach about the relation to breeding or the robustness of the population? Correct?"

Nate sighed. Fuckwad, he thought. He spoke to the strange faces in the audience, the nonprofessionals. "As you know, Dr. Box, samples for whale-behavior studies are usually very small. It's understood that we have to extrapolate more from the data with whales than with other animals who are more easily observed. Small samples are an accepted limitation of the field."

"So what you are saying," Box continued, "is that you are trying to extrapolate the behavior of an animal that spends less than three percent of its time on the surface from observing its behavior on the surface. Isn't that akin to trying to extrapolate all of human civilization from looking at people's legs underwater at the beach? I mean, I don't see how you could possibly do it."

Nate looked around the room, hoping that one of the other behavior researchers might jump in, help him out, throw a bone to the podium, but apparently they were all finding the displays on the bulletin boards, the ceiling fans, or the wooden floor planks irresistibly interesting.

"Lately we've been spending more and more time observing the animals under the water. Clay Demodocus has over six hundred hours of videotape of humpback behavior underwater. But it's only recently, with digital videotape and rebreather technology, that underwater observation has become practical to do to any extent. And we still have the problem of propulsion. No diver can swim fast enough to keep up with the humpbacks when they're traveling. I think all the researchers in this room understand the value of observing the animals in the water, and it goes without saying that any research without consideration of underwater behavior is incomplete. You understand that, I'm sure, Dr. Box."

There were a few stifled snickers around the room. Nathan Quinn smiled. The Count would not go into the water, under any circumstances. He was either terrified of it or allergic to it, but it was obvious from watching him on his boat that he wanted no contact whatsoever with the water. Still, if he was going to get his funding from the International Whaling Commission, he had to get out there and count whales. On the water, never in it. Quinn believed that Box did bad science, and because of that he had gone into consulting, the "dark side." He performed studies and provided data for the highest bidder, and Nate had no doubt that the data was skewed to the agenda of the funding. Some nations in the IWC wanted to lift the moratorium on hunting whales, but first they had to prove that the populations had recovered enough to sustain hunting. Gilbert Box was getting them their numbers. Nate was happy to have embarrassed Box. He waited for the gaunt scientist to nod before he took the next question.

"Yes, Margaret."

"Your study seems to focus on the perspective of the male animals, without consideration for the female's role in the behavior. Could you speak to that?"

Jeez, what a surprise, thought Nate. "Well, I think there's good work being done on the cow/calf behavior, as well as on surface-active groups, which we assume is mating-related activity, but since my work concerns singers and as far as we know, all singers are males, I tend to observe more male behavior." There, that should do it.

"So you can't say definitively that the females are not the ones controlling the behavior?"

"Margaret, as my research assistant has repeatedly pointed out to me, the only thing I can say definitively about humpbacks is that they are big and wet."

Everyone laughed. Quinn looked at Amy and she winked at him, then, when he looked back to Margaret, he saw Libby beside her, winking at him as well. But at least the tension among the researchers was broken, and Quinn noticed that Captain Tarwater and Jon Thomas Fuller and his entourage were no longer raising their hands to ask questions. Perhaps they realized that they weren't going to learn anything, and they certainly didn't want to try to pursue their own agendas in front of a crowd and be slapped down the way Gilbert Box had. Quinn took the questions from the nonscientists.

"Could they just be saying hi?"

"Yes."

"If they don't eat here, and it's not for mating, then why do they sing?"

"That's a good question."

"Do you think they know that we've been contacted by aliens and are trying to contact the mother ship?"

Ah, always good to hear from the wacko fringe, Nate thought. "No, I don't think that."

"Maybe they're using their sonar to find other whales."

"As far as we know, baleen whales, toothless whales like the humpbacks who strain their food from the sea through sheets of baleen, don't echolocate the way toothed whales do."

"Why do they jump all the time? Other whales don't jump like that."

"Some think that they are sloughing skin or trying to knock off parasites, but after years of watching them, I think that they just like making a splash — the sensation of air on their skin. The way you might like to dangle your feet in a fountain. I think they're just goofing off."

"I heard that someone broke into your office and destroyed all of your research. Who do you think would want to do that?"

Nate paused. The woman who had asked the question was holding a reporter's steno pad. Maui Times, he guessed. She had stood to ask her question, as if she were attending a press conference rather than a casual lecture.

"What you have to ask yourself," said Nate, "is who could possibly care about research on singers?"

"And who would that be?"

"Me, a few people in this room, and perhaps a dozen or so researchers around the world. At least for now. Perhaps as we find out more, more people will be interested."

"So you're saying that someone in this room broke into your offices and destroyed all your research?"

"No. As a biologist, one of the things you have to guard against is applying motives where there are none and reading more into a behavior than the data actually support. Sort of like the answer to the 'why do they jump? question. You could say that it's part of an incredibly complex system of communication, and you might be right, but the obvious answer, and probably the correct one, is that the whales are goofing off. I think the break-in was just a random act of vandalism that has the appearance of motive." Bullshit, Quinn thought.

"Thank you, Dr. Quinn," said the reporter. She sat down.

"Thank you all for coming," said Nate.

Applause. Nate arranged his notes as people gathered around the podium.

"That was bullshit," Amy said.

"Complete bullshit," said Libby Quinn.

"What a load of crap," said Cliff Hyland.

"Rippin' talk, Doc," Kona said, "Marley's ghost was in ye."

CHAPTER NINE Relativity

Leathery bar girls worked the charter booths at the harbor, smoking Basic 100s and talking in voices that sounded like 151 rum poured into hot grease — a jigger of friendly to the liter of harsh. They were thirty-five or sixty-five, the color of mahogany, skinny and strong from living on boats, liquor, fish, and disappointment. They'd come here from a dozen coastal towns, some sailing from the mainland in small craft but forgetting to save enough courage for the trip home. Marooned. Man to man, boat to boat, year to year — salt and sun and drinking had left them dry enough to cough dust. If they lasted a hundred years — and some would — then one moonless night a great hooded wraith would swoop into the harbor and take them off to their own craggy island — uncharted and unseen more than once by any living man — and there they would keep the enchantment of the sea alive: lure lost sailors to the shore, suck out all of their fluids, and leave their desiccated husks crumbling on the rocks for the crabs and the black gulls. Thus were the sea hags born… but that's another story. Today they were just razzing Clay for leading two girls down the dock.

"Just like outboards, Clay, you gotta have two to make sure one's always running," called Margie, who had once, after ten mai-tais, tried to go down on the wooden sea captain who guarded the doorway of the Pioneer Inn.

Debbie, who had a secret source for little-boy pee that she put in the ears of the black-coral divers when they got ear infections, said, "You give that young one the first watch, Clay. Let her rest up a bit."

"Morning, ladies," Clay tossed over his shoulder. He was grinning and blushing, his ears showing red even where they weren't sunburned. Fifty years old, he'd dived every sea, been attacked by sharks, survived malaria and Malaysian pirates, ridden in a titanium ball with a window five miles down into the Tonga Trench, and still he blushed.

Clair, Clay's girlfriend of four years, a forty-year-old Japanese-Hawaiian schoolteacher who moved like she was doing the hula to a Sousa march (strange mix of regal order and island breeze), backhanded a hang-loose shaka at the cronettes and said, grinning, "She just along to pour buckets on his reels girls, keep him from burning up."

"Oh, you guys are so friggin' nautical," said Amy, who was wrestling with a huge Pelican case that held the rebreather. The case slipped out of her grip and barked her shin before she caught it. "Ouch. Damn it. Oh yeah, everyone loves your salty friggin' charm."

A chorus of cackles from the charter booths wheezed into coughing fits. Back to the cats, the cauldrons, the coconut oil, the sacred Jimmy Buffett songs sung at midnight into the ear of drunken, white-bearded Hemingway wannabes to make that rum-soaked member rise from the dead just this one last time. The leathery bar girls turned back to their business as Kona passed by.

"Irie, Sistah Amy. Give up ye burden," said Kona, bounding down the dock to sweep the heavy rebreather out of Amy's grip and up onto his shoulder.

Amy rubbed her arm. "Thanks. Where's Nate?"

"He go to the fuel dock to get coffee for the whole tribe. A lion, him."

"Yeah, he's a good guy. You'll be going out with him today. I have to go along with Clay and Clair as a safety diver."

"Slippers off in the boat," Clay said to Clair for the hundredth time. She rolled her eyes and kicked off her flip-flops before stepping down into the Always Confused. She offered Clay a hand, and he steadied her as if escorting a lady from the king's court to the ballroom floor.

Kona handed the rebreather down to Clay. "I can safety-dive."

"You'll never be able to clear your ears. You can't pinch your nostrils shut with those nose rings in."

"They come out. Look, out they come." He tossed the rings to Amy and she deftly sidestepped, letting them plop into the water.

"Oops."

"Amy's a certified diver, kid. Sorry. You're with Nate today."

"He know that?"

"Yeah, does he know that?" asked Clair.

"He will soon. Get those lines, would you, Amy."

"I can drive the boat." Kona was on the edge of pleading.

"No one but me drives the boat," said Clay.

"I'm driving the boat," corrected Clair.

"You have to sleep with Clay to drive the boat," said Amy.

"You just do what Nate tells you," Clay said. "You'll be fine."

"If I sleep with Amy can I drive the boat?"

"Nobody drives the boat," Clay said.

"I drive the boat," Clair said.

"Nobody sleeps with Amy," Amy said.

"I sleep with Amy," Clair said.

And everyone stopped and looked at Clair.

"Who wants cream?" asked Nate, arriving at that moment with a paper tray of coffee cups. "You can do your own sugar."

"That's what I'm saying," said Clair. "Sisters are doing it for themselves."

And Nate hung there in space, holding a cup and a sugar packet, a wooden stir stick, a baffled expression.

Clair grinned. "Kidding. Jeez, you guys."

Everyone breathed. Coffee was distributed, gear was loaded, Clay drove the Always Confused out of the harbor, pausing to wave to the Count and his crew, who were loading gear into a thirty-foot rigid-hull Zodiac normally used for parasailing. The Count pulled down the brim of his hat and stood in the bow of the Zodiac, his sun umbrella at port arms, looking like a skeletal statue of Washington crossing the Lethe. The crew waved, Gilbert Box scowled.

"I like him," Clay said. "He's predictable."

But Amy and Clair missed the comment. They were applying sunscreen and indulging in girl talk in the bow.

"You can talk like such a floozy sometimes," said Amy. "I wish I could be floozish."

Clair poked her in the leg with a long, red-lacquered fingernail. "Don't sell yourself short, pumpkin."

The ersatz Hawaiian stood on the bow rail like he was hanging ten off the twenty-two-foot Mako, waving to the Zodiac crew as they passed. "Irie, science dreadies! We be research jammin' now!" But when the Count ignored his greeting, Kona gave the traditional island response: "What, I owe you money?"

"Settle, Kona," Nate said. "And get down off of there."

Kona made his way back to the console. "Old white jacket givin' you the stink-eye. Why, he think you an agent of Babylon?"

"He does bad science. People come to me to ask me about him, I tell them he does bad science."

"And we do the good science?"

"We don't change our numbers to please the people who fund us. The Japanese want numbers that show recovery of the humpback population to levels where the IWC will let them start hunting them again. Gilbert tries to give them those numbers."

"Kill these humpies? No."

"Yes."

"No. Why?"

"To eat."

"No," said the blond Rastaman, shaking his head as if to clear the evil from his ears — his dreads fanning out into nappy spokes.

Quinn smiled to himself. The moratorium had been in effect since before Kona was born. As far as the kid knew, whales had been and always would be safe from hunters. Quinn knew better. "Eating whale is very traditional in Japan. It sort of has the ritual of our Thanksgiving. But it's dying out."

"Then it's all good."

"No. There are a lot of old men who want to bring back whale hunting as a tradition. The Japanese whaling industry is subsidized by the government. It's not even a viable business. They serve whale meat in the school-lunch program so kids will develop a taste for it."

"No. No one eats the whale."

"The IWC allows them to kill five hundred minke whales a year, but they kill more. And biologists have found whale meat from half a dozen endangered whale species in Japanese markets. They try to pass it off as minke whale, but the DNA doesn't lie."

"Minke? That devil in the white war paint killing our minke?"

"We don't have any minkes here in Hawaii."

"Course not, the Count killing them. We going to chant down this evil fuckery." Kona dug into his red, gold, and green fanny pack. Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed.

"Slow de boat, brah. I got to spark up for freedom. Chant down Babylon, go into battle for Jah's glory, mon. Slow de boat."

"Put that away."

Kona paused, his Bic lighter poised over the bowl. "Take de ship home to Zion, brah?"

"No, we have work to do." Nate slowed the boat and killed the motor. They were about a mile off Lahaina.

"Chant down Babylon?" Kona raised the lighter.

"No. Put that away. I'll show you how to drop the hydrophone." Quinn checked the tape in the recorder on the console.

"Save our minkes?" Kona waved the lighter, unlit, in circles over the bowl.

"Did Clay show you how to take an ID photo?" Nate pulled the hydrophone and the coil of cord out of its case.

"Ride Jah's herb into the mystic?"

"No! Put that away and get the camera out of that cabinet in the bow."

Kona broke down the bong with a series of whirs and clicks and put it back in his fanny pack. "All right, brah, but when they have eated all your minkes, will not be Jah's fault."

An hour later, after listening, and moving, and listening again, they had found their singer. Kona stood balanced on the gunwale of the boat staring down in wonder at the big male, who was parked under the boat making a sound approximating that of a kidnap victim trying to scream through duct tape.

Kona would look from the whale to Nate, grin, then look back to the whale again, the whole time perched and balanced on the gunwale like a gargoyle on the parapet of a building. Nate guessed that he would be able to hold that position for about two minutes before his knees locked permanently and he'd be forced to finish life in a toadish squat. Still, he envied Kona the enthusiasm of discovery, the fascination and excitement of being around these great animals for the first time. He envied him his youth and his strength. And, listening to the song in the headphones, the song that seemed so clearly to be a statement of mating and yet refused to give up any direct evidence that it was, Nate felt a profound irrelevance. Sexually, socially, intellectually, fiscally, scientifically irrelevant — a sack of borrowed atoms lumpily arranged in a Nate shape. No effect, purpose, or stability.

He tried to listen more closely to what the whale was doing, to lose himself in analyzing what exactly was going on below, but that merely seemed to underscore the suspicion that not only was he getting old, he might be going crazy. This was the first time he'd been out since the "bite me" incident, and since then he had convinced himself that it must have been some sort of hallucination. Still, he cringed a bit every time the whale humped its tail to dive, expecting to see a message scrawled across the flukes.

"He's making them up noises, boss."

Nate nodded. The kid was learning fast. "Get your camera ready, Kona. He'll breathe three, maybe four times before he dives, so be ready."

Abruptly the singing in the headphones stopped. Nate pulled up the hydrophone and started the engine. They waited.

"He went that way, boss," Kona said, pointing off to the starboard side. Nate turned the boat slowly in place and waited.

They were looking in the direction in which Kona had seen the whale moving underwater when he surfaced behind them, not ten feet away from the boat, the blow making both of them jump, the spray wafting across them in a rainbow cloud.

"Ho! Dat buggah up, boss!"

"Thank you, Captain Obvious," Nate said under his breath. He pulled down the throttle and came in behind the whale. On its next breath the whale rolled and slapped a long pectoral fin on the surface, soaking Kona and throwing heavy spray over the console. At least the kid had had the sense to use his body to shield the camera from the splash.

"I love this whale!" Kona said, his Rastaspeak melting, leaving behind a middle-class Jersey accent. "I want to take this whale home and put him in a box with grass and rocks. Buy him squeaky toys."

"Get ready for your ID shot," Nate instructed.

"When we're done with him, can I keep him? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeze!"

"Here he goes, Kona. Focus."

The whale humped, then fluked, and Kona fired off four quick frames with the motor drive.

"You get it?"

"Rippin' pics. Rippin'!" Kona put the camera down on the seat in front of the console and covered it with a towel.

Nate pointed the boat toward the last fluke print, a twenty-foot lens of smooth water formed on the surface by the turbulence of the whale's tail. These lenses would hold on the surface sometimes for as long as two minutes, serving as windows through which the researchers could watch the whales. In the old whaling days the hunters believed that fluke prints had been caused by oil excreted by the whale. Nate cut the engine and let the boat coast over the fluke print. They could hear the whale song coming up from below and could feel the boat vibrating under their feet.

Nate dropped the hydrophones, hit the «record» button, and put on the headphones. Kona was recording the frame numbers and GPS coordinates in the notebook as Nate had taught him. A monkey can do my job, Nate thought. An hour's experience and this stoner is already doing it. This kid is younger, stronger, and faster than I am, and I'm not even sure that I'm smarter, as if that matters. I'm totally irrelevant.

But maybe it did matter. Maybe it wasn't all about strength. Culture and language completely screwed up normal biological evolution. Why would we humans have developed such big brains if mating was always predicated on strength and size? Women must have chosen their mates based on intelligence as well. Perhaps early smart guys would say something like "There, right behind those rocks, there's a tasty sloth ripe for the spearing. Go get him, guys." Then, after he'd sent the stronger, dumber guys running off a cliff after the imaginary sloth, he'd settle down with the best of the Cro-Magnon cuties to mix some genes. "That's right, bite my brow ridge. Bite it!" Nate smiled.

Kona was looking over the side at the singer, whose tail was only twenty feet below the boat (although his head was forty feet deeper). He was only a couple of minutes into his song. He'd be down at least ten minutes more.

"Kona, we need to get a DNA sample."

"How we do that?"

Nate pulled a set of flippers out of the console and handed them and an empty coffee cup out to the surfer. "You're going to need to go get a semen sample."

The surfer gulped. Looked at the whale, looked at the cup, looked over the side at the whale again. "No lid?"

CHAPTER TEN Safety

Clay Demodocus drifted silently down past the tail of the breath-holder, only the quiet hissing of his own breath in his ears. Breath-holders were called such because they hung there in the water for up to forty minutes, heads down like a singer, just holding their breath. Not swimming or singing or doing much of anything else. Just hanging there, sometimes three or four of them, tails spread out like the points of a compass. As if someone had just dropped a handful of sleeping whales and forgotten to pick them up. Except they weren't sleeping. Whales didn't really sleep, as far as they knew. Well, the theory was that they slept with only half of their brain at a time, while the other half took care of not drowning. For an air-breather, sleeping in the water and not drowning is a big problem. (Go ahead, try it. We'll wait.)

Falling asleep would be so easy with the rebreather, Clay thought. It was very quiet, which was why Clay was using it. Instead of using a tank of air that was exhaled through a regulator into the water as bubbles, the rebreather sent the diver's exhalation back through a scrubber that took out the carbon dioxide, past some sensors and a tank that added some oxygen, then back to the diver to be rebreathed. No bubbles, which made the rebreather perfect for studying whales (and for sneaking up on enemy ships, which is why the navy had developed it in the first place). Humpbacks used bubble blowing as a means of communication, especially the males, who threatened one another with bubble displays. Consequently it was nearly impossible to get close to a whale with scuba gear, especially a static animal like a singer or a breath-holder. By blowing bubbles the diver was babbling away in whalespeak, without the slightest idea of what he was saying. In the past Clay had dropped on breath-holders with scuba gear, only to watch the animals swim off before he got within fifty feet of them. He imagined the whales saying, "Hey, it's the skinny, retarded kid talking nonsense again. Let's get out of here."

But this season they'd gotten the rebreather, and Clay was getting his first ever decent footage of a breath-holder. As he drifted by the tail, he checked his gauges, looked up to see Amy snorkeling at the surface, silhouetted in a sunbeam, a small tank strapped on her back ready to come to his rescue should something go wrong. The one big drawback to the rebreather (rather than a fairly simple hose on a tank as in a scuba setup) was that it was a very complex machine, and, should it break, there was a good chance it would kill the diver. (Clay's experience had taught him that the one thing you could depend on was that something would break.)

Around him, except for the whale, was a field of clear blue; below, nothing but blue. Even with great visibility he couldn't see the bottom, some five hundred feet down.

Just past the tail he was at a hundred feet. The navy had tested the rebreather to more than a thousand feet (and since he could theoretically stay down for sixteen hours if he needed to, decompression wasn't a problem), but Clay was still wary of going too deep. The rebreather wasn't set to mix gases for a deep dive, so there was still the danger of nitrogen narcosis — a sort of intoxication caused by pressurized nitrogen in the bloodstream. Clay had been narced a couple of times, once while under arctic ice filming beluga whales, and if he hadn't been tethered to the opening in the ice with a nylon line, he would have drowned.

Just a few more feet and he'd be able to sex the breath-holder, something that they hadn't done more than a few times before, and then it was by crossbow and DNA. The question so far was, are breath-holders all male like singers, and if so, does the breath-holding behavior have something to do with the singing behavior? Clay and Quinn had first come together over the question of sexing singers, some seventeen years before, when DNA testing was so rare as to be nearly nonexistent. "Can you get under the tail?" Nate had asked. "Get photos of the genitals?"

"Kinky," Clay had said. "Sure, I'll give it a try."

Of course, except for a few occasions when he was able to hold his breath long enough to get under an animal, about a third of the time, Clay had failed at producing whale porn. Now, with this rebreather…

As he drifted below the tail, so close now that even the wide-angle lens could take in only a third of the flukes, Clay noticed some unusual markings on the tail. He looked up from the display just as the whale began to move, but it was too late. The whale twitched, and the massive tail came down on Clay's head, driving him some twenty feet deeper in an instant. The wash from the flukes tumbled him backward three times before he settled in a slow drift to the bottom, unconscious.

As he watched the pseudo-Hawaiian try to kick down to the singing whale for the eighth time, Nathan Quinn thought, This is a rite of passage. Similar things were done to me when I was a grad student. Didn't Dr. Ryder send me out to get close-up blowhole pictures of a gray whale who had a hideous head cold? Wasn't I hit by a basketball-size gob of whale snot nearly every time the whale surfaced? And wasn't I, ultimately, grateful for the opportunity to get out in the field and do some real research? Of course I was. Therefore, I am being neither cruel nor unprofessional by sending this young man down again and again to perform a hand job on the singer.

The radio chirped, signaling a call from the Always Confused. Nate keyed the mike button on the mobile phone/two-way radio they used to communicate between the two boats. "Go ahead, Clay."

"Nate, it's Clair. Clay went down about fifteen minutes ago, but Amy just dove after him with the rescue tank. I don't know what to do. They're too deep. I can't see them. The whale took off, and I can't see them."

"Where are you, Clair?"

"Straight out, about two miles off the dump."

Nate grabbed the binoculars and scanned the island, found the dump, looked out from there. He could make out two or three boats in the area. Six or eight minutes away at full throttle.

"Keep looking, Clair. Get ready to drop a hang tank if you have one set up, in case they need to decompress. I'll be there as soon as I get the kid out of the water."

"What's he doing in the water?"

"Just a bad decision on my part. Keep me apprised, Clair. Try to follow Amy's bubbles if you can find them. You'll want to be as close to them as you can when they come up."

Nate started the engine just as Kona broke the surface, spitting out the snorkel and taking in a great gasp of air. Kona shook his head, signifying that he hadn't accomplished the mission. "Too deep, boss."

"Come, come, come. To the side." Nate waved him to the boat. Quinn brought the boat broadside to Kona, then reached over with both hands. "Come on." Kona took his hands, and Quinn jerked the surfer over the gunwale. Kona landed in a heap in the bottom of the boat.

"Boss —»

"Hang on, Clay's in trouble."

"But, boss —»

Quinn buried the throttle, yanked the boat around, and cringed at the bunny-in-a-blender screech as the hydrophone cord wrapped around the prop, sheared the prop pin, and chopped itself into a whole package of expensive, waterproof licorice sticks.

"Fuck!" Nate snatched off his baseball cap and whipped it onto the console.

The hydrophone sank peacefully to the bottom, bopping the singer on the back as it went. Nate killed the engine and grabbed the radio. "Clair, are they up yet? I'm not going to be able to get there."

Amy felt as if someone were driving huge ice picks into her eardrums. She pinched her nostrils closed and blew to equalize the pressure, even as she kicked to go deeper, but she was moving too fast to get equalized.

She was down fifty feet now. Clay was a hundred feet below her, the pressure would triple before she got there. She felt as if she were swimming through thick, blue honey. She'd seen the whale tail hit Clay and toss him back, but the good news was that she hadn't seen a cloud of bubbles come up. There was a chance that the regulator had stayed in Clay's mouth and he was still breathing. Of course, it could also mean that he was dead or that his neck had snapped and he was paralyzed. Whatever his condition, he certainly wasn't moving voluntarily, just sinking slowly, relentlessly toward the bottom.

Amy fought the pressure, the resistance of the water, and did math problems as she kicked deeper. The rescue tank held only a thousand pounds of air, a third of the capacity of a normal tank. She guessed that she'd be at around a hundred and seventy-five to two hundred feet before she caught Clay. That would give her just enough air to get him to the surface without stopping to decompress. Even if Clay was unhurt, there was a good chance he was going to get decompression sickness, the bends, and if he lived through that, he'd spend three or four days in the hyperbaric decompression chamber in Honolulu.

Ah, the big palooka is probably dead anyway, she thought, trying to cheer herself up.

Although Clay Demodocus had lived a life spiced with adventures, he was not an adventurer. Like Nate, he did not seek danger, risk, or fulfillment by testing his mettle against nature. He sought calm weather, gentle seas, comfortable accommodations, kind and loyal people, and safety, and it was only for the work that he compromised any of those goals. The last to go, the least compromised, was safety. The loss of his father, a hard-helmet sponge diver, had taught him that. The old man was just touching bottom at eight hundred feet when a drunken deck hand dragged his ass across the engine start button, causing the prop to cut his father's air line. The pressure immediately drove Papa Demodocus's entire body into the bronze helmet, leaving only his weighted shoes showing, and it was in his great helmet that he was lowered into the grave. Little Clay (Cleandros in those days in Greece) was only five at the time, and that last vision of his father haunted him for years. He never did see a Marvin the Martian cartoon — that great goofy helmet body riding cartoon shoes — when he did not have to fight a tear and sniffle for Papa.

As Clay drifted down into the briny blue, he saw a bright light and a dark shape waiting there on the other side. Out of the light came a short but familiar figure. The face was still dark, but Clay knew the voice, even after so many years. "Welcome, Earth Being," said the vacuum-packed Greek.

"Papa," said Clay.

Clair dragged the heavy tank out of the Always Confused's bait well and tried to attach the regulator in order to hang it off a line for Amy and Clay to breathe from so they could decompress before coming up. Clay had shown her how to do this a dozen times, but she had never paid attention. It was his job to put the technothingies together. She didn't need to know this stuff. It wasn't as if she was ever going to go diving without him. She'd let him drone on about safety this and life-threatening that while she applied her attention to putting on sunscreen or braiding her hair so it wouldn't tangle in the equipment. Now she was blinking back tears and cursing herself for not having listened. When she thought she finally might have the regulator screwed on correctly, she grabbed it and dragged the tank to the side of the boat. The regulator came off in her hands.

"Goddamn it!" She snatched the radio and keyed the mike. "Nate, I need some help here."

"Go ahead, sistah," came back. "He be in the briny blue, fixing the propeller."

"Kona, do you know how a regulator goes on a scuba tank?"

"Yah mon, you got to keep the bowl above the water or your herb get wet and won't take the fire."

Clair took a deep breath and fought back a sob. "See if you can put Nate on."

Back on the Constantly Baffled, Nate was in the water with snorkel and fins fighting the weight of half a dozen wrenches and sockets he'd put in the pockets of his cargo shorts. He almost had the propeller off the boat. With luck he could install the shear pin and be up and running in a couple of minutes. It wasn't a complex procedure. It had just been made a lot trickier when Nate found that he couldn't reach the prop to work on it from inside the boat. Then, suddenly, his air supply was cut off.

He kicked up, spit the snorkel out of his mouth, and found himself staring Kona right in the face. The fake Hawaiian hung over the back of the boat, his thumb covering the end of Nate's snorkel, his other hand holding the radio, which he'd let slip halfway underwater.

"Call for you, boss."

Nate gasped and snatched the receiver out of Kona's hand — held it up out of the water. "What in the hell are you doing? That's not waterproof." He tried to sling the water out of the cell phone and keyed the mike. "Clair! Can you hear me?" No sound, not even static.

"But it's yellow," said Kona, as if that explained everything.

"I can see it's yellow. What did Clair say? Is Clay all right?"

"She wanted to know how to put the regulator on the tank. You have to keep the bowl above the water, I tell her."

"It's not a bong, you idiot. It's a real scuba tank. Help me out."

Nate handed up his fins, then stepped on the trim planes on the stern and pulled himself into the boat. At the console he turned on the marine radio and started calling. "Clair, you listening? This is the Constantly Baffled calling the Always Confused. Clair, are you there?"

"Constantly Baffled," cut in a stern, official-sounding male voice, "this is the Department of Conservation and Resources Enforcement. Are you displaying your permit flag?"

"Conservation, we have an emergency situation, a diver in trouble off our other boat. I'm dead in the water with a broken shear pin. The other boat is roughly two miles off the dump."

"Constantly Baffled, why are you not displaying your permit flag?"

"Because I forgot to put the damn thing up. We have two divers in the water, both possibly in trouble, and the woman on board is unable to put together a hang tank." Nate looked around. He could see the whale cops' boat about a thousand yards to the west toward Lanai. They were alongside another boat. Nate could see the familiar figure of the Count standing in the bow, looming there like doom in an Easter bonnet. Bastard!

"Constantly Baffled, hold there, we are coming to you."

"Don't come to me. I'm not going anywhere. Go to the other boat. Repeat, they have an emergency situation and are not responding to marine radio."

The Conservation Enforcement boat lifted up in the water under the power of two 125-horse Honda outboards and beelined toward them.

"Fuck!"

Nate dropped the mike and started to shake, a shiver born not of temperature, as it was eighty degrees on the channel, but out of frustration and fear. What had happened to Clay to prompt Amy to go to his rescue? Maybe she had misjudged the situation and gone down needlessly. She didn't have much experience in the water, or at least he didn't think she had. But if things were okay, then why weren't they up…?

"Kona, did Clair say whether she could see Amy and Clay?

"No, boss, she just wanted to know about the regulator." Kona sat down in the bottom of the boat and hung his head between his knees. "I'm sorry, boss. I thought if it was yellow, it could go in the water. I didn't know. It slipped."

Nate wanted to tell the kid it was all right, but he didn't like lying to people. "Clay put you on the research permit, right, Kona? You remember signing a paper with a lot of names on it?"

"No, mon. That five-oh coming up now?"

"Yeah, whale cops. And if Clay didn't put you on the permit, you're going to be going home with them."

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Mermaid and the Martian

The depth gauge read two hundred feet by the time Amy finally snagged the top of Clay's rebreather and pulled herself down to where she was looking into his mask. If it weren't for a small trail of blood streaming from his scalp, making him look like he was leaking black motor oil into the blue, he might have been sleeping, and she smiled in spite of herself. The sea dog survives. Somehow — maybe through years of conditioning his reflexes to keep his mouth shut — Clay had bitten down on the mouthpiece of the rebreather. He was breathing steadily. She could hear the hiss of the apparatus.

She wasn't sure that Clay's mouthpiece would stay in all the way to the surface, and, if it came out, the photographer would surely drown, even if she replaced it quickly. Unlike a normal scuba regulator, which was frightfully easy to purge, you couldn't let water get into a rebreather or it could foul the carbon-dioxide scrubbers and render the device useless. And she'd need both her hands for the swim up. One to hold on to Clay and one to vent air from his buoyancy-control vest, which would fill with air as they rose, causing them both to shoot to the surface and get the bends. (Amy wasn't wearing a BC vest or a wet suit; she wasn't supposed to have needed them.) After wasting a precious thirty seconds of air to consider the problem, she took off her bikini top and wrapped it around Clay's head to secure his mouthpiece. Then she hooked her hand into his buoyancy vest and started the slow kick to the surface.

At a hundred and fifty feet she made the mistake of looking up. The surface might have been a mile away. Then she checked her watch and pulled up Clay's arm so she could see the dive computer on his wrist. Already the liquid-crystal readout was blinking, telling her that Clay needed two decompression stops on the way up. One at fifty feet and one at twenty, from ten to fifteen minutes each. With his rebreather he'd have plenty of air. Amy wasn't wearing a dive computer, but by ball-parking it from her pressure gauge, she figured she had between five and ten minutes of air left. She was about half an hour short.

Well, this is going to be awkward, she thought.

The whale cops wore light blue uniform shirts with shorts and aviator-style mirrored sunglasses that looked as if they'd been surgically set into their faces. They were both in their thirties and had spent some time in the gym, although one was heavier and had rolled up his short sleeves to let his grapefruit biceps breathe. The other was thin and wiry. They brought their boat alongside Nate's and threw over a bumper to keep the boats from rubbing together in the waves.

"Howzit, bruddahs!" Kona said.

"Not now," Nate whispered.

"I need to see your permit," said the heavier cop.

Nate had pulled a plastic envelope out from under the console as they approached. They went through this several times a year. He handed it over to the cop, who took out the document and unfolded it.

"I'll need both of your IDs."

"Come on," Nate said, handing over his driver's license. "You guys know me. Look, we've sheared a pin and there's a diver emergency on our other boat."

"You want us to call the Coast Guard?"

"No, I want you to take us over there."

"That's not what we do, Dr. Quinn," said the thin cop, looking up from the permit. "The Coast Guard is equipped for emergencies. We are not."

"Dis haole, lolo pela, him," said Kona. (Meaning, he's just a dumb white guy.)

"Don't talk that shit to me," said the heavier cop. "You want to speak Hawaiian, I'll talk to you in Hawaiian, but don't talk that pidgin shit to me. Now, where's your ID?"

"Back at my cabin."

"Dr. Quinn, your people need to have ID at all times on a research vessel, you know that."

"He's new."

"What's your name, kid?"

"Pelekekona Keohokalole," said Kona.

The cop took off his sunglasses — for the first time ever, Nate thought. He looked at Kona.

"You're not on the permit."

"Try Preston Applebaum," said Kona.

"Are you trying to fuck with me?"

"He is," said Nate. "Just take him in, and on the way take me to our other boat."

"I think we'll tow both of you in and deal with the permit issues when we get into harbor."

Suddenly, amid the static of the marine radio on in the background, Clair's voice: "Nate, are you there? I lost Amy's bubbles. I can't see her bubbles. I need help here! Nate! Anyone!"

Nate looked at the whale cop, who looked at his partner, who looked away.

Kona jumped up on the gunwale of the police boat and leaned into the wiry cop's face. "Can we do the territorial macho power trip after we get our divers out of the water, or do you have to kill two people to show us how big your fucking dicks are?"

Clair ran around the boat searching for Amy's bubble trail, hoping she was just missing it, had lost it in the waves — hoping that it was still there. She looked at the hang tank sitting in the floor of the boat, still unattached to the regulator, then ran back to the radios, keying both the marine radio and the cell-phone radio and trying not to scream.

"SOS here. Please, I'm a couple of miles off the dump, I have divers down, in trouble."

The harbormaster at Lahaina came back, said he'd send someone, and then a dive boat who was out at the lava cathedrals at Lanai said they had to get their divers out of the water but could be there in thirty minutes. Then Nathan Quinn came back.

"Clair, this is Nate. I'm on the way. How long ago did the bubbles stop?"

"Clair checked her watch. Four, five minutes ago."

"Can you see them?"

"No, nothing. Amy went deep, Nate. I watched her go down until she disappeared."

"Do you have hang tanks in the water?"

"No, I can't get the damn regulators on. Clay always did it."

"Just tie off the tanks and tie the regulators to the tanks and get them over the side. Amy and Clay can hook them up if they get to them."

"How deep? I have three tanks."

"Ninety, sixty, and thirty. Just get them in the water, Clair. We'll worry about exact depth when I get there. Just hang them so they can find them. Tie glow sticks on them if you have any. Should be there in five minutes. We can see you."

Clair started tying the plastic line around the necks of the heavy scuba tanks. Every few seconds she scanned the waves for signs of Amy's bubbles, but there weren't any. Nate had said "If they get to them." She blinked away tears and concentrated on her knots. If? Well if Clay made it back — when he made it back — he could damn sure get himself a safer job. Her man wasn't going to drown hundreds of feet under the ocean, because from now on he was going to be taking pictures of weddings or bar mitzvahs or kids at JC Penney's or some goddamn thing on dry land.

Across the channel, near the shore of Kahoolawe, the target island, Libby Quinn had been following the exchange between Clair and Nate over the marine radio. Without being asked, her partner, Margaret, said, "We don't have any diving equipment on board. That deep, there's not much we could do."

"Clay's immortal anyway," said Libby, trying to sound more blasé than she felt. "He'll come up yammering about what great footage he got."

"Call them, offer our help," the older woman said. "If we deny our instincts as caretakers, we deny ourselves as women."

"Oh, fuck off, Margaret! I'm calling to offer our help because it's the right thing to do."

Meanwhile, on the ocean side of Kahoolawe, Cliff Hyland was sitting in the makeshift lab belowdecks in the cabin cruiser, headphones on, watching an oscilloscope readout, when one of his grad students came into the cabin and grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Sounds like Nathan Quinn's group is in trouble," said the girl, a sun-baked brunette wearing zinc-oxide war paint on her nose and cheeks and a hat the size of a garbage-can lid.

Hyland pulled up the headphones. "What? Who? Fire? Sinking? What?"

"They've lost two divers. That photographer guy Clay and that pale girl."

"Where are they?"

"About two miles off the dump. They're not asking for help. I just thought you should know."

"That's a ways. Start reeling in the array. We can be there in a half hour maybe."

Just then Captain Tarwater came down the steps into the cabin. "Stay that order, grommet. Stay on mission. We have a survey to finish today — and a charge to record."

"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."

Before the surfer was out the door, Nate had turned to the monitor and started mapping out peaks in the wave pattern of the low end of the whale song. He'd need to look up some articles on blue-whale calls — the lowest, loudest, longest-traveling calls on the planet — and he'd have to see if anyone had done any numerical analysis on dolphin sonar clicks, and that was all he could think of right at the moment. In the meantime he had to have enough of a sample to see if there was any meaning there. It was ridiculous, of course. It would never be so simple, nor could it be so complex. Of course you could assign values of one or zero to parts of the song — that was easy. It didn't mean there would be any meaning to it. It wouldn't necessarily answer any of their questions, but it was a different way of looking at things. Whale-call binary, no.

Two hours later he was still assigning ones and zeroes to different microoscillations in wave patterns of different songs and felt as if he might actually, strangely, amazingly, be learning something, when Clay came through the door wearing a knee-length pink kimono emblazoned with huge white chrysanthemums. There was a small bandage on his forehead and what appeared to be a lipstick smear that ran from his mouth to his right ear.

"Any beer in there?" Clay nodded to the kitchen. The office cabin, like all the others at Papa Lani, had once been living quarters for a whole family, so it had a full kitchen in addition to the great room they used for a main office, two smaller rooms they used for storage, and a bathroom. Clay padded past and threw open the refrigerator. "Nope. Water, I guess. I'm really dehydrated."

"You okay," Nate said. "How was the CAT scan?"

"I'm cat free." Clay came back to the office and fell into the chair in front of his broken monitor. "Thirteen stitches in my scalp, maybe a mild concussion. I'll be okay. Clair may kill me yet tonight, though — heart attack, stroke, affection. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring out the passion in a woman. You can't believe the stuff that woman is doing to me. And she's a schoolteacher. It's shameful." Clay grinned, and Nate noticed a little lipstick on his teeth.

"So that's shame?" Nate gestured for Clay to wipe his mouth.

The photographer took a swipe across his mug, came up with a handful of color, and examined it. "No, I think that's strawberry lip gloss. A woman her age wearing flavored lip gloss. The shame is in my heart."

"You really had her worried, Clay. Me, too. If Amy hadn't kept her head… well —»

"I fucked up. I know it. I started living in the viewfinder and forgot where I was. It was an amateurish mistake. But you can't believe the footage I was getting using the rebreather. It's going to be amazing for singers. I'm finally going to be able to get underneath them, beside them, whatever you need. I just need to remember where I am."

"You're unbelievably lucky." Nate knew that any lecture he might come up with, Clay had already put himself through a dozen times. Still, he had to say it. Regardless of the outcome, he had endured the loss of his friend, even if was for only forty minutes or so. "Unconscious, that deep, for that long — you used up a lot of lives on that one, Clay. The fact that your mouthpiece stayed in is a miracle."

"Well, that part wasn't an accident. I have the hoses tight because the rebreather is so temperamental about getting water in it. Over the years I've had mouthpieces knocked out of my mouth a hundred times, kicked out by another diver, camera caught on it, hit by a dolphin. Since you have to keep your head back to film most of the time anyway, with the hoses short so the thing stays in your mouth, it's just a matter of keeping the seal. Man's only instinct is to suck."

"And you suck, is that what you're saying?"

"Look, Nate, I know you're mad, but I'm okay. Something was going on with that animal. It distracted me. It won't happen again. I owe it to the kid, though."

"We thought we'd lost her, too."

"She's good, Nate. Really good. She kept her head, she did what needed to be done, and damned if I know how she did it, but she brought my ancient ass up alive and without the bends. Situation was reversed, I would have never done the decompression stops, but it turns out she did the right thing. You can't teach that kind of judgment."

"You're just trying to change the subject."

Clay was indeed trying to change the subject. "How'd Toronto do against Edmonton tonight?"

Oh, sure, thought Nate, try to appeal to his inherent Canadian weakness for hockey. Like playing the hockey card would distract him from — "I don't know. Let's check the score."

From outside the screen door came Clair's voice. "Clay Demodocus, are you wearing my robe?"

"Why, yes, dear, I am," said Clay, shooting an embarrassed glance at Quinn, as if he'd only just noticed that he was wearing a woman's kimono.

"Well, that would mean that I'm wearing nothing, wouldn't it?" said Clair. She wasn't close enough to the door for him to actually see her through the screen, but Quinn had no doubt she was naked, had her hip cocked, and was tapping a foot in the sand.

"I guess," said Clay. "We were just going to check the hockey scores, sweetheart. Would you like to come in?"

"There's a skinny kid with a half order of dreadlocks and an erection out here staring at me, Clay, and it's making me feel a little self-conscious."

"I woke up with it, Bwana Clay," Kona said. "No disrespect."

"He's an employee, darling." Clay said reassuringly. Then to Quinn he whispered, "I had better go."

"You better had," said Quinn.

"See you in the morning."

"You should take the day off."

"Nah, I'll see you in the morning. What are you working on anyway?"

"Putting the subsonic part of the song in binary."

"Ah, interesting."

"Feeling vulnerable out here," Clair said. "Vulnerable and angry."

"I had better go," said Clay.

"Night, Clay."

An hour later, just when Nate was getting to the point where he felt he had enough samples marked out in binary to start looking for some sort of pattern, the third spirit in the night came through the door: Amy, in a man's T-shirt that hung to midthigh, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

"The hell you doing up at this hour? It's three in the morning."

"Working?"

Amy padded barefoot across the floor and looked at the monitor where Quinn was working, trying to blink the bleariness out of her eyes. "That the low end of the song?"

"Yeah, that and some blue-whale calls I had, for comparison."

Quinn could smell some kind of berry shampoo smell coming off of Amy, and he became hyperaware of the warmth of her pressing against his shoulder. "I don't understand. You're digitizing it manually? That seems a little primitive. The signal is already digitized by virtue of being on the disk, isn't it?"

"I'm looking at it a different way. It will probably wash out, but I'm looking at the waveform of just the low end. There's no behavior for context, so it's probably a waste of time anyway."

"But still you're up at three in the morning anyway, making ones and zeroes on a screen. Mind if I ask why?"

Quinn waited a second before answering, trying to figure out what to do. He wanted to turn to look at her, but she was so close that he'd be right in her face if he did. This wasn't the time. Instead he dropped his hands into his lap and sighed heavily as if this were all too tedious. He looked at the monitor as he spoke. "Okay, Amy, here's why. Here it is. The whole payoff, the whole jazz of what we do, okay?"

"Okay." She sensed the unease in his voice and stepped back.

Nate turned and looked her in the eye. "It might be out on the boat, as you're coming in for the day — or it might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be. That's the jazz, Amy. That's why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."

Amy stood with her hands clenched in front of her, arms straight down, like a little girl trying to ignore a lecture. She looked at the floor. "So you're saying that you're about to have one of these moments and I'm bugging you?"

"No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just telling you why I'm doing it. And that's why you're doing it, too. You just don't know it yet."

"And what if someone told you that you'd never have one of those moments of knowing something again — would you keep doing it?"

"That won't happen."

"So you're close to something here? With this binary thing?"

"Maybe."

"Didn't Ryder analyze the song as far as how much information it could carry and come up with something really anemic like point six bits per second? That's not really enough to make it meaningful, is it?" Growl Ryder had been Quinn's doctoral adviser at UC Santa Cruz. One of the first generation of greats in the field, along with Ken Norris and Roger Payne, a true kahuna. His first name was actually Gerard, but anyone who had known him called him Growl, because of his perpetually surly nature. Ten years ago, off the Aleutians, he'd gone out alone in a Zodiac to record blue-whale calls and had never come back. Quinn smiled at his memory. "True, but Ryder died before he finished that work, and he was looking at the musical notes and themes for information. I'm actually looking at waveform. Just from what I've done tonight, it looks like you can get up to fifty, sixty bits per second. That's a lot of information."

"That can't be right. That won't work," Amy said. She seemed to be taking this information a bit more emotionally than Nate would have expected. "If you could move that much information subsonically, the navy would be using it for submarines. Besides, how could the whales use waveform? They'd need oscilloscopes." She was up on her toes now, almost shouting.

"Calm down, I'm just looking into it. Dolphins and bats don't need oscilloscopes to image sonically. Maybe there's something there. Just because I'm using a computer to look at this data doesn't mean I think whales are digital. It's only a model, for Christ's sake." He was going to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but then remembered her attitude toward that at the jail.

"You're not looking at data, Nate, you're making it up. You're wasting your time, and I'm not sure you're not wasting my time. This whole job might have been a big mistake."

"Amy, I don't understand why —»

But she wouldn't give him a chance to defend himself. "Go to bed, Nate. You're delirious. We have real work to do tomorrow, and you'll be worthless if you don't get some sleep." She turned and stormed out into the night. Even as she moved across the courtyard to her cabin, Nate could hear her ranting to herself. The words "doofus," "deluded," and "pathetic loser" rang out above the tirade to settle on Nate's ego.

Strangely enough, a feeling of relief washed over him as he realized that the delusions of romantic grandeur that he'd been indulging — nay, fighting — about his research assistant had been just that: delusions. She thought he was a complete joke. At peace with himself for the first time since Amy had come on board, he saved his work, powered down the machine, and went off to bed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Down to the Harbor

Down to the harbor they went — past the condos, the cane fields, the golf course, the Burger King, the Buddhist cemetery with its great green Buddha blissed out by the sea, past the steak houses, the tourist traps, the old guy riding down Front Street on a girl's bike with a macaw perched on his head — down to the harbor they went. They waved to the researchers at the fuel dock, nodded to the haglets at the charter booths, shakaed the divemasters and the captains, and schlepped science stuff down the dock to start their day.

Tako Man stood in the back of his boat eating a breakfast of rice and octopus as the Maui Whale crew — Clay, Quinn, Kona, and Amy — passed by. He was a strong, compact Malaysian with long hair and a stringy soul-patch beard that, along with the bone fishhooks he wore in his ears, gave him the distinct aspect of a pirate. He was one of the black-coral divers who lived in the harbor, and this morning, as always, he wore his wet suit.

"Hey, Tako," Clay said. The diver glanced up from his bowl. His eyes looked as if someone had poured shots of blood into them. Kona noticed that the small octopus in the diver's bowl was still moving, and he scampered down the dock feeling a case of the creeps fluttering to life in his spinal cord.

"Nightwalkers, gray ones, on your boat last night. I seen them," said Tako Man. "Not the first time."

"Good to know," said Clay, patronizing the diver and moving down the dock. You had to keep peace with anyone who lived in the harbor, especially the black-coral divers, who lived far over the edge of what most people would consider normal life. They shot heroin, drank heavily, spent all day doing bounce dives to two hundred feet looking for the gemstone-valuable black coral, then spent their money on weeklong parties that had, more than once, ended with one of them dead on the dock. They lived on their boats and ate rice and whatever they could pull out of the sea. Tako Man had gotten his name because on any given afternoon, after the divers came in for the day, you'd see the grizzled Malaysian carrying a net bag full of tako (octopus) that he had speared on the reef for their supper.

"Hi," Amy said sheepishly to Tako Man as they passed. He glared at her through his bloody haze, and his head bobbed as he almost nodded out into his breakfast. Amy quickened her pace and ran a Pelican case she was carrying into the back of Quinn's thigh.

"Jeez, Amy," Quinn said, having almost lost his footing.

"Do those guys dive in that condition?" Amy whispered, still sticking to Quinn like a shadow.

"Worse than that. Would you back up a little?"

"He's scary. You're supposed to protect me, ya mook. How do they keep from getting into trouble?"

"They lose one or two a year. Ironically, it's usually an overdose that gets them."

"Tough job."

"They're tough guys."

Tako Man shouted, "Fuck you, whale people! You'll see. Fucking nightwalker fuckers. Fucking fuck you, haole motherfuckers!" He tossed the remains of his breakfast at them. It landed overboard, and tiny fish broke the water fighting for the scraps.

"Rum," said Kona. "Too much hostility in dat buzz. Rum come from da cane, and cane come from slavin' the people, and dat oppression all distilled in de bottle and come out a man mean as cat shit on a day."

"Yeah," said Clay to Quinn. "Didn't you know that about rum?"

"Where's your boat?" asked Quinn.

"My boat?"

"Your boat, Clay," said Amy.

"No," said Clay. He stopped and dropped two cases of camera equipment on the dock. The Always Confused, the spiny and powerful twenty-two-foot Grady White center-console fisherman, Clay's pride and joy, was gone. A life jacket, a water bottle, and various other familiar flotsam bobbed gently in a rainbow slick of gasoline where the boat had once been.

Everyone thought someone else should say something, but for a full minute no one did. They just stood there, staring at what should have been Clay's boat but instead was a big, boatless gob of tropical air.

"Poop," Amy finally said, saying it for all of them.

"We should check with the harbormaster," said Nate.

"My boat," said Clay, who stood over the empty slip as if it were his recently run-over boyhood dog. He would have nuzzled it and stroked its little dead doggy ears if he could have, but instead he fished the oily life jacket out of the water and sat on the dock rocking it.

"He really liked that boat," Amy said.

"Can I get a duh for the sistah?" exclaimed the dreaded blond kid.

"I paid the insurance," Nate said as he moved away, headed for the harbormaster.

Tako Man had come down the dock from his own boat to stare at the empty water. Somber now. Amy backed up into Kona for protection, but Kona had backed up into the next person behind him, which turned out to be Captain Tarwater, resplendent in his navy whites and newly Kona-scuffed shoes.

"Irie, ice cream man."

"You're on my shoes."

"What happened?" asked Cliff Hyland, coming down the dock behind the captain.

"Clay's boat's gone," said Amy.

Cliff moved up and put his hand on Clay's shoulder. "Maybe someone just borrowed it." Clay nodded, acknowledging that Cliff was trying to comfort him, but comfort fell like sandwiches on the recently bombed.

By the time Quinn returned from the harbormaster's office with a Maui cop in tow, there were a half dozen biologists, three black-coral divers, and a couple from Minnesota who were taking pictures of the whole thing, thinking that this would be something they would want to remember if they ever found out what was happening. As the cop approached, the black-coral divers faded to the edges of the crowd and away.

Jon Thomas Fuller, the scientist/entrepreneur who was accompanied by three of his cute female naturalists, stepped up beside Quinn. "This is just horrible, Nate. Just horrible. That boat represented a major capital investment for you guys, I'm sure."

"Yeah, but mainly we liked to think of it as something that floated and moved us around on the water." Nate actually had a great capacity for sarcasm, but he usually reserved it for those things and people he found truly irritating. Jon Thomas Fuller was truly irritating.

"Going to be tough to replace it."

"We'll manage. It was insured."

"You might want to get something bigger this time. I know there's a measure of safety working off of these sixty-five-footers we have, but also with the cabin you can set up computers, bow cameras, a lot of things that aren't really possible on little speedboats. A good-size boat would add a lot of legitimacy to your operation."

"We sort of decided to go with the legitimacy we get from doing credible research, Jon Thomas."

"We didn't make those figures up." Fuller caught himself raising his voice. The cop interviewing Clay looked over his shoulder, and Fuller lowered his tone. "That was just professional jealousy on the part of our detractors."

"Your detractors were the facts. What did you expect when your paper concluded that humpbacks actually enjoyed being struck by Jet Skis?"

"Some do." Fuller pushed back his pith helmet and ventured a smile of sincerity, which collapsed under its own weight.

"What's your angle, Jon Thomas?"

"Nate, I can get you a boat like ours, with all the trimmings, and an operating budget, and you'd just have to do one little project for me. One season of work, maximum. And your operation can keep the boat, sell it, do whatever you want."

Unless Fuller was about to ask him to shove him off the dock into the oily water, Quinn pretty much knew he was going to turn down the offer, but he had to ask. Those were really nice boats. "Make your proposal."

"I need you to put your name on a study that says that human-dolphin interaction facilities are not harmful to the animals, and do a study that says that building one at La Perouse Bay wouldn't have a negative impact on the environment. Then I'd need you to stand up at the appropriate meetings and make the case."

"I'm not your guy, Jon Thomas. First, I'm not a dolphin guy, and you know that." Nate avoided adding what he wanted to say, which was Second, you are a feckless weasel out to make a buck without any consideration for science or the animals you study. Instead he said, "There are dozens of people doing studies on captive dolphins. Why don't you go to them?"

"I have the animal study. You don't have to do the study. I just want your name on it."

"Won't the people who actually did the study have some objection to that?"

"No. They'll be fine with it. I need your name and your presence, Nate."

"I don't think so. I can't see myself testifying before impact committees and county planning boards."

"Okay, fair enough. Clay or Amy can do the stand-ups. Just put your name on the paper and do the environmental impact study. I need the credibility of your name."

"Which I won't have as soon as I let you use me. I'm sorry, but my name is all I really have to show for twenty-five years of work. I can't sell it out, even for a really nice boat."

"Oh, right, the nobility of starvation. Fuck that, Nate, and fuck your high ideals. I'm doing more for these animals by exposing the public to them than you'll do in a lifetime of graphing out songs and recording behavior. And before you retire to your ivory tower on the ethical high ground, you'd better take a good look at your people. That kid is a common thief, and no one has ever heard of your precious new assistant." Fuller turned and signaled to his chorus line of whalettes that they were going to their boat.

Quinn looked for Amy, saw her on the other side of the cop who was talking to Clay, helping him fill in details. He ran up behind Fuller, grabbed the smaller man's arm, and spun him around. "What are you talking about? Amy studied at Woods Hole, with Tyack and Loughten."

"That right? Well, maybe you'd better give them a call and ask them. Because they've never heard of her. Despite what you think, I do my research, Nate. Do you? Now, get back to your one-boat operation, would you."

"If I find out you had anything to do with this…"

Fuller wrenched his arm out of Quinn's grip and grinned. "Right, you'll what? Become more irrelevant? Screw you, Nate."

"What did you say?"

But Fuller ignored him and boarded his million-dollar research vessel, while Quinn skulked back down the dock to his friends. Oily flotsam seemed to be losing its allure, however, and the crowd had dispersed somewhat, leaving only Amy, Clay, the cop, and the couple from Minnesota.

"You. You're somebody aren't you?" asked the woman as Nate walked up. "Honey, this guy is someone. I remember seeing him on the Discovery Channel. Get my picture with him."

"Who is he?" said «honey» as his wife took Nate by the arm and posed like he'd just handed her a check.

"I don't know, one of those ocean guys," she said through a grin, acting as if she were posing with one of the carved statues that decorated doorways around Lahaina. "Just take the picture."

"Are you one of those Cousteau fellas?"

"Oui," said Nate. "Now I muss speak with my good fren' Sylvia Earle," he continued in his French-by-way-of-British-Columbia-and-Northern-California fake accent as he went over to Amy. "I need to talk to you."

"Sylvia Earle! She's a National Geographic person. Get their picture together, honey."

"He's lying, Nathan," Amy said. "You can check if you want. It was all on the resume I gave to Clay." She didn't appear angry, just hurt, betrayed perhaps. Her eyes were huge and teary, and she was starting to look vaguely like one of those creepy Keane sad-eyed-kid pictures. Quinn felt like he'd just smacked a bag of kittens against a truck bumper.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. I just… well, Jon Thomas is an asshole. I let him get to me."

"It's okay," Amy sniffed. "It's just… just… I've worked so hard."

"I don't need to check, Amy. You do good work. My fault for doubting you. Let's get Clay squared away and get to work."

He tentatively put his arm around her and walked her back to where Clay was finishing up his interview with the cop. Clay saw the tear tracks down Amy's face and immediately took her in his arms and pressed her head to his shoulder. "I know, honey. I know. It was a great boat, but it was just a boat. We'll get another one."

"Where's Kona?" Nate asked.

"He was around here a second ago," said Clay.

Just then Nate's cell phone rang. He worked it out of his shirt pocket and answered it. "Nathan, it's me," said the Old Broad. Nate covered the mouthpiece. "It's the Old Broad," Nate said to Clay.

"Amy, you go round up Kona while I finish up with the officer, okay?" Clay said.

Amy nodded and was off down the dock. Clay turned back to the officer.

The Old Broad went on, "Nathan, I spoke to that big male again today, and he definitely wants you to take a hot pastrami on rye with you when you go out. He said it's very important."

"I'm sure it is, Elizabeth, but I'm not sure we're even going out today. Something's happened to Clay's boat. It's gone."

"Oh, my, he must be distraught. I'll come down and look after him, but you have to get out in the channel today. I just feel it's very important."

"I don't think you'll need to come down, Elizabeth. Clay will manage."

"Well, if you say so, but you have to promise me you'll go out today."

"I promise."

"And you'll take a pastrami on rye for that big male."

"I'll try, Elizabeth. I have to go now, Clay needs me for something."

"With Swiss cheese and hot mustard!" the Old Broad said as Nate disconnected.

Clay thanked the policeman, who nodded to Quinn as he walked off. Even the couple from Minnesota had moved on, and only Clay and Quinn were left on the dock. "Where are the kids?" asked Nate, cringing at the whole idea: he and Clay, the middle-aged couple being responsible and boring while the kids went off to play and have adventures.

"I asked Amy to find Kona. They could be anywhere."

"Clay, I need to ask you something before they get back."

"Shoot."

"Did you check any of Amy's references before you hired her? I mean, did you call anyone? Woods Hole? Her undergrad school — what was it?"

"Cornell. Nope. She was smart, she was cute, she seemed to know what she was talking about, and she said she'd work for free. The bona fides looked good on paper. Gift horse, Nate."

"Jon Thomas Fuller said that he checked and that no one at Woods Hole has heard of her."

"Fuller's an asshole. Look, I don't really care if she finished high school. The kid has proven herself. She's got balls."

"Still, maybe I should call Tyack. Just in case."

"If you need to. Call him this afternoon when you get back in."

"I'm sure Fuller was just yanking my chain. He tried to offer us a boat like his if we backed his dolphin-park project."

"And you turned him down?"

"Of course."

"But those are really nice boats. Our armada has been reduced by fifty percent. Our nautical resources have declined by more than one-half. Our boatage is deficient by point five."

"What's up?" Amy said. She'd come back down the dock and seemed to have shaken off her earlier melancholy.

"Clay's being scientific. Fuller offered us a sixty-foot research vessel like his, with operating budget, if we back his dolphin project."

"Do I have to sleep with him?"

"We haven't put that on the table," Clay said, "but I'll bet we could get a sonar array if you're enthusiastic."

"Hell, Nate, take it," Amy said.

"It would mean selling out my credibility," said Quinn, appalled at what total whores his colleagues had become. "We'd be going over to the dark side."

Amy shrugged. "Those are really nice boats." The corner of her mouth twitched as if she was trying not to grin, and Nate realized that she was probably goofing on him.

"Yeah," said Clay. "Nice." Clay was goofing, too. He'd be all right. Nate shook his head, looking as if he were fighting disbelief, but actually he was trying to shake the memory of his dream of driving a big cabin cruiser through the streets of Seattle with Amy displayed as the bikinied figurehead. "If you're okay, Clay, we really should get out before the wind comes up."

"Go," Clay said. "I'll get the police report for the insurance company." To Amy he said, "You find Kona?"

"He's down there with that Tako guy."

"What's he doing down there?"

"It looked like he was building a saxophone. I didn't go close."

Quinn strode down the dock and looked to where Kona was talking with Tako Man. "No, that's his bong. It breaks down for easy portage."

"What's a bong?"

"Cute, Amy. Help me get the equipment in the boat."

Suddenly Kona started shouting and running down the dock toward them. "Bwanas! I found the boat!"

Clay perked up. "Where?"

"Right there. Tako Man says it's right there. He dove down there this morning."

Kona was pointing to a patch of murky jade green water in the center of the harbor. Jade green because of all the waste flushed from the live-aboards, as well as the bait, fish guts, seasickness, and bird poop that went into the water faster than the scavengers could clean it out, and so it caused a perpetual algae bloom.

"My boat," said Clay, looking forlornly at the empty water.

Amy stepped up and put her arm around Clay's shoulders to resume stage-two comfort. "He dove in that water?"

"The nightwalkers sank it, Bwana Clay. Tako Man saw them. Skinny blue-gray guys. He called them nightwalkers. I think aliens."

"Aliens are always gray, aren't they?" inquired Quinn.

"That's what I say to him," said Kona. "But he say no, not with the lightbulb head. He say they tall and froggy."

"You're high," said Clay.

"Tako Man got dank mystical buds, brah. Was a spiritual duty."

"He's not criticizing you, Kona," Quinn explained. "We just assume that you're high. Clay's just doubting the credibility of your story."

"You don't believe I? Give a man a mask, I'll dive down and get a ting off da boat for proof."

"Hepatitis, that's what you'll bring up," said Amy.

"I'm going to work," said Nate.

"My boat," said Clay.

Nate decided that perhaps he should offer a measure of solace. "Look at the bright side, Clay. At least whales are big."

"How is that the bright side?"

"We could be studying viruses. You have any idea what it costs to replace a scanning electron microscope?"

"My boat," said Clay.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Song for Your Supper

Amy picked the whale. It had been a stressful morning for her, and Quinn wanted to convey his complete confidence in her, so he handed over the headphones and took directions as they narrowed down which of their whales was actually the singer.

"Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."

And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.

"He's over there."

"That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.

"Go that way. That's where our whale is."

"Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."

She just stood there next to him — dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes — looking at him.

"Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."

A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.

"Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.

Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."

"Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."

"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."

"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."

"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."

"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"

"Give or take fifty."

"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."

" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"

"I'm not going to need to know that."

"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).

Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.

Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface — pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"

If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.

Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert — don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it — then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"

"It's a date," said Quinn.

"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"

"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"

"Hmmm, let me think about it…"

She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."

"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."

"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."

"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.

"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.

"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.

They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.

"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."

"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.

"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and —»

"I thought you liked these animals."

"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."

The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down — this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.

"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.

Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.

One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.

"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.

"Ready," Amy said.

The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.

"You get that? You get that?"

"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.

"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black… uh, stripes?" Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.

"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."

"Damn it!"

"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."

"That's not the point."

"It's not?"

"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."

Amy stood on the bow and directed Quinn. When she dropped her arm, he killed the engine. And there was the whale, hanging there, singing, his tail not ten feet under the water. They weren't a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. They'd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, they'd probably lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to finish this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. "Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?"

"You're going in the water?"

"Yes."

"But you never go in the water."

"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.

"You're not a water guy."

"See if there's a weight belt in there, too."

"Clay says you're not a water guy. You're a boat guy."

"I'm going to get an ID photo from under his tail. If he's going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, I'm going to go get the photo."

"Can you do that?"

"Why not?"

She handed him a belt weighted with ten pounds of lead, and Nate buckled it around his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. "You're going to drift off of me. I'm not going to try to swim to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I don't want you to start the engine until I'm sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me."

" 'Kay." Amy's mouth was sort of hanging open as if she'd just been slapped.

"This is no big deal."

"Right. You want me to do it? It's my fault I didn't get the shot last time."

"Not your fault. The shot wasn't there. See ya."

Quinn put the snorkel in his mouth and rolled backward off the boat. At seventy-five degrees, the water was still cold enough to knock the breath out of him. He floated to the surface and tried to take controlled breaths until his system adjusted.

The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nate's ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the "bite me" whale. Even if he'd somehow been wrong about there actually being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animal's tail. And there was more than that, too, if he could prove to himself that this was the same animal. It would mean that the whale had stayed in the general area of the Au'au Channel for over three weeks, which was fairly unusual. Of course, conclusions weren't reached from that lack of data. It could simply be that they hadn't computerized the catalog of Hawaiian ID photos the way they had in Alaska. And without the first picture there'd be no proof that this was the same animal, but Quinn would know. He would know. That had become the impetus of this silly mission, not just proving that he wasn't hallucinating. He was a man of science, of facts, of reason. He didn't need to prove he was sane.

I'm out of my mind, he thought. He'd never even heard of anyone trying to do an ID photo underwater.

The animal was perfectly motionless, a great swath of gray in a field of infinite blue. But Quinn thought he saw movement on the far side of the whale. He lifted his head out of the water and looked back at the boat. Amy gave him a thumbs-up. He took a deep breath and made his dive to take the photo.

If he'd been wearing tanks, he might have let the weight belt take him down slowly, but he knew he'd be able to stay down for only forty to sixty seconds, so he went headfirst, kicking hard until he was down twenty or so feet. Then he leveled off, holding the camera in front of him, and looked up at the underside of the whale's tail.

There it was, in big, sans-serif, spray-paint-like letters: BITE ME! He nearly forgot to take the picture. How could this possibly be? Had the animal somehow been caught in a net when it was younger and marked by a sardonic fisherman before being released? Was it one of those animals that had swum up a river and got stranded, then been rescued by an army of fish-and-game people?

He centered the tail in the viewfinder and hit the shutter. Advanced the film and shot again. Then he needed to breathe. He turned and kicked to the surface, but again he saw the dark shape moving near the whale. Remora, he thought. Although it looked too big to be one of the parasite fish that often attached themselves to whales.

At the surface he looked back down at the singer, near the left pec where he'd seen the movement. The animal was doing ribbits. Quinn smiled around his snorkel, took three deep breaths, held, then dove again.

This time, before he could get the camera up, he saw the movement of a dark fin on the far side of the whale, and he squinted to see deep into the blue distance. Blue-water willies, was how he'd always thought of it. The feeling you get when you realize that something big and carnivorous could come at you from any direction, then you start looking for gray missiles in the blue, like looking for a malevolent face to appear at a dark window.

Then the whale moved. The wash of the tail pushed Quinn back, but he maintained his bearings and started toward the surface, trying to keep his eye on the animal. The whale turned around in little more than its own length and shot toward Nate. He kicked laterally, trying to move to one side or another, then up, so he'd be tossed over the top of the animal rather than under it as it came up, because it was definitely going to bump him.

He looked back beyond his fins as he kicked and saw the whale adjust its direction to keep coming toward him. Nate kicked once for the surface, then looked back again to see the animal's enormous mouth opening beneath him. No, this can't be happening, he thought.

The panic rising in his chest demanded air, but it was as if the entire ocean had opened up a hole behind him, and he wasn't going to make it to the surface. The whale came halfway out of the water as it scooped him up, and Nate saw sky, and white water, and baleen fringing the upper jaw above — all of it framed by the huge trapezoid that was the whale's open mouth. Then he felt the whale sinking back, and he saw the baleen close over him. He rolled into a ball, hoping not to be crushed by the jaws, hoping to be spit out as a horrible dining mistake. But then the great tongue came forward, warm and rough, driving him against the baleen plates — it was like being smashed into a wrought-iron fence by a wet Nerf Volkswagen. He could feel the baleen ripping the skin on his back as the tongue covered him, pressing the seawater out around him as it would strain krill, then crushing him until the last of the air exploded from his body and he blacked out.