Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Shoes Off in the Whale!

"Shoes off in the whale!" a male voice said out of the dark.

Quinn could see nothing. His entire body ached like, well, like it had been chewed. He crawled to his hands and knees on what felt like wet latex. He reached down and felt for his feet. He still had his flippers on, and logic protested through his confusion. "I'm not wearing shoes. These are fins."

"Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus."

Two things that, if asked about an hour earlier, Nate might have said with conviction he'd never hear in a lifetime of conversation.

"What?" Quinn said, squinting into the dark. He realized that he was still wearing his dive mask and reached up to push it back.

"I'll bet he didn't bring the pastrami on rye I asked for either, did he?" came the voice.

Shapes began to define themselves in the darkness, and Nate saw a face not a foot away from his. He gasped and pulled away from it, for although it seemed to be examining him with great interest, the face was not human.

Clay Demodocus was known throughout the world as one of the calmest, most level-tempered, most generous and considerate individuals in the entire milieu of marine biology. His reputation preceded him when he went on assignment, and people took it for granted that he would remain amiable throughout a long voyage in cramped quarters, as well as efficient in his own work, respectful of the work of others, and cool-headed in an emergency. Because he often had to subjugate himself to the head researcher on any given assignment, Clay did not indulge in ego battles and testosterone-slinging contests with researchers or crew. None of these qualities were evident when he went over the desk of the Coast Guard commandant and stopped only inches from head-butting the tall, athletic-looking officer. "You call this search off now and I'll see to it that your name is remembered for all time in concert with Adolf Eichmann and Vlad the Impaler. Nathan Quinn is a legend in his field, and every time there's a documentary on whales on the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic, or Animal Planet, or PBS, or the fucking Cartoon Channel, I'll see to it that your name is mentioned right after Nate's as the man who left him out there. You'll be the official Coast Guard pariah for the next hundred years. This will be the Coast Guard's My Lai. Every time a kid drowns, your name will be mentioned — nay, every time someone gets a soaker, the name of Commodore Whateveryournameis shall be brought forth and your effigy burned in the streets and your head stuck on a pole, lipsticked, and marched around school yards, forever. And all because you're too goddamned lamebrained to put a couple of helicopters into the air to find my friend. Is that what you want?"

Clay had strong views on loyalty.

The commodore had been in the Coast Guard for most of his adult life, spending the majority of his time and energy either rescuing people or training others to do so, and as a result he was taken aback more than somewhat by Clay's tirade. He looked across his office to where Kona and Amy stood by the door, looking nearly as haggard as he felt. The surfer looked at him and shook his head sadly.

"It's been three days, Mr. Demodocus. In open water with no life preserver? You're not a tourist — you know the odds. If he were alive, he'd have drifted far out of where we're able to patrol by now anyway. We're doing no fewer than ten rescues a day on Maui. I can't have our helicopters out to sea when there's just no chance."

"What about tide maps, currents?" Clay pleaded. "Can't we try to predict which way he might have drifted? Narrow the search area."

The commodore had to look away from Clay when he answered. The first thing the surfer kid with the uneven dreadlocks had said when they'd come into his office was "Sucks to be you." And right now the commodore couldn't have agreed more. He'd lost friends at sea; he understood. "I'm sorry," he said.

Clay sighed heavily, and his shoulders sagged. Amy came forward and took him by the arm. "Let's go home, Clay."

Clay nodded and allowed himself to be led out of the commodore's office.

As they made their way across the parking lot to Clay's truck Kona said, "That was amazing, Clay."

"Throwing a fit? Yeah, I'm proud of that, especially since it worked so well."

"Why didn't you say anything about the whale eating Nate?" In the three days since Quinn had disappeared, Kona had forgotten to speak brophonics and Rasta talk almost completely, and now he just sounded like a kid from New Jersey with a "whoa, dude" surfer accent.

"Whales don't eat people, Kona," Clay said. "You know better."

"I know what I saw," Amy said.

Clay stopped and stepped away from both of them. "Look, if you're going to do this stuff, you have to be practical. I believe that you saw what you say you saw, but nothing about it helps. First, a humpback's throat is only about a foot in diameter. They couldn't swallow a human if they wanted to. So if the whale did scoop up Nate, then there's a good chance he was spit out very quickly. Second, if I told that story to everyone else, either they'd think you were being hysterical or, if they believed you, they'd assume that Nate had been drowned immediately, and there wouldn't have been a search. I believe you, kid, but don't think anyone else will."

"So what now?" Kona asked.

Clay looked at the two of them, standing there like abandoned puppies, and he pushed aside his own grief. "We finish Nate's work. We do this work, we carry on. Right now I've got to go up the mountain and see the Old Broad. Nate was like a son to her."

"You haven't told her?" Amy asked.

Clay shook his head. "Why would I? I haven't given up on Nate. I've seen too much. Last year they thought they'd lost one of the black-coral divers. The boat came back to where they'd sent him down, and he was gone. A week later he called from Molokai for them to come get him. He'd swum over and had been so busy partying he'd forgotten to call.

"Doesn't sound like Nate," Kona said. "He told me that he hated fun."

"Still, it would be wrong not to let the Old Broad know what's happened," Amy said.

Clay patted them each on the back. "Intrepid," he said.

As he drove up the volcano, Clay tried to formulate some gentle way of breaking the news to the Old Broad. Since his mother had passed away, Clay had taken the bearing of bad news very seriously — so seriously, in fact, that he usually let someone else do the bearing. He'd been in Antarctica on assignment for National Science, snowed in at the naval weather station for six months when his mother, still in Greece, had gone missing. She was seventy-five, and the villagers knew she couldn't have gone far, yet, search as they might, they did not find her for three days. Finally her location was revealed by her ripening odor. They found her dead in an olive tree, where she had climbed to do some pruning. Clay's older brothers, Hektor and Sidor, would not hold the funeral without Clay, the baby, yet they knew their brother would be completely out of touch for months. "He is the rich American," came the ouzo-besotted lament. "He should take care of Mama. Perhaps he will even fly us to America for the funeral." And so the two brothers, having inherited their mother's weakness for alcohol and their father's bad judgment, packed the remains of Mother Demodocus in an olive barrel, filled the barrel with the preserving brine, and shipped it off to their rich younger brother's house in San Diego. The problem was, in their grief (or perhaps it was their stupor) they forgot to send a letter, leave a message, or, for that matter, put a packing label on the barrel, so months later, when Clay returned to find the barrel on his porch, he broke into it thinking he was about to enjoy a delicious snack of kala-mata olives from home. It was not the way to find out about his mother's death, and it engendered in Clay very strong views about loyalty and the bearing of bad news.

I will do this right, he thought as he pulled into the Old Broad's driveway. There's no reason for this to be a shock.

There were cats and crystals everywhere. The Old Broad led him through the house and had him sit in a wicker emperor's chair that looked out over the channel while she fetched some mango iced tea for them. The house could have been designed by Gauguin and landscaped by Rousseau. It was small, just five rooms and a carport, but it sat on twenty acres of fruit-salad jungle: banana trees, mango, lemon, tangerine, orange, papaya, and coconut palm, as well as a florist's dream of orchids and other tropical flowers. The Old Broad had cultivated a low, soft grass under all the trees that was like a golf-course green over sponge cake. The house was made almost entirely of dark koa wood, nut brown and with black grain running through it, polished to a smooth satin and as hard as ebony. There was a high-peaked galvanized-tin roof with a vented tower in the center to draw heat out the top and cool air in from under the wide eaves that surrounded the whole house. There were no windows, just open sliding walls. You could look through any part of the house to the other and see the tropical garden. The Old Broad's telescope and «big-eye» binoculars stood on steel and concrete mountings in front of where Clay sat, looking very much out of place: the artillery of science planted in paradise. At Clay's feet a skinny cat happily crunched the legs off a scorpion.

The Old Broad handed Clay a tall, icy glass and sat in another emperor's chair beside him. She was barefoot and wore a flowered caftan and a yellow-and-red hibiscus blossom in her hair that was half the size of her face. She had probably been a dish back around the time of Lincoln, Clay thought.

"It's so nice to see you, Clay. I don't get many visitors. Not that I'm lonely, you know. I have the cats and the whales to talk to. But that's not like having one of my boys to visit with."

Oh, jeez, Clay thought. One of her boys. Oh, jeez. He had to tell her. He knew he had to tell her. He had come up here to tell her, and he was going to tell her, and that was that. "This is excellent tea, Elizabeth. Mango, you say?"

"That's right. Just a little bit of mint. Now, what is it you needed to talk to me about?"

"And ice? I think the coldness makes it, gives it a fantastic, uh…"

"Temperature? Yes, ice is an essential ingredient in iced tea, Clay. Thus the name."

Sarcasm is so ugly on the aged, thought Clay. No one likes a sarcastic oldster. He said, "Iced tea, you mean?" Oh, this is just going to kill her, he thought.

"If this is about a new boat, Clay, don't be shy. I know how you loved that boat, and we'll get you another one. I'm just not sure we can go for one quite that nice. My investments haven't been doing well the last couple of years."

"No, no, it's not the boat. The boat was insured. It's Nate."

"And how is Nathan? I hope he's handling his little infatuation with your new researcher with a bit of dignity. He was wearing it on his sleeve that night at the sanctuary. You'd think a man as smart as Nathan would have better control over his impulses."

"Nate had a thing for Amy?" Clay was going to tell her, really. He was just working up to it.

"You said 'had, " said the Old Broad. "You said Nate 'had' a thing for Amy."

"Elizabeth, there's been an accident. Three days ago Nate went into the water to get a better look at a singer, and… well, we haven't been able to find him." Clay put down his tea so he could catch the old woman should she faint. "I'm very sorry."

"Oh, that. Yes, I heard about that. Nate's fine, Clay. The whale told me."

And here Clay found himself balancing on another dilemma. Should he let her have her belief, no matter how crazy it might be, or should he dash her spirits to earth with the truth?

Although Nate had found Elizabeth's eccentricities irritating, Clay had always liked her insistence that the whales spoke to her. He wished it were true. He scooted to the edge of his chair and took her hand in his.

"Elizabeth, I don't think you understand what I'm saying —»

"He took the pastrami and rye, right? He said he would."

"Um, that's not exactly pertinent. He's been gone for three days, and they were right at the wind line toward Molokai when he was lost. Rough sea. He's probably gone, Elizabeth."

"Well, of course he's gone, Clay. You'll just have to carry on until he gets back." Now she patted his hand. "He did take the sandwich, right? The whale was very specific."

"Elizabeth! You're not listening to me. This is not about the whales singing to you through the trees. Nate is gone!"

"Don't you shout at me, Clay Demodocus. I'm trying to comfort you. And it wasn't a song through the trees. What do you think? I'm some crazy old woman? The whale called on the phone."

"Oh, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I don't know how to do this»

"More tea?" asked the Old Broad.

As Clay made the long drive down the volcano and back to Papa Lani, he tried to fight letting his spirits rise. The Old Broad was completely convinced that Nathan Quinn was just fine and dandy, although she could give no reason other than to say that the whale, after ordering a pastrami on rye, had told her that everything would be all right.

"And how did you know it was the whale on the phone?" asked Clay.

"Well, he told me that's who he was."

"And it was a male voice?"

"Well, it would be. He's a singer, isn't he?"

She'd gone on like that, reassuring him, encouraging him to go back to work, dismissing any guilt or grief, until he was almost to the gates of the compound before he remembered.

"She's a total loony!" he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nate's dead.

Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Clay could not make himself go to sleep. Instead he went to the office, knowing that nothing in the world could eat up time like editing video. He attached a digital video camera to his computer and turned on the recently replaced giant monitor. Blue filled the screen, and then he could sense the motion of descent, but there was only a faint hiss of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. He'd completely forgotten about it. The breath-holder's tail came into frame.

Clay's first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder — the best they'd ever recorded. As he passed the tail, the genital slit came into view, and he could tell that they were dealing with a male. There were black marks on the underside of the tail, but the view was still edge on, and he couldn't make out their shape. He heard a faint kazoo sound in the background and ran back the tape, with the sound turned up.

This time his breath sounded like a bull snorting before a charge, the kazoo sound, louder now, like a voice through wax paper. He ran back the tape again and cranked the sound all the way up, bringing down the high frequency to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

"He's close, Captain, really close. Too close."

Then the tail came down, and there was a deafening thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then settled as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clay's fin as he sank, and then it was just blue and the occasional shot of the lanyard that secured the camera to his wrist.

Clay ran the tape back again, confirmed the voices, then set it to dub onto the computer hard drive so he could manipulate the audio in a waveform, the way they did with sound recordings. Even though he was sure what was on the tape, he couldn't figure out how it could possibly have gotten there. Only five minutes of watching little progress bars move across the monitor, and he could stand the suspense no longer. He smiled to himself, because now was the time he would have gone to Nate, as he had so many times before, to help him figure out exactly what it was they were hearing or looking at, but Nate was gone. He checked his watch, and, deciding that it wasn't too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Jonathan Livingston Reaper

Amy wore an oversized, tattered "I'M WITH STUPID" nightshirt and Local Motion flip-flops. Her hair was completely flat on one side and splayed out into an improbable sunburst of spikes on the other, making it appear that she was getting hit in the side of the head by a tiny hurricane, which she wasn't. She was, however, performing the longest sustained yawn Clay had ever seen.

"Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a," she said in yawnspeak, a language — not unlike Hawaiian — known for its paucity of consonants. (You go ahead, I'm okay, she was saying.) She gestured for Clay to continue.

Clay cued the tape and fiddled with the audio. A whale tail in a field of blue passed by on the monitor.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

Amy stopped yawning and scooted forward on the stool she was perched upon behind Clay. When the whale tail came down, Clay stopped the tape and looked back at her.

"Well?"

"Play it again."

He did. "Can we get a feeling for direction?" Amy asked. "That housing has stereo microphones, right? What if we move the speakers far apart — can we get a sense where it's coming from?"

Clay shook his head. "The mikes are right next to each other. You have to separate them by at least a meter to get any spatial information. All I can tell you is that it's in the water and it's not particularly loud. In fact, if I hadn't been using the rebreather, I'd never have heard it. You're the audio person. What can you tell me?" He ran it back and played it again.

"It's human speech."

Clay looked at her as if to say, Uh-huh, I woke you up because I needed the obvious pointed out.

"And it's military."

"Why do you think it's military?"

Now Amy gave Clay the same look that he had just finished giving her." 'Captain'?"

"Oh, right," said Clay. "Speaker in the water? Divers with underwater communications? What do you think?"

"Didn't sound like it. Did it sound like it was coming from small speakers to you?"

"Nope." Clay played it again. "Sandwich?" he said.

"Sandwich?"

"The Old Broad said that someone called her claiming to be a whale and asked her to tell Nate to bring him a sandwich."

Amy squeezed Clay's shoulder. "He's gone, Clay. I know you don't believe what I saw happened, but it certainly wasn't about a sandwich conspiracy."

"I'm not saying that, Amy. Damn it. I'm not saying this had anything to do with Nate's" — he was going to say drowning and stopped himself — "accident. But it might have to do with the lab getting wrecked, the tapes getting stolen, and someone trying to mess with the Old Broad. Someone is fucking with us, Amy, and it might be whoever is recorded on this tape."

"And there's no way the camera could have pulled a signal out of the air, something on the same frequency or something? A mobile phone or something?"

"Through a half-inch of powder-coated aluminum housing and a hundred feet of water? No, that signal came in through the mike. That I'm sure of."

Amy nodded and looked at the paused picture on the screen. "So you're looking for two things: someone military and someone who has an interest in Nate's work."

"No one — " Clay stopped himself again, remembering what he'd said to Nate when the lab had been wrecked. That no one cared about their work. But obviously someone did. "Tarwater?"

Amy shrugged. "He's military. Maybe. Leave the tape out. I'll run a spectrograph on the audio in the morning, see if I can tell if it's coming through some kind of amplifier. I've got nothing left tonight — I'm beat."

"Thanks," Clay said. "You get some rest, kiddo. I'm going to hit it, too. I'll be heading down to the harbor first thing."

" 'Kay."

"Oh, and hey, the 'kiddo' thing, I didn't mean —»

Amy threw her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. "You big mook. Don't worry, we'll get through this." She turned and started out the door.

"Amy?"

She paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Can I ask you a… personal question, kinda?"

"Shoot."

"The shirt — who's stupid?"

She looked down at her shirt, then back at him and grinned. "Always seems to apply, Clay. No matter where I am or who I'm with, the smoke clears and the shirt is true. You gotta hang on to truth when you find it."

"I like truth," Clay said.

"Night, Clay."

"Night, kiddo."

The next day the weather was blown out, with whitecaps frosting the entire channel across to Lanai and the coconut palms whipping overhead like epileptic dust mops. Clay drove by the harbor in his truck, noting that the cabin cruiser that Cliff Hyland's group had been using was parked in its slip. Then he turned around and caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye as he drove past the hundred-year-old Pioneer Inn — Captain Tarwater's navy whites standing out against the green shiplap. He parked his truck by the giant banyan tree next door and humped it over to the restaurant.

When Clay came up to the table, the hostess was just seating Cliff Hyland, Tarwater, and one of their grad students, a young blond woman with a raccoon sunburn and straw-dry hair.

"Hey, Cliff," Clay said. "You got a minute?"

"Clay, how you doing?" Hyland took off his sunglasses and stood to shake hands. "Please, join us."

Clay looked at Tarwater, and the naval officer nodded. "Sorry to hear about your partner," he said. Then he looked back down at his menu. The young woman sitting with them was watching the dynamic between the three men as if she might write a paper on it.

"Just a second," Clay said. "If I could talk to you outside."

Now Tarwater glanced up and gave Cliff Hyland an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

"Sure, Clay," Cliff said, "let's walk." He looked to the junior researcher. "When she comes, coffee, Portuguese sausage, eggs over easy, whole wheat."

The girl nodded. Hyland followed Clay out to the front of the hotel, which overlooked the harbor fueling station and the Carthaginian, a steel-hulled replica of a whaling brig, now used as a floating museum. They stood side by side, watching the harbor, each with a foot propped on the seawall.

"What's up, Clay?"

"What are you guys working on, Cliff?"

"You know I can't talk about that. I signed a nondisclosure thing."

"You got divers in the water, people with underwater coms?"

"Don't be silly, Clay. You've seen my crew. Except for Tarwater, they're just kids. What's this about?"

"Somebody's fucking with us, Cliff. They sank my boat, tore up the office, took Nate's papers and tapes. They're even messing with one of our benefactors. I'm not even sure they don't have something to do with Nate's —»

"And you think it's me?" Hyland took his foot off the seawall and turned to Clay. "Nate was my friend, too. I've known you guys, what? Twenty-two, twenty-three years? You can't think I'd do anything like that."

"I'm not saying you personally. What are you and Tarwater working on, Cliff? What would Nate know that would interfere with what you're doing?"

Hyland stared at his feet. Scratched his beard. "I don't know."

"You don't know? You know what we're doing — figure it out. Listen, I know you guys are using a big towable sonar rig, right? What's Tarwater looking at? Some new kind of active sonar? If it didn't have a hinky element, he wouldn't be here on site. Mines?"

"Damn it, Clay, I can't tell you! I can tell you that if I thought it was going to hurt the animals, or anyone in the field for that matter, I wouldn't be doing the work."

"Remember the navy's Pacific Biological Ocean Science Program? Were you in on that?"

"No. Birds, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, seabirds. The navy came to a bunch of field biologists with a ton of money — wanted seabirds tagged and tracked, behavior recorded, population information, habitat, everything. Everyone thought the heavens had opened up and started raining money. Thought the navy was doing some sort of secret impact study to preserve the birds. Do you know what the study was actually for?"

"No, that was before my time, Clay."

"They wanted to use the birds as delivery systems for biological weapons. Wanted to make sure they could predict that they'd fly to the enemy. Probably fifty scientists helped in that study."

"But it didn't happen, Clay, did it? I mean, the data was valuable scientifically, but the weapons project didn't pan out."

"As far as we know. That's the point. How would we know, until a seagull drops fucking anthrax on us?"

Cliff Hyland had aged a couple of years in the few minutes they'd been standing there. "I promise, Clay, if there's any indication that Tarwater or the navy or any of the spooky guys that come around from time to time are involved with trying to sabotage you guys, I'll call you in an instant. I promise you. But I can't tell you what I'm working on, or why. I don't exactly have funding coming out my ears. If I lose this, I'm teaching freshmen about dolphin jaws. I'm not ready for that. I need to be in the field."

Clay looked at him sideways and saw that there was real concern, maybe even a spark of desperation in Hyland's eyes. "You know, your funding might be a little easier to come by if you weren't based in Iowa. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's no ocean in Iowa."

Hyland smiled at the old dig. "Thanks for pointing that out, Clay."

Clay extended his hand. "You promise you'll let me know?"

"Absolutely."

Clay left feeling totally spent. The great head of steam he'd built up through a night of fitful sleep had wilted into exhaustion and confusion. He got in his truck and sat while sweat rolled down his neck. He watched tourists in aloha wear mill around under the great banyan tree like gift-wrapped zombies.

Cliff Hyland's eggs were still steaming when he returned to the table.

Tarwater looked up from his own breakfast and moved his snow-white hat away from Hyland's plate, as if the rumpled scientist might splash yolk over the gold anchors in a fit of disorganized eating. "Everything all right?"

The young woman at the table fidgeted and tried to look invisible.

"Clay's still a little shaken up. Understandably. He and Nathan Quinn have been working together a long time."

"Lucky they made it this long without self-destructing," Tarwater said. "Slipshod as they run that operation. You see that kid that works for them? Not worth grinding up for chum."

Cliff Hyland dropped his fork in his plate. "Nathan Quinn was one of the most intuitively brilliant biologists in the field. And Clay Demodocus may very well be the best underwater photographer in the world, certainly when it comes to cetaceans. You have no right."

"The world turns, Doc. Yesterday's alphas are today's betas. Losers lose. Isn't that what you biologists teach?"

Cliff Hyland came very close to burying a fork in Tarwater's tanned forehead, but instead he slowly climbed to his feet. "I need to use the restroom. Excuse me."

As he walked away, Hyland could hear Tarwater lecturing the junior researcher on how the strong survive. Cliff dug his mobile phone out of the pocket of his safari shirt and began scrolling through the numbers.

Clay was just dozing off in the driver's seat when his mobile trilled. Without looking at the display, he figured it was Clair checking up on him. "Go, baby."

"Clay, it's Cliff Hyland."

"Cliff? What's up?"

"You've got to keep this under your hat, Clay. It's my ass."

"I got you. What is it, Cliff?"

"It's a torpedo range. We're doing site studies for a torpedo test range."

"Not in the sanctuary?"

"Right in the middle of the sanctuary."

"Jeepers, Cliff, that's terrible. I don't know if my hat is big enough to hold that."

"You gave me your word, Clay. What's with 'jeepers'? Who says 'jeepers'?"

"Amy does. She's a little eccentric. Tell me more. Does the navy have divers in the water?"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Heinous Fuckery Most Foul

"Jeepers," said Amy. She was at Quinn's computer. Streamers of digital videotape were festooned across her lap and over the desk.

"Oh, that's heinous fuckery most foul," said Kona. He was perched on the high stool behind Amy and actually appeared to be trying to learn something when Clay came in.

"They've been simulating explosions on the lee of Kahoolawe with a big towable array of underwater speakers, measuring the levels. The speaker array is what's in that big case we've seen on their boat."

"We have a couple of explosions on the singer tapes, but distant," Amy said. "Nate thought it might be naval exercises out at sea."

"Speaking of tapes?" Clay picked up a strand of tape. "This isn't my rebreather footage, is it?"

"I'm sorry, Clay. I didn't get the video, but I pulled the audio off before this happened. Want to see the spectrograph?"

Kona asked, "You think those voices in the water be navy divers?"

Clay looked at Amy, raised an eyebrow.

"He wanted to learn."

"Cliff says there're no divers in the water, that his operation is it, militarily, in the sanctuary anyway. But he might not even know."

Amy wadded up the videotape and chucked the resulting bird's nest into the wastebasket. "How can they do that, Clay? How can they put a torpedo range in the middle of the humpback sanctuary? It's not like people won't notice."

"Yeah, she's a big ocean. Why here?" Kona said.

"I have no idea. Maybe they don't want there to be any mistake about whose waters they're blowing up ordnance in. If they blow them up in between a bunch of American islands, maybe there can't be any misinterpretation about what they're doing."

"Lost now," Kona said. "Does not compute. Danger. Danger. Control room needs herb." The Rastafarian had affected an accent that seemed an excellent approximation of how a stoned robot might sound.

"Submarine warfare is all about hide and seek with other submarines," Clay said. "The crews are autonomous when they're underwater. They make decisions on whether they're being attacked and whether to defend. Maybe if the navy just shot torpedoes off in the middle of the open sea, someone might misinterpret the action as an attack. It's damn unlikely that a Russian sub is going to be cruising up to Wailea for brunch and misinterpret an attack."

"They can't do that," Amy said. "They can't let them set off high explosives around the mothers and calves. It's just insane."

"They'll go deep and say it doesn't bother them. The navy will guarantee they won't blow up anything shallower than, say, four hundred feet. The humpbacks don't dive that deep in this channel."

"Yes they do," Amy said.

"No they don't," Clay said.

"Yes they do."

"There's no data on that, Amy. That's specifically what Cliff Hyland asked me about. He wanted to know if we were doing any research on the depth of humpback dives. Said that it would be the only thing the navy would care about."

Amy stood up and shoved the wheeled desk chair away. It bounced off Kona's shins, causing him to wince. "Ease on up, sistah."

"Amy, this wasn't my idea," Clay said. "I'm just telling you what Hyland told me."

"Fine," Amy said. She pushed her way past Clay and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Somewhere else." She let the screen door slam behind her.

Clay turned to Kona, who appeared to be studying the ceiling with great concentration. "What?"

"You makin' up that submarine war story?"

"Kind of. I read a Tom Clancy book once. Look, Kona, I'm not supposed to know stuff. Nate knew stuff. I just take the pictures."

"You think the navy sink your boat? Maybe make something bad happen to Nate?"

"The boat, maybe. I don't think they could have had anything to do with Nate. That was just bad luck."

"The Snowy Biscuit — all this getting under her skin."

"Mine, too."

"I'll go put the calm on her."

"Thanks," Clay said. He walked to the other side of the office, slumped in his chair, and pulled his editing tools up on the giant monitor.

A half hour later he heard a tiny voice coming through the screen door. "Sorry," Amy said.

"It's okay."

She stepped into the room and stood there, not looking as glazed as he would have expected if Kona had put the calm on her in an herbal way. "Sorry about your tape, too. The camera was making crunching noises on playback, so I sort of rushed taking it out."

"Not a problem. It was your big rescue scene. It just made me look like an amateur. I got most of it on the hard drive, I think."

"You did?" She stepped over to the monitor. "That it?" Frame stopped, the whale tail from the edge, black marks barely visible.

"Just going through it to see if there's anything else the audio picked up. The camera was running the whole time you were saving my bacon."

"Why don't you let it rest and let me take you out to lunch."

"It's ten-thirty."

"What, you're Mr. Rigid Schedule all of a sudden? Come out to lunch with me. I feel bad."

"Don't feel bad, Amy. It's a huge loss. I… I'm not dealing well myself. You know, to keep this work going, we'll be needing some academic juice."

Amy just stared at the frozen image of the whale tail, and then she caught herself. "What? Oh, you'll get someone. You put the word out, you'll have Ph.D.'s knocking the door down to work with you."

"I was thinking about you."

"Me? I'm crap. I don't even have a bona fide hair color. Ink on my master's isn't even dry. You read my resume."

"Actually, I didn't."

"You didn't?"

"You seemed intelligent. You were willing to work for nothing."

"Nate read it, though, right?"

"I told him you were good. And if it's any consolation, he thought the world of you."

"That's how you hire? I'm smart and I'm cheap — that's it? What kind of standards do you guys have?"

"Have you met Kona?"

She looked back at the monitor, then at Clay again. "I feel so used. Honored, but used. Look, I'm thrilled you want to keep me on, but I'm not going to bring you funding or legitimacy."

"I'll worry about that."

"Worry about it after lunch. Come on, I'll buy."

"You're poor. Besides, I'm meeting Clair for lunch at one."

"Okay. Can I borrow Nate's — uh, the green truck?"

"Keys are on the counter." Clay waved over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

Amy took the keys, then started out the door, caught herself, then ran back, and threw her arms around the photographer. "I really appreciate your asking me to stay."

"Go. Take Kona with you. Feed him. Hose him off."

"Nope, if you're not coming, I'm going solo. Tell Clair hi for me."

"Go."

He looked back at the computer, looked past the window at the brilliant Maui sun, then shut the computer down, feeling very much as if nothing he did mattered or would ever matter again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN Scooter Don't Meep

The whale tossed like a roller coaster moving through tomato soup — great gut-flopping waves of muscular motion. Quinn rolled to his hands and knees and urped his breakfast into a splatter pattern across the rubbery gray floor, then heaved in time with the rhythm of the whale's swimming until he was empty and exhausted.

"Hurl patrol," came a voice out of the dark.

"Flush and gush, boys, the doc blew ballast back here," came another voice.

Quinn rolled onto his bottom and scooted away from the voices until he came against a bulkhead, which was warm and moist and gave at his touch. He felt huge muscles moving behind the skin and nearly jumped. He scooted away, then sat balled up near where he'd been sick. Cold seawater rolled down from the front of the whale and over his feet, taking his recently vacated breakfast with it. His ears popped with a pressure increase, and in a second the water was gone.

The interior of the whale looked like a bad van conversion done by a latex freak: damp, rubbery skin over everything, lit by a light blue haze coming from the eyes up front, the rest dimly lit by bioluminescent strips of green that ran over the top of the teardrop-shaped chamber. At the front of the chamber, on either side by the eyes, two things sat in seats that wrapped around their bodies. Quinn didn't know what they were, and his mind felt as if it were ripping open trying to grasp the whole of the situation. Details like nonhuman humanoids decked out in gray skin couldn't register enough space in his consciousness to be examined or analyzed. In fact, he could keep his eyes open for only a few seconds before the nausea returned.

Inside the whale smelled like fish.

Standing, or sort of standing — riding was a more appropriate term, as everything inside the whale was moving — behind the seated creatures were two men, one about forty, the other twenty-five, both barefoot but wearing military khakis without insignias or any badges of rank, but the older man was obviously in command. Quinn had tried for five minutes to ask them the questions coming into his mind, but each time he opened his mouth, he had to stop himself from throwing up. He'd always considered himself pretty seaworthy until now.

"What…?" he managed to get out before his gorge rose again.

"It really helps with the incredulity if you accept that you're dead," said the older man.

"I'm dead?"

"I didn't say that, but if you accept that you are, it sort of quells the anxiety."

"Yeah, if you're already dead, what bad can really happen?" said the younger guy.

"Then I am dead?"

"Nope. Breathe and go with the motion," said the older guy. "It's not going to stop, so if you fight it, you'll lose."

"Your lunch," added the young guy, and then he let loose a giggle at his own joke.

"There's less motion toward the front. The head tracks close to level. But you knew that."

Quinn hadn't been able to apply any of his analytical powers to the situation because he flat couldn't accept it. Yes, in another world he realized that he knew that the whale's head would have less motion than the tail, but he'd never even considered that he might be thinking about it from the perspective of an internal organ.

"I'm inside a whale?"

"Ding, ding, ding, he's gotten the bonus answer." The young guy leaned back against the back of the seat where one of the gray creatures was sitting, and a chairlike protrusion rose out of the floor to catch him. "Tell him what he's won, Captain."

"Hospitality, Poe. Help the doctor up to the front so we can talk without him tossing his cookies."

The younger guy helped Quinn to his feet and across the undulating floor to the chair thing that had risen behind one of the gray creatures facing the back of the ship. Once close to the creatures, Quinn couldn't take his eyes off them. They were humanoid, in that they had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head, but their heads were like that of a pilot whale, with a large melon in the front — for transmitting and receiving sound underwater, Quinn guessed — and their eyes were set wide to the side, so the creatures would see with binocular vision. Their hands were inserted into consoles that rose out of the floor and appeared to have no instrumentation whatsoever except for some bioluminescent nodules that looked like cloudy eyeballs and emitted different colors of light. The creatures appeared as if they had become part of the whale.

"We call them the whaley boys," the older man said. "They pilot the whale."

"The one directly behind you is Scooter, the other one is Skippy. Say hi, guys."

The creatures turned as far as the chairs would allow them and made clicking and squeaking noises, then seemed to smile at Quinn. While smiling they showed mouthfuls of sharp, peglike teeth. With the teeth set against their dark gray skins and the melon above, the whaley boys put Quinn in mind of more cheerful versions of the creature from the Alien movies. Scooter saluted Nate with a hand consisting of four very long webbed fingers and only the suggestion of a thumb.

"They say hi," said Poe. "I'm Poe. This is Captain Poynter." Poynter, the older man, tipped his hat and offered a hand to shake. Quinn took it and waggled it limply.

"The whaley boys don't speak English as we know it," Poe said, "although they have a few squeaks that come out like words. They're tapped directly in to the whale's nervous system. They steer it, control all the processes at any given time. We can't do much on the whales without them. Certainly could never drive one. The whales and the whaley boys are made for each other."

Poe pushed against the back of Skippy's seat, and another seat formed out of the floor to cradle him as he leaned back into it. "I love that," Poe said.

Poynter backed up to a rubbery bulkhead, and a seat formed out of the wall to catch him as well.

"If they're paying attention, they'll never let you fall." Poe grinned. "Of course, almost everything in here is soft — child safe, don't you know — except the spine, which runs over the top, so you wouldn't be hurt if you did fall. But just the same, we're secured when they're doing maneuvers. You think you're sick now — wait until we go for a breach. Don't freak out." Poe turned to the whaley boys. "Secure the doc, boys." The arms of the seat shape wrapped over Quinn's lap. Parts came over his shoulders and fused across his chest, then around his hips and over his lap. Quinn freaked out.

"Get it off me! Get it off me! I can't breathe!"

"Prepare for breach," said Poynter.

Scooter chirped. Skippy grinned. Similar restraints extruded from all their seats, securing them.

The attitude of the whale changed, going up at a nearly sixty-degree angle — and then the angle went sharper as they moved. Quinn was looking backward at the tail section of the teardrop interior. The lurching movement of the luminescent strips was starting to nauseate him. He could feel his internal organs shifting with the acceleration, and then the whale ship went vertical and airborne. At the apex of the motion, Quinn's stomach tried to escape through his diaphragm, then shifted as they fell sideways. There was an enormous concussion as the ship hit the water. Slowly the whale came back around, and they were horizontal again.

The whaley boys chirped and clicked gleefully, grinning back at Quinn, then at each other, then back at Quinn, nodding as if to say, Was that cool, or what? Their necks were nearly as wide as their shoulders, and Quinn could see heavy muscles moving under the skin. "They love that," said Poynter.

"I kind of like it, too," said Poe. "Except when they go overboard and do twenty or thirty breaches in a row. Even I get sick when they do that. And the noise… well, you heard it."

Quinn shook his head, closed his eyes, then opened them again. The only way to deal with this experience was to accept it at face value: He was in a whale, one that was somehow being used as a submarine by human and nonhuman sentient creatures. Everything he knew no longer applied, but then again, maybe it did. What put him on the less loopy side of sanity was noticing the whaley boys' thick necks.

"They're amphibious, right?" Quinn asked Poynter. "Their necks are thick to take the stress of swimming at high speeds?" Quinn rose in his chair as far as the restraints would allow and saw that Scooter did indeed have a blowhole just behind his melon. He was a humanoid whale, or a dolphin creature. Scooter was impossible. All of this was impossible. The details, not the big picture, Quinn reminded himself. In the big picture there be madness. "They're like a whale/human hybrid, aren't they?"

"Which would be why we call them the whaley boys," said Poynter.

"Wait, are you accusing us of something?" asked Poe. "Because these guys are not the love children of us and some whales. We don't do that kind of thing."

"Well, there was that one time," said Poynter.

"Okay, yeah, just that one time," said Poe.

But Quinn was studying Scooter, and Scooter was eyeing him right back. "Although they appear to be able to turn their heads, like beluga whales. Their neck vertebrae probably aren't fused like most whales'." The scientist rising, Quinn was comfortable now, his fear taken away by curiosity. He was focused on finding out things, which was his home turf, even in this completely unreal situation. If he focused on the details, the big picture wouldn't throw him over the edge into drooling lunacy.

"Let's ask them," said Poe. "Scooter, are your vertebrae fused together, or are you just a big, no-necked gray thug?"

Scooter turned his head to Poe and made a loud raspberry sound, spraying whaley spit all down the front of Poe's khakis and increasing the odor of decaying fish in the cabin by a factor of ten.

"We don't know what they are, Dr. Quinn," said Captain Poynter. "They were here when we got here, and we got here just like you did. We've all been on this ride."

"Meep," said Skippy.

"I taught him that," said Poe.

"That's from a Warner Brothers' cartoon," Quinn said. "Road Runner."

"No, that would be two meeps. Skippy only does one. Therefore, it's original. Isn't that right, Skippy?"

"Meep."

For some reason the meep did it. Some minds, particularly those with a scientific bent, a love of truth and certainty, have limits to how much absurdity they can handle. And here Quinn found himself well over the limit.

"Skippy and Scooter and Poynter and Poe — I can't handle it!" he screamed.

He felt as if his mind were a rubber band being stretched to breaking, and the meep had tweaked it. He screamed until he could feel veins pulsing in his forehead.

"You let it out now," said Captain Poynter. "Just go with it." Then, to Poe, "You know, I wouldn't have thought the alliteration would have done it. You ever hear of that?"

"Nope, I had an uncle who used to get nauseated at Reader's Digest article titles — you know, 'Terrible Truths of Toxic Toe Jam' — but I thought it was more because he read them in the doctor's office than the alliteration. You sure it wasn't the meep that did it?"

"This can't be happening. This can't be happening," Quinn chanted. He was hyperventilating, and his vision had gone to a blur, his heart pounding like he'd been running a sprint across an electrified floor.

"Anxiety attack," said Poynter. He put his hand on Quinn's forehead and spoke softly. "Okay, Doc, here's the skinny. You are in a living ship that resembles a whale but is not a whale. There are two other guys aboard who have lived through this, so you can live through this. In addition, there are two guys who are not strictly human, but they won't hurt you. You are going to live and deal with this. This is real. You are not insane. Now, calm the fuck down."

And it was then that Poynter stepped back and Poe threw the bucket of cold seawater in Quinn's face.

"Hey," Quinn said. He sputtered and blinked seawater out of his eyes.

"I told you to go with the dead thing, but you didn't listen," Poe said.

Nothing had changed, but things, his heart, slowed down, and Quinn looked around. "Where did that bucket come from? There was no bucket in here. There was nothing but us. And where did you get the water?"

Poe held the bucket at ready. "You're sure you're okay? I don't want to freak you out again."

"Yeah. I'm okay," said Quinn. And actually, he was. He'd decided to go with the idea that he was already dead, and that seemed to make everything fall into perspective. "I'm dead."

"That's the spirit," said Poe. He held the bucket against a wall, and a small portal opened and sucked the bucket in. Quinn would have sworn there hadn't been any seams in the wall to indicate there'd been an opening there.

"Hey," said Poynter, taking on the tone of the deeply offended, "now that you're dead, I've got a bone to pick with you about not bringing me my sandwich."

Quinn looked at the sharp features and narrowed eyes of the captain — who now seemed genuinely angry — and a shiver ran through his body that had nothing to do with the cold seawater running out of his hair. "Sorry," he said, shrugging as much as he could in the restraints.

"Damn it, how hard could that have been? You've got a Ph.D. for Christ's sake — you can't get a fucking pastrami on rye? I've got a good mind to chuck you out the anus."

"Shhhhhhhh, Cap," Poe said. "That was gonna be a surprise."

"Meep," said Skippy.

CHAPTER TWENTY Missing Biscuit, Flopping Tuna

"Bwana Clay, you seen the Snowy Biscuit?"

Clay and Clair sat on the lanai of Clay's bungalow drinking mai-tais and watching smoke roll out the vents of a Weber kettle barbecue. Kona had his long board tucked underneath his arm and was heading for his Maui cruiser, a lime Krylon-over-rust 1975 BMW 2002, with no windows and seats that were covered in ratty blankets.

Clay was two mai-tais south of lucid, but he could still talk, "She took Nate's truck into town this morning. Haven't seen her since."

"Sistah wanted me to teach her some surfing. Got some easy sets rolling on West Shore, good for that."

"Sorry," said Clay. "We're smoking a big hunk of ahi tuna if you'd like to join us."

"No," said Clair.

"Tanks, but I'm going down to Lahaina town and see if I can find that Snowy Biscuit. We going to work tomorrow?"

"Maybe," said Clay, trying to think through a rum cloud. They'd pulled the Always Confused up out of the bottom of the harbor, and the boatyard had said it would be a week or so before it was ready to float again, although even then it would need some major cleaning. Still, they had Nate's boat. He looked at Clair.

"You're not sitting home tomorrow whining to me about your hangover," Clair said. "You get out there on the water and be sick like a proper man." She'd revised her thoughts on Clay's staying off the water. He was who he was.

"Yeah, plan on going out if it's not too windy," Clay said. "Hey, we supposed to have wind?" It occurred to Clay that he hadn't checked the weather since Nate had disappeared.

"Calm morning, trades in the afternoon," Kona said. "We can work."

"Tell Amy when you see her, okay. Take my cell phone with you. Call me when you find her. You sure you won't have dinner with us?"

"No," said Clair.

"No," said Kona, grinning at Clair. "Auntie, you embarrassed that Kona seen you naked? You look fine, yeah."

Clair stood up. "You go ahead, call me 'Auntie' again, see if I don't snatch out the rest of those dreads and use them to make cat toys."

"Ease up, I'm going to find the Biscuit." And he loped to the Beemer, slid the long board in through the back window, hooked the skeg over the passenger seat to secure it, and then drove off to Lahaina to look for Amy.

It was two in the morning when the phone in Clay's bungalow rang. "Tell me you're not in jail," Clay said.

"Not in jail, Bwana Clay, but maybe you need to sit down."

"I'm in bed sleeping, Kona. What?"

"The truck, Bwana Nate's truck. It's here at the kayak rental in Lahaina. They say Amy rent a kayak this morning, about eleven."

"They're still there?"

"I waked the guy up."

"They don't know where she went? They let her go alone? He didn't call us when it got dark?"

"She said she was just using it to tow behind the boat, for research. He know she a whale researcher, so he didn't think nothing of it. Sometime they take kayaks two, three days."

"You checked? She's not on the boat?"

"You mean the not sunk one?"

"Yes, that would be the one."

"Yeah, I check. The boat in the slip. No kayak."

"Stay there. I'll be down in a few minutes. I have to get dressed and call the Coast Guard."

"This kayak guy says it not on him — she signed a wafer. That some kind of religious thing?"

"Waiver, Kona, she signed a waiver. Are you high?"

"Yes."

"Of course. Sorry. Okay, I'll be right there."

Nate was three days inside the whale before he asked, "Your names aren't really Poynter and Poe, are they?"

"What?" said Poynter. "You're eaten by a giant whale ship and you're worried that we might be traveling under assumed names? Go for it, Poe."

"Give us a flush, boys!" Poe said.

Water came gushing down the floor of the whale from the front. Pantsless, Ensign Poe took three steps and went into a slide toward the tail like he was sliding into third base on a wet rain tarp. As he reached the end of the chamber, he spread his arms out to his sides at right angles. There was a sucking sound, and he sank up to his armpits into an orifice that only a second ago had appeared as just an impression in solid skin.

"Wow, that's cold," said Poe. "How deep are we?"

Scooter clicked and whistled a couple of times.

"Ninety feet," said Poynter. "Can't be that bad."

"Feels colder. I think my 'nads have crawled up inside my body."

Nate simply stared, gape-jawed, at the arms and head of the ensign, just above floor level.

"You see, Doc," said Poynter, "most of the time we call it the 'back orifice' instead of the anus, you know, because otherwise, with us moving in and out of it, there's implications. His lower body is in the sea right now, at three atmospheres, yet the back orifice is sealed around him and it's not crushing his chest. It's not crushing your chest, is it, Poe?"

"No, sir. It's snug for sure, but I can breathe."

"How is that possible?" asked Nate.

"You're a diver. You've been down, what, a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty feet?"

"A hundred and fifty, by accident, but what does that have to do with this?"

"You never had sphincter failure at that depth, did you? Blow up like a puffer fish?"

"No."

"Well, there you go, Nate. This here is just advanced poop-chute technology. We don't even understand it ourselves, but it's the key to sanitation on these small ships, and it's how we get in and out. Normally the mouth on these humpback ships doesn't even open, which gives us a lot more room, but this one was made specially to retrieve 'Dirts. That's you people."

"Made? By whom?" Of course they were made. Nothing like this could have evolved.

"Later," said Poynter. "Poe, you done?"

"Aye, aye, Captain."

"Get back in here."

"Mighty cold out here, sir. I'm telling you, my tackle's going to look like I'm posing for a baby picture."

"I'm sure the doc will take that into account, Poe."

Nate could feel a slight change in pressure in his ears, and Poe oozed back into the whale. The orifice sealed behind him, leaving almost no water on the floor. The ensign sidled, crablike, to the front of the ship, shielding his privates with his hands. He retrieved his pants from a storage nook that opened with a flap of skin like the blowhole on a killer whale. The whale's interior was lined with the storage nooks, but you couldn't even see the seams by the dim bioluminescence when they were closed.

"You're going to learn how to do that, Nate. It's just the civilized thing to do until we transfer you to the blue. Can't have you doing your business in the ship."

When he'd had to go to the bathroom, they'd sent Nate to the back of the whale, where he'd gone on the floor. Seconds later the whaley boys had let a bit of water in through a crack in the mouth, which washed across the floor and effectively flushed the mess out the back orifice.

"The blue?" Nate asked.

"Yeah, we can't take you where they want you in this little thing. We'll transfer you to a blue and send you on. You'll have to go through the poop chutes."

"So there's a blue-whale ship as well?"

"Ships," Poynter corrected. "Yeah, and other species, too."

"Right whales are my favorites," Poe said. "Slower than hell, but really wide. Plenty of room. You'll see."

"So they — the whaley boys — can regulate the pressure that precisely? They can let in water, expel it, keep the pressure in here from giving us the bends? Allow us to transfer from one of these ships to another?"

"Yep, they're tapped in to the whale directly. They're like his cerebral cortex, I guess. The whale ships have a brain, but that only takes care of autonomic functions. Allows it to act like a whale for hours on end — diving, breathing, stuff like that. But without one of the whaley boys tapped in, they're just dumb machines, limited function. The pilots control higher functions — navigation and such. They really show off their stuff in these humpbacks — the breaching, the singing, you know."

"This thing sings?" Nate couldn't help himself. He wanted to hear a whale sing from the inside.

"Of course it sings. You heard it sing."

Since Nate had been on, the only sound the whale ship had made was the beating of its enormous flukes and the explosive blow every ten minutes or so.

"I hate it when they sing," said Poe.

"What's the purpose of the song?" Nate asked. He didn't care who these guys were or what they were doing. He now had the opportunity to get the answer to a question he'd pursued for most of his adult life. "Why do they sing?"

"Because we tell them to," said Poynter. "Why'd you think?"

"No. It's not right." Nate buried his face in his hands. "Kidnapped by morons."

Scooter let loose with a series of frantic chirps. The whaley boy was staring out the eye into the blue Pacific.

"School of tuna outside," said Poe.

"Go, Scooter," said Poynter. "Go get some."

The restraints retracted from around Scooter's waist, and the creature stood up for the first time since Nate had come on board. He was taller than Nate, maybe six-six, with lean gray legs that looked like those of a giant bullfrog crossbred with a fullback and terminated in long, webbed feet that resembled the rear flippers of a walrus. Scooter took three quick steps and dove at the floor in the back of the whale. There was a whooshing sound, and he disappeared, headfirst, through the back orifice, which sealed behind him with a distinct pop.

Poe stepped into the seat that Scooter had vacated and looked out through the eye. "Nate, check this out. Watch how these guys hunt."

Nate looked out the whale's eye and saw Scooter's lithe form swim by at incredible speed, darting back and forth with astounding agility in pursuit of a twenty-pound tuna.

In the water the whaley boy's eyes no longer bugged out as they did inside the whale. Like whales and dolphins, Nate realized, whaley boys possessed muscles that could actually change the shape of the eye for focusing in either air or water. Scooter did a rapid turn and snatched the tuna in his jaws not ten feet from the eye of the whale. Nate could hear the snap and saw blood in the water around Scooter's mouth.

"Yes!" said Poe. "It's sashimi tonight."

Nate had eaten nothing but raw fish since he'd been on board the whale ship, but this was the first time he'd seen it caught. Still, he couldn't quite share Poe's enthusiasm. "Is this all you eat? Raw fish?"

"It beats the alternatives," said Poe. "The whale carries a nutrient paste that's like krill puree."

"Oh, my God," said Nate.

Poynter leaned in close to Nate, so he was only inches from the scientist's ear. "Thus the somewhat substantial demand for culinary variety, as in — oh, I don't know — a pastrami on rye!"

"I said I was sorry," Nate muttered.

"Yeah, right."

"Drop me off anywhere. I'll go get you one."

"We don't land these things on shore."

"You don't?"

"Except to paint 'bite me' on the flukes," said Poe.

"Yeah, except for that," said Poynter.

Skippy meeped as Scooter scooted in through the poop chute with tuna in hand. Upon seeing the pilot's entrance, Nate started thinking, for the first time since he'd been eaten, about how to escape.

This is just stupid, Amy thought. She'd been paddling like a madwoman for four hours and was still barely halfway to Molokai. She'd been past the channel wind line for two of those four hours and so battled four-foot swells and a crosswind that threatened to take her out to sea.

"Who gives GPS coordinates for a meeting? Who does business like that?" She'd been shouting into the wind on and off for an hour, then checking the little liquid-crystal map on the display of the GPS receiver. The "you are here" dot never seemed to move. Well, that wasn't true. If she paused from paddling to take a drink of water or apply some sunscreen, the dot seemed to jump off course a mile at a time.

"Are you guys on drugs?" she screamed into the wind.

Her shoulders ached, and she'd drunk nearly all of the two-liter bottle of water she'd brought with her. She started to regret not having brought along some kind of snack. "An easy paddle. 'Just rent a kayak. You won't need a power boat. I'm adrift on a piece of Tupperware, you nitwits!"

She leaned back on the kayak to catch her breath and watched the direction and speed indicators change on the GPS. She could rest maybe five minutes without drifting too far. She closed her eyes and let the swells rock her into a light doze. It was quiet, just the white noise of wind and water, not even a slap of waves on the kayak — she was so light that it rode high in the water and over the tops of the waves without a sound. She thought about Nate, about how frightened he must have been in those last moments, about how much she'd started to enjoy working with him. Action nerd. She smiled to herself, a melancholy smile as she dozed off, but then the sound of a fusillade of bubbles breaking the surface near the kayak jolted her to alertness. It was a huge expulsion of air, as if someone had set off an explosion deep under the water.

She started paddling away from the eruptions of bubbles, but even as she moved, the sea began to darken around her, the crystal blue turning to shadow in a huge pool under the kayak. Then something hit the little boat, tossing Amy into the air twenty feet before she hit the water and the darkness surrounded her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE I Lick the Body Electric

The Maui sunset had set the sky on fire and everything in the bungalow had taken on the glowing pink tone of paradise — or hell, depending on where you were standing. Clay dismembered the bird and put the severed pieces on a platter to transport them to the grill.

"You'll need something to bring those in on," Clair said. Her dress was a purple hibiscus-flower print, and the orchid she wore in her hair looked like lavender dragonflies humping. She was dicing pickles into the macaroni salad.

"What's wrong with this?" Clay held up the plate with the raw chicken.

"You can't use the same plate. You'll get salmonella."

"Fine, fuck it," Clay said, tossing the plate into the yard. The chicken parts bounced nicely, breading themselves with a light coating of sand, ants, and dried grass. "When did chicken become like plutonium anyway, for Christ's sake? You can't let it touch you or it's certain fucking death. And eggs and hamburgers kill you unless you cook them to the consistency of limestone! And if you turn on your fucking cell phone, the plane is going to plunge out of the sky in a ball of flames? And kids can't take a dump anymore but they have to have a helmet and pads on make them look like the Road Warrior. Right? Right? What the fuck happened to the world? When did everything get so goddamn deadly? Huh? I've been going to sea for thirty damned years, and nothing's killed me. I've swum with everything that can bite, sting, or eat you, and I've done every stupid thing at depth that any human can — and I'm still alive. Fuck, Clair, I was unconscious for an hour underwater less than a week ago, and it didn't kill me. Now you're going to tell me that I'm going to get whacked by a fucking chicken leg? Well, just fuck it then!"

He didn't know where to go, so he came back in and slammed the screen door behind him, then opened it and slammed it again. "Goddamn it!" And he stood there, breathing hard. Not really looking at anything.

Clair put down her knife and pickle, then wiped her hands. As she came toward Clay she pulled a large bobby pin from the back of her hair, and her long, thick locks cascaded down her back. She took Clay's right hand and kissed each of his fingertips, licked his thumb, then took his index finger in her mouth and made a show of removing it slowly and with maximum moisture. Clay looked at the floor, shaking.

"Baby," she said as she placed the bobby pin firmly between Clay's wet thumb and index finger, "I need you to go over to that wall and take this bobby pin and insert it ever so firmly into that electrical outlet over there."

Clay looked up at her at last.

"Because," she continued, "I know that you aren't mad at me and that you're just grieving for your friends, but I think you need to be reminded that you aren't invulnerable and that you can hurt even more than you do now. And I think it would be better if you did it yourself, because otherwise I'll have to brain you with your own iron skillet."

"That would be wrong," Clay said.

"It is a cruel world, baby."

Clay took her in his arms and buried his face in her hair and just stood there in the doorway for a long time.

Amy had been missing for thirty-two hours. That morning a fisherman had found her kayak washing against some rocks on Molokai and had called the rental company in Maui. A life jacket was still strapped on the front of the boat, he said. The Coast Guard had stopped looking already.

"Now, let me go," Clair said. "I have to get that chicken out of the yard and rinse it off."

"I don't think we should eat that."

"Please. I'm going to cook it up for Kona. You're taking me out."

"I am?"

"Of course."

"After I stick this in the outlet, right?"

"You can grieve, Clay — that's as it should be — but you can't feel guilty for being alive."

"So, I don't have to stick this in the outlet?"

"You used foul language at me, baby. I don't see any way around it."

"Oh, well, that's true. You go get Kona's chicken out of the yard. I'll do this."

On the second morning after Amy was lost at sea, Clay walked to the seaside, a rocky beach between some condos north of Lahaina — too short for morning runners, too shallow for a bathing crowd. He stood on an outcropping of rocks with the waves crashing around him and tried to let pure hatred run out of his heart. Clay Demodocus was a guy who liked things, and among the things he had liked the most was the sea, but this morning he held nothing but disdain for his old friend. The sapphire blue was indifferent, the waves elitist. She'd kill you without even learning your name. "You bitch," Clay said, loud enough for the sea to hear. He spit into her face and walked back home.

That old trickster Maui had been sitting on a rock nearby watching, and he laughed at Clay's hubris. Maui admired a man with more balls than brains, even a haole. He cast a small blessing at the photographer — just a trinket for the laugh, a trifling little mango of magic — and then he headed off to the great banyan tree to fog the film of Japanese tourists.

Back in what was now only his office, Clay dug Amy's resume out of his files and made the call. He braced himself, trying to figure out how, exactly, he was going to tell these strangers that their daughter was missing and assumed to have drowned. He felt sad and alone, and his elbow hurt from the jolt of electricity he'd taken the night before. He didn't want to do this. He reached for the phone, then stopped and closed his eyes, as if he could make the whole thing go away, but on the back of his eyelids he saw the face of his mother as he had last seen her, looking up at him out of her barrel of brine, "Make the call, you pussy. If anyone knows how not to get bad news, it's you. Part of loyalty is following up, you sniveling coward. Don't be like your brothers."

Ah, sweet Mama, Clay thought. He dialed the phone — a number with a 716 area code, Tonawanda, New York. It rang three times, and the recorded operator came on, saying that the number he'd reached was not in service at this time. He checked it, then dialed the next number down, which also turned out not to be working. He called Tonawanda information for Amy's parents, and the operator told him there was no such listing. At a loss, he called Woods Hole Oceanographic Center, where Amy had gotten her master's. Clay knew one of her advisers, Marcus Loughten, an irascible Brit who had worked at Woods Hole for twenty years and was famous in the field for his work in underwater acoustics. Loughten answered on the third ring.

"Loughten," Loughten said.:

"Marcus, this is Clay Demodocus. We worked together on —»

"Yes, Clay, I bloody know who you are. Calling from Hawaii, are you?"

"Well, yes, I —»

"Probably, what, seventy-eight degrees with a breeze? It's seven below zero Fahrenheit here. I'm out installing bloody sound buoys in a monthlong blizzard to keep right whales from getting run over by supertankers."

"Right, the sound buoys. How are those working out?"

"They're not."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, right whales are stupid as shit, aren't they? It's not like a supertanker is quiet. If sound was going to deter them, then they'd be bloody well deterred by the engine noise, wouldn't they? They don't make the connection. Stupid shits."

"Oh, sorry to hear that. Uh, why keep doing it then?"

"We have funding."

"Right. Look, Marcus, I need some information on one of your students who came out here to work with us. Amy Earhart? Would have been with you guys until fall of last year."

"No, I don't know that name."

"Sure you do, five-five, thin, pale, dark hair with kind of unnatural blue highlights, smart as a whip."

"Sorry, Clay. That doesn't fit any of my students."

Clay took a deep breath and trudged on. Biologists were notorious for treating their grad students as subhuman, but Clay was surprised that Loughten didn't remember Amy. She was cute, and if Clay could judge from a night of drinking he'd done with Loughten at a marine mammal conference in France, the Brit was more than a bit of a horndog.

"Great ass, Marcus. You'd remember."

"I'm sure I would, but I don't."

Clay studied the resume. "What about Peter? Would he —»

"No, Clay, I know all of Peter's grad students as well. Did you call to confirm her references when you took her on?"

"Well, no."

"Good work, then. Abscond with your Nikons, did she?"

"No, she's missing at sea. I'm trying to contact her family."

"Sorry. Wish I could be of help. I'll check the records, just to be sure — in case I've had a ministroke that killed the part of the brain that remembers fine bottoms."

"Thanks."

"Good luck, Clay. My best to Quinn."

Clay cringed. It turned out he really wasn't up for bearing bad news. "Will do, Marcus. Good-bye." Clay hung up and resumed staring at the phone. Well, he thought, I knew absolutely nothing about this woman that I thought I knew. Libby Quinn had already called (sobbing) to say that they should have some kind of joint service at the sanctuary for Nate and Amy, and that Clay should speak. What was he going to say about Amy? Dearly beloved, I think we all knew Amy as scientist, a colleague, a friend, a woman who showed up out of nowhere with a completely manufactured history, but I think, because she saved my life, that I came to know her better than anyone here, and I can tell you unequivocally, she was a smart aleck with a cute butt.

Yeah, he'd need to work on that. Damn it, he missed them both.

Clay decided to kill the day by editing video: time-eating busywork that supplied at least an imaginary escape from the real world. The afternoon found him going through the rebreather footage he'd taken on the day the whale had conked him, for the first time going past the point where he was unconscious, just to see if the camera picked up anything usable. Clay let the video run: minutes of blue water, the camera tossing around at the end of the wrist lanyard, then Amy's leg as she comes down to stop his descent. He cranked the audio. Hiss of ambient noise, then the bubbles from Amy's regulator, the slow hiss of his own breathing through the rebreather. As Amy starts to swim to the surface, the camera catches his fins hanging limply against a field of blue, then Amy's fins kicking in and out of the frame. Both their breathing is steady on the audio track.

Clay looked at the time signature of the video. Fifteen minutes when the motion stops. Amy making her first decompression stop. On the audio he hears the chorus of distant singing humpbacks, a boat motor not too far off, and Amy's steady bubbles. Then the bubbles stop.

The camera settles against his thigh and drifts, the lens up, catches light from the surface, then Amy's hand holding on to his buoyancy vest, reading the data off his dive computer. Her regulator is out of her mouth. On the audio there's only his breathing. The camera swings away.

Ten minutes more pass. Clay listens for Amy's breathing to resume. The motion from her hooking into the rescue tank on the rebreather should move the camera, but there's just the same gentle drift. They move up. Clay guesses maybe to seventy-five feet. Amy is doing another decompression stop, doing it by the book, despite the emergency. Except he still can hear only one person breathing.

She pulls him to more shallow depth. The frame lightens up, and the camera swings around, the wide angle showing Clay's unconscious form and Amy kicking, the regulator out of her mouth, looking at the surface. She hasn't used the bail-out tank on Clay's rebreather, and she hasn't taken a breath for, as far as Clay can tell, forty minutes. This can't be right.

He listens, watching until the time signature shows sixty and the tape ends — the entire thing having been dubbed to the hard drive. He rewinds it on-screen, slowing down when the camera shows anything but blue, listening again.

"No fucking way."

Clay backed away from the monitor, watching as the video ran out again and froze on the image of Amy holding him steady at twenty or so feet down, no regulator in her mouth.

He ran out the door, calling, "Kona! Kona!"

The surfer came shuffling out of his bungalow in a cloud of smoke. "Just tracking down navy spies, boss."

"Where did you guys put the rebreather? The day they took me to the hospital?"

"She's in the storage shed."

Clay made a beeline for the bungalow they used to store dive and boat equipment. He waved Kona after him. "Come."

"What?"

"Did you guys refill the oxygen or the bail-out tanks?"

"We just rinsed it and put it in the case."

Clay pulled the big Pelican case off a stack of scuba tanks and popped the latches. The rebreather was snug in the foam padding. Clay wrenched it out onto the wooden floor and turned on the computer that was an integral part of it. He hit buttons on the display console and watched the gray liquid-crystal display cycle through the numbers. The last dive: Downtime had been seventy-five minutes, forty-three seconds. The oxygen cylinder was nearly full. The bail-out air supply was full. Full. It hadn't been touched. Somehow Amy had stayed underwater for an hour without an air supply.

Clay turned to the surfer. "Do you remember anything that Nate showed you about what he was working on? I need details — I know in general." Clay wasn't sure what he was looking for, but this had to mean something, and all he had to fall back on was Nate's research.

The surfer scratched the dreadless side of his head. "Something about the whales singing binary."

"Come show me." Clay stormed through the door and back to the office.

"What you looking for?"

"I don't know. Clues. Mysteries. Meaning."

"You gone lolo, you know?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Deep Below, Bernard Stirs

About the time that Nathan Quinn had started to master his nausea in the whale ship's constant motion (four days on board), another force started working on his body. He felt an uneasiness come over him in waves, and for twenty or so seconds he would feel as if he needed to crawl out of his skin. Then it would pass and leave him feeling a little numb for a few seconds, only to start up again.

Poynter and Poe were moving around the small cabin looking at different gobs and bumps of bioluminescence as if they were gleaning some meaning from them, but, try as he might, Nate couldn't figure out what they were monitoring. It would have helped to be able to get out of the seat and take a closer look, but Poynter had ordered him strapped in after he made his first break for the back orifice. He'd nearly made it, too. Had dived at it just like he'd seen the whaley boys do, except that only one arm had gone through, and he ended up stuck to the floor of the whale, his face against the rubbery skin, his hand trailing out in the cold ocean.

"Well, that was phenomenally stupid," said Poynter.

"I think I've dislocated my shoulder," Nate said.

"I should leave you there. Maybe a remora or two will latch on to your hand and teach you a lesson."

"Or a cookie-cutter shark," said Poe. "Nasty bastards." The whaley boys turned in their seats and snickered, bobbing their heads and blowing the occasional raspberry, which could inflict considerable moisture off a four-inch-wide tongue. Evidently Quinn was a cetacean laugh riot. He'd always suspected that, actually.

Poynter got down on his hands and knees and looked Nate in the eye. "While you're down there, I'd like you to think on what might have happened if you'd been successful at launching yourself through that orifice. First, we're at — Skippy, what's the depth?" Skippy chirped and clicked a number of times. "A hundred and fifty feet. Beyond the fact that you'd probably have blown out your eardrums almost immediately, you might think on how you were going to get to the surface on one breath of air. And should you have gotten to the surface, what were you going to do then? We're five hundred miles from the nearest land."

"I hadn't worked out the whole plan," Nate said.

"So, actually, I might be looking at success, right? You just wanted to test the outside water temperature?"

"Sure," said Nate, thinking it might be best to stay agreeable.

"Can you feel your hand?"

"It's a little chilly, but, yes."

"Oh, good."

And so they'd left him there a couple of hours, his hand and about six inches of his arm hanging out in the open sea as the whale ship swam along, and when they finally pulled him up, they put him in his seat and kept him restrained except to eat and go to the bathroom. He'd tried to relax and observe — learn what he could — but then a few minutes ago these waves of uneasiness had started hitting him. "He's got the sonic willies," said Poe.

Poynter looked away from Skippy's console. "It's the subsonics, Doc. You're feeling the sound waves even though you can't hear them. We've been communicating with the blue for about ten minutes now."

"You might have said something."

"I just did."

"Couple of hours you'll be in the blue, Doc. You can stand up again, walk around a little. Have some privacy."

"So you're communicating with it in low-frequency sound?"

"Yep. Just like you thought, Doc, there was meaning in the call."

"Yeah, but I didn't think this, that there were guys, and guylike things, riding about inside whales. How in the hell can this be happening? How can I not know about this?"

"So you're giving up on the being-dead strategy?" asked Poe.

"What is it? Space aliens?"

Poynter unbuttoned his shirt and showed some chest hair. "Do I look like a space alien?"

"Well, no, but them." Nate nodded toward the whaley boys. They looked at each other and snickered, a sort of wheezing laughter coming from their blowholes, paused, looked back at Nate, then snickered some more.

"Maybe on their planet sentient life evolved from whales rather than apes," Quinn continued. "I can see how they might have landed here, deployed these whale ships, and kept under the radar of human detection while they looked around. I mean, man obviously isn't the most peaceful of creatures."

"That work for you, Doc?" asked Poynter.

"On their planet they developed an organically based technology, rather than one based on combustion and manipulation of minerals like ours."

"Oh, that is good," said Poe.

"He's on a roll," said Poynter. "Unraveling the mystery, he is."

Skippy and Scooter nodded to each other and grinned.

"So that's it? This ship is extraterrestrial?" Quinn felt the small victory rush that one gets from proving a hypothesis — even one as bizarre as space aliens riding in whale ships.

"Sure," said Poe, "that works for me. You, Cap?"

"Yeah, moon men, that's what you guys are," Poynter said to the whaley boys.

"Meep," said Scooter.

And in a high, squeaky, little-girl voice, Skippy croaked, "Phone home."

The whaley boys gave each other a high four and collapsed into fits of hysterical wheezing.

"What did he say?" Nate nearly snapped his neck trying to turn around against the restraints. "They can talk?"

"Well, I guess, if you call that talking," Poe said. He exchanged high fives with Poynter at the expense of the whaley boys, who paused in their own laughter to roll the whale ship in three quick spirals, which tossed the unsecured Poe and Poynter around the soft cabin like a couple of rag dolls.

Poynter came up with a bloody lip from connecting with his own knee. Poe had barked his shin on one of the whaley boys' heads as he went over. Strapped in, Nate concentrated on not watching a rerun of his lunch of raw tuna and water.

"Bastards!" said Poe.

"That what you expected in your race of super-intelligent, space-faring extraterrestrials, Nate?" Poynter wiped blood from his lower lip and flung it at Scooter.

Carl Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish doctor who specialized in the treatment of syphilis, is credited with inventing the modern system that is used for classifying plants and animals. Linnaeus is responsible for naming the humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae, or "big wings of New England," and later naming the blue whale Balaenoptera musculus, or "little mouse": at 110 feet long, over a hundred tons, an animal whose tongue alone is larger than a full-grown African elephant — the largest animal to ever live on the planet. "Little mouse"? Some speculated that this ironic misnomer was perpetrated entirely to confuse Linnaeus's lab assistants, as in Run out and bring me back a "little mouse," Sven. Others think that the pox had gone to Carl's head.

Quinn was crouched over the back orifice, Skippy and Scooter holding him by either arm, Poynter and Poe crouched before him, saluting. He could feel the texture of the opening under his bare feet, like wet tire tread.

"It's been a pleasure, Doc," Poynter said. "Have a great trip."

"We'll see you back at base," said Poe. "Now, just relax. You're barely going to contact water. Hold your nose and blow."

Quinn did.

Poynter counted, "One, two —»

"Meep."

Nate was sucked out the orifice, felt a brief chill and some pressure pushing back against his ears, and found himself in a chamber only a little taller than that in the humpback, with a fairly amused woman.

"You can stop blowing now," she said.

"Yet another phrase I didn't think I'd be hearing in this lifetime," Nate said. He let go of his nostrils and took a deep breath. The air seemed fresher than in the humpback.

"Welcome to my blue, Dr. Quinn, I'm Cielle Nuñez. How do you feel?"

"Pooped." Quinn grinned. She was about his age, Hispanic with short dark hair peppered gray and wide brown eyes that caught the bioluminescence off the walls and reflected what looked like laughter. She was barefoot and wearing generic khakis like Poynter and Poe. He shook her hand.

"Cute," she said. "Come forward with me, Doctor. I'm sure it's been a while since you were able to stand up straight." She led him down the corridor, which reminded Nate of when, as kids, he and his buddies had explored storm drains in Vancouver. It was tall enough to walk in, but not tall enough to stand in comfortably.

"Actually, Cielle, I'm not a doctor. I have a Ph.D., but the doctor thing —»

"I understand. I'm captain of this rig, but if you call me 'Captain, I'll ignore you."

"I wanted to hear the humpback sing before I left. You know, from the inside."

"You will. There'll be time."

The corridor started to widen as they moved forward, and Nate was actually able to walk normally, or as normally as one can walk when barefoot on whaleskin. This skin had a mottled appearance, whereas on the humpback it had been nearly solid gray. He noticed that on this ship there were wide veins of bioluminescence on the floor, casting a yellow light up upward that gave everything a sinister green glow. Nuñez paused by what appeared to be portals on either side of them.

"This is as good a place as any," she said. "Now, turn sideways and take my hand."

Quinn did as he was asked. Her hand felt warm but dry. She was a small woman, but powerfully built, he could feel the strength in her grip. "Now, we're just going to walk as the ship moves. Don't stop until I say, or you'll fall on your ass."

"WHAT?"

"Okay, Scooter, roll it."

"Scooter?"

"All pilots are called Scooter or Skippy. They didn't tell you?"

"They weren't very forthcoming with information."

"Humpback crews are a bunch of yahoos." Nuñez smiled. "You know the type, like navy fighter pilots topside? All ego and testosterone."

"I got more cretin than yahoo," Nate said.

"Well, with that particular bunch, yes."

The whole corridor started to move.

"Here we go, step, step, step, that's good." They were walking across the walls as the ship rolled. When they were standing on the ceiling, the roll stopped. "Nice, Scooter," Nuñez said, obviously communicating through some sort of hidden intercom. Then, to Nate, "He's so good."

"We were upside down to make the transfer?"

"Exactly. You're a smart guy. Look, these are cabins. She touched a lighted node on the wall, and a skin portal folded back on itself. Again Nate was put in mind of the blowhole of a toothed whale, but it was so big, nearly four feet across, it was just… unnatural. Lines of light pumped to life past the portal to reveal a small cabin, a bed — apparently made of the same skin as the rest of the interior — but also a table and a chair. Nate couldn't make out what material they might be made of, but it looked like plastic.

"Bone," Nuñez said, noticing him noticing. "They're as much a part of the ship as the walls. All living tissue. There are shelves and cubbyholes for your stuff in the bulkheads, closed now. Obviously everything has to be stowed for little maneuvers like the one we just performed. The motion isn't as bad as on the humpbacks. You'll find you'll get used to it, and then you can move about just as if you were on land."

"You're right. I didn't even notice we were moving."

"That would be because we're not," said Nuñez.

The sound of whaley-boy snickering wheezed down the corridor toward them.

"You guys are supposed to be working," Nuñez said to the air. "Prepare to get under way." She turned to Quinn. "Can I buy you a cup of joe? Maybe answer some of your questions?"

"You're offering?" Quinn felt his heart jump with excitement. Information, without Poynter and Poe's goofing obfuscation? He was thrilled. "That would be fantastic."

"Don't pee all over yourself, Quinn. It's just coffee."

The corridor opened up into a large bridge. The head of the blue was huge compared to the humpback's. On either side of the entry a whaley boy stood grinning at them as they passed. They were both taller than Quinn, and unlike the Scooter and Skippy of the humpback, their skin was mottled and lighter in color.

Nate paused and grinned back at them. "Let me guess — Skippy and Scooter?"

"Actually, Bernard and Emily 7," said Nuñez.

"You said they all were —»

"I said all pilots were named Skippy and Scooter." She gestured to the front of the bridge, where two whaley boys sitting at control consoles were turning in their seats and grinning. Maybe, thought Nate, they always appeared to be grinning, much like dolphins. He'd made an amateur mistake, assuming that their facial expressions were the analog of human expressions. People often did that with dolphins, even though the animals had no facial muscles to facilitate expression. Even sad dolphins appeared to be smiling.

"What are you two grinning at?" asked Nuñez. "Let's get on the way."

The pilots frowned and turned back to their consoles.

"Well, crap," Nate said.

"What?"

"Nothing, just another theory shot in the ass."

"Yeah, this operation does that, doesn't it?"

Nate felt something stirring in his back pocket and spun around to see a thin, fourteen-inch-long pink penis that was protruding from Bernard's genital slit. It waved at him.

"Holy moly!"

"Bernard!" Nuñez snapped. "Put that away. That is not procedure."

Bernard's unit drooped noticeably from the scolding. He looked at it and chirped contritely.

"Away!" Nuñez barked.

Bernard's willy snapped back up into his genital slit. "Sorry about that," Nuñez said to Nate. "I've never gotten used to that. It's really disconcerting when you're working with one of them and you ask them to hand you a screwdriver or something and his hands are already full. Coffee?"

She led him to a small white table around which four bone chairs protruded from the floor. They looked like old-style Greek saddle chairs — no backs, organic curves, and the high gloss of living bone — but more Gaudi than Flintstone. Quinn sat while Nuñez touched a node on the wall that opened a meter-wide portal that had concealed a sink, several canisters, and what looked like a percolator. Nate wondered about the electricity but forced himself to wait before asking.

While Nuñez prepared the coffee, Quinn looked around. The bridge was easily four times the size of the entire cabin in the humpback. Instead of riding in a minivan, it was like being in a good-size motor home — a very curvy, dimly lit motor home, but about that size. Blue light filtered in through the eyes, illuminating the pilots' faces, which shone like patent leather. Nate was starting to realize that even though everything was organic, living, the whale ship had the same sort of efficiency found on any nautical vessel: every spaced used, everything stowed against movement, everything functional.

"If you need to use the head, it's back down the corridor, fourth hatch on the right."

Emily 7 clicked and squealed, and Nuñez laughed. She had a warm laugh, not forced; it just rolled out of her smooth and easy. "Emily says it seems as if it would be more logical for the head to be in the head, but there goes logic."

"I gave up logic a few days ago."

"You don't have to give it up, just adjust. Anyway, facilities in the head are like everything on the ship — living — but I think you'll figure out the analogs pretty quickly. It's less complicated than an airliner bathroom."

Scooter chirped, and the great ship started to move, first in a fairly radical wave of motion, then smoothing out to a gentle roll. It was like being on a large sailing ship in medium seas.

"Hey, a little more warning, Scooter, huh?" said Nuñez. "I nearly dumped Nathan's coffee. Okay if I call you Nathan?"

"Nate's good."

Moving with the roll of the ship, she made it back to the table and put down the two steaming mugs of coffee, then went back for a sugar bowl, spoons, and a can of condensed milk. Nate picked up the can and studied it.

"This is the first thing from the outside that I've seen."

"Yeah, well, that's special request. You don't want to try whale milk in your coffee. It's like krill-flavored spray cheese."

"Yuck."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Cielle, if you don't mind my saying, you don't seem very military."

"Me? No, I wasn't. My husband and I had a sixty-foot sailboat. We got caught in a hurricane off of Costa Rica and sank. That's when they took me. My husband didn't make it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It was a long time ago. But, no, I've never been in the military."

"But the way you order the whaley boys around —»

"First, we need to clear up a misconception that you are obviously forming, Nate. I — we, the human beings on these ships — are not in charge. We're just — I don't know, like ambassadors or something. We sound like commanders because these guys would just goof off all day without someone telling them what to do, but we have no real authority. The Colonel gives the orders, and the whaley boys run the show."

Scooter and Skippy snickered like their counterparts on the humpback ship, Bernard and Emily 7 joined them — Bernard extending his prehensile willy like a party horn.

"And whaley girls?" Nate nodded toward Emily 7, who grinned — it was a very big, very toothy grin, but a little coquettish in the way one might expect from, say, an ingenue with a bite that could sever an arm.

"Just whaley boys. It's like the term 'mankind, you know — alienate the female part of the race at all costs. It's the same here. Old-timers gave them the name."

"Who's the Colonel?"

"He's in charge. We don't see him."

"Human, though?"

"I'm told."

"You said you'd been here a long time. How long?"

"Let me get you another cup, and I'll tell you what I can." She turned. "Bernard, get that thing out of the coffeepot!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Clair Stirs a Brainstorm

For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.

Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of thirteen knocking the edge off his mental acuity by the concerted application of the most epic smokage that Jah could provide (thanks be unto Him), he was now being called upon to think and remember with a sharpness that was clearly painful.

"Think," said Clair, rapping the surfer in the forehead with the spoon she had only seconds earlier used to stir honey into a cup of calming herbal tea.

"Ouch," said Kona.

"Hey, that's uncalled for," said Clay, coming to Kona's aid. Loyalty being important to him.

"Shut up. You're next."

"Okay."

They were gathered around Clay's giant monitor, which, for all the good it was doing them, could have been a giant monitor lizard. A spectrogram of whale song from Quinn's computer was splashed across the screen, and for the information they were getting from it, it might have been the aftermath of a paint-ball war, which is what it looked like.

"What were they doing, Kona?" Clair asked, spoon — steaming with herbal calmness — poised to strike. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishment was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education. "Nate and Amy both went through this with you. Now you have to remember what they said."

"It's not these things, it's the oscilloscope," Kona said. "Nate pulled out just the submarine stuff and put it on the spectrum."

"It's all submarine," Clay said. "You mean subsonic."

"Yeah. He said there was something in there. I said like computer language. Ones and ohs."

"That doesn't help."

"He was marking them out by hand," Kona said. "By freezing the green line, then measuring the peaks and troughs. He said that the signal could carry a lot more information that way, but the whales would have to have oscilloscopes and computers to do it."

Clay and Clair both turned to the surfer in amazement.

"And they don't," Kona said. "Duh."

It was as if a storm of coherence had come over him. They just stared.

Kona shrugged. "Just don't hit me with the spoon again."

Clay pushed his chair back to let the surfer at the keyboard. "Show me." Late into the night the three of them worked, making little marks on printouts of the oscilloscope and recording them on yellow legal pads. Ones and ohs. Clair went to bed at 2:00 A.M. At 3:00 A.M. they had fifty handwritten legal-pad pages of ones and ohs. In another time this might have felt to Clay like a job well done. He'd helped analyze data on shipboard before. It killed some time and ingratiated him to whatever scientist was leading the project he was there to photograph, but he'd always been able to hand off the work for someone else to finish. It was slowly dawning on him: Being a scientist sucked.

"This sucks," said Kona.

"No it doesn't. Look at all we have," said Clay, gesturing to all they had.

"What is it?"

"It's a lot, that's what it is. Look at all of it."

"What's it mean?"

"No idea."

"What does this have to do with Nate and the Snowy Biscuit?"

"Just look at all of this," said Clay, looking at all of it.

Kona got up from his chair and rolled his shoulders. "Mon, Bwana Clay, Jah has given you a big heart. I'm goin' to bed."

"What are you saying?" Clay said.

"We got all the heart we need, brah. We need head."

" 'Scuse me?"

And so, in the morning, with the promise of a colossal piece of information for barter (the torpedo range) but without a true indication of what he really needed to know in return (everything else), Clay talked Libby Quinn into coming to Papa Lani.

"So let me get this straight," said Libby Quinn as she paced from Clay's computer to the kitchen and back. Kona and Clay were standing to the side, following her movement like dogs watching meatball tennis. "You've got an old woman who claims that a whale called her and instructed her to have Nate take him a pastrami sandwich?"

"On rye, with Swiss and hot mustard," Kona added, not wanting her to miss any pertinent scientific details.

"And you have a recording of voices, underwater, presumably military, asking if someone brought them a sandwich."

"Correct," said Kona, "No bread, or meat, or cheese, specified."

Libby glared at him. "And you have the navy setting off simulated explosions in preparation to put a torpedo range in the middle of the Humpback Whale Sanctuary." She paused meaningfully and pivoted thoughtfully — like Hercule Poirot in flip-flops. "You have a tape of Amy doing a breath-hold dive for what appears to be an hour, with no ill effects."

"Topless," Kona added. Science.

"You have Amy claiming that Nate was eaten by a whale, which we all know is simply not possible, given the diameter of the humpback's throat, even if one were inclined to bite him, which we know they wouldn't." (She was just a deerstalker, a calabash, and a cocaine habit short of being Sherlock Holmes here.) "Then you have Amy taking a kayak out for no apparent reason and disappearing, presumed drowned. And you say that Nate was working on finding binary in the lower registers of the whale song, and you think that means something? Have I got that right?"

"Yeah," said Clay. "But you have the break-in to our offices to get the sound tapes, and you have my boat being sunk, too. Okay, it sounded more connected when we were talking about it last night."

Libby Quinn stopped pacing and turned to look at both of them. She wore cargo shorts, tech sandals, and a running bra and appeared ready at any moment to just take off and do something outdoorsy and strenuous. They both looked down, subdued, as if they were still under the threat of Clair's deadly spoon of calm. Clay had always had a secret attraction to Libby, even while she'd been married to Quinn, and it was only within the last year or so he'd been able to make eye contact with her at all. Kona, on the other hand, had studied dozens of videotapes on the lesbian lifestyle, especially as it pertained to having a third party show up in the middle of an intimate moment (usually with a pizza), so he had long ago assigned a «hot» rating to Libby, despite the fact that she was twice his age.

"Help us," Kona said, trying to sound pathetic, staring at the floor.

"This is what you guys have, and you think because I know a little biology I can make something of all this?"

"And that," said Clay, pointing at the now arranged and collated pages of ones and ohs on his desk.

Libby walked over and flipped through the pages. "Clay, this is nothing. I can't do anything with this. Even if Nate was on to something, what do you think? That even if we recognize a pattern, it's going to mean something to us? Look, Clay, I loved Nate, too, you know I did, but —»

"Just tell us where to start," Kona said.

"And tell me if you see anything in this." Clay went to his computer and hit a key. A still of the edge view of the whale tail from his rebreather dive was on the screen. "Nate said that he had seen some markings on a whale tail, Libby. Some writing. Well, I thought there was something on this whale, too, before it knocked me out. But this is the best shot of the tail we have. It could mean something."

"Like what?" Her voice was kind.

"I don't know what, Libby. If I knew what, I wouldn't have called you. But there's too much weird stuff going on that almost fits together, and we don't know what to do."

Libby studied the tail still. "There is something there. You don't have a better shot?"

"No, this is something I do know about. This is the best I have."

"You know, Margaret and I were helping a guy from Texas A&.M who was designing a software program that would shift perspective of tail shots, so edge and bad-angle views could be shifted and extrapolated into usable ID photos. You know how many get tossed because of bad angles?"

"You have this program?"

"Yes, it's still in beta tests, but it works. I think we can shift this shot, and if there's something meaningful there, we'll see it."

"Cool runnings," Kona said.

"As far as this binary thing, I think it's a shot in the dark, but if it's going to mean anything, you're going to have to get your ones and ohs in the computer. Kona, can you type?"

"Well, on ones and ohs? I shred most masterful, mon."

"Right. I'll set you up with a simple text file — just ones and ohs — and we'll figure out if we can do anything with it later. No mistakes, okay?"

Kona nodded.

Clay finally looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Libby."

"I'm not saying it's anything, Clay, but I wasn't exactly fair to Nate when he was around. Maybe I owe him one now that he's gone. Besides, it's windy. Fieldwork would have sucked today. I'm going to call Margaret, have her bring the program over. I'll help you if you promise that you'll put all your weight into stopping this torpedo range and you'll sign Maui Whale on to the petition against low-frequency active sonar. You guys have a problem with that?"

She was giving them the "spoon of death" look, and it occurred to both of them that this might be something that was innate to all women, not just Clair, and that they should be very, very afraid.

"Nope," said Kona.

"Sounds good to me. I'll put on a pot of coffee," said Clay.

"Margaret is absolutely going to shit when she hears about the torpedo range," said Libby Quinn as she reached for Clay's phone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Orientation to the Blues

A small explosion went off over his head, and Nate dove under the table. When he looked up, Emily 7 was bent over staring at him with her watery whale eyes and a mild expression of distress, and Nuñez was crouched at the other end of the table smiling.

"That was the blow, Nate," Nuñez said. "A little more intense than the humpback's, huh? These ships act like real whales, remember. The blowhole is right above our heads. Vented to the rest of the ship, but, you know, every twenty minutes or so it's going to go. You get used to it."

"Sure, I knew that," said Nate, crawling out from under the table. He'd been out off of Santa Cruz searching for the blues. You usually found them by the sound of their blows, which you could hear up to a mile and a half away. He looked up, expecting to see sky through the blowhole, but instead he saw just more smooth whaleskin.

"They behave like whales, but the physiology is completely different to allow for the living quarters. I don't really understand it, but for instance the blowhole is vented down the sides somewhere to some axillary lungs that do the oxygen exchange with the blood. I don't know how they got us electricity at all. I mean, I said I wanted a coffeepot, and they put in an outlet. There are circuits all over the bridge for our machinery. The other bodily functions seem to be handled by smaller versions of liver, kidneys, and so forth around the outside of the cabins. The main spine runs over the top of the ship. There's no digestive system. The ship's digestive system is at the base; it hooks up and pumps nutrient-rich blood into the ship, which stores enough energy in blubber to run it for six months at sea, or around the world at least once. We can cruise at twenty knots as long as no one is watching."

"What do you mean, 'no one is watching'?"

"I mean you guys. Biologists. If one of you guys is watching us, we have to slow it down after a couple of hours. Especially if we're tagged."

"This ship has been satellite-tagged? What do you do?"

"We go to silent running for a while. Then we dive, and one of the whaley boys goes outside and pulls the tag off. We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can. If they'd asked me, he'd be the one riding with us now."

"You know who he is?" Nate was aghast. As a scientist, you were always fighting being overwhelmed by what you don't know, but the magnitude of this whole operation — it was too much.

"Of course. Since commercial whaling backed off, cetacean biologists have been the main focus of our intelligence program. Why do you think you're here?"

"Okay, why am I here?"

"I don't know the whole story, but it's something to do with the song. Evidently you were a little too close to finding our signal in the song, so they yanked you."

"The aliens were that interested in what I was doing?"

"What aliens?"

"These aliens," Nate said, nodding toward the pilots and Bernard and Emily 7, who had moved to another table on the other side of the corridor.

"The whaley boys aren't aliens. Who told you that?"

"Well, Poynter and Poe implied that they were."

"Those jerks. No, they're not aliens. They're a little weird, but not from-another-planet weird."

Bernard looked up from what appeared to be a chart of some sort and gave a half-assed signature raspberry.

"They do that a lot," Nate said.

"If you had a tongue four inches wide, you'd do that a lot, too. It's sort of a display move with them, like the penis waving that Bernard was doing."

"Like male killer whales do."

"Bingo. See, a guy with your background, this is easy to explain. I didn't understand squat at first."

"I'm sorry, but I can't believe that this ship, the whaley boys, the whole perfection of the way they work, could possibly be products of natural selection. There had to be a design. Someone made all this."

Cielle nodded, smiling. "I've known a number of scientists in my lifetime, Nate, but I'm sure this is the first time I've heard one arguing in favor of a grand designer. What's that called, the 'watchmaker argument'?"

She was right, of course. It was an accepted premise that intelligent design in nature was not necessarily a product of intelligence, but merely the mechanism of natural selection of traits for survival and really, really long periods of time for the selections to assert themselves. Nate's life's work had been built on that assumption, but now he was giving Darwin the old heave-ho simply because his — Nate's — mind was too small to adapt to the idea of this craft. Well, yes, damn it. Screw Darwin. This was too strange.

"I'm sorry, I'm just having a little trouble getting my head around this. I don't know how you take to being a prisoner, but I don't care for it. On top of that, I could barely sleep on the humpback with the blow going off every few minutes, and I haven't eaten anything but raw fish and water for about five days. I'd be addled even if this didn't seem impossible."

Bernard made a whimpering noise, and Skippy and Scooter followed along in a moment until they sounded like a basketful of hungry puppies, and then they all broke out into wheezing snickers. Emily 7 frowned at them.

"Of course, I understand, Nate," Nuñez said. "Maybe you should finish up your coffee and go to your quarters. I have a few sports shakes in my cabin that will get some carbohydrates to your brain, and I can get you something to help you sleep — the ship's doctor has a full stock of Pharmaceuticals." She patted his hand maternally. Nate felt a little ashamed for having complained.

"You're not the only human on this ship, then?"

"No, there are four humans and six whaley boys on board. The others are in their quarters. But they're all excited to meet you. Everyone's been talking about it for weeks."

"You've known for weeks you were going to take me?"

"Well, sort of. We were on standby. We just got the go-ahead the day before we took you."

"And you, and the rest of the crew, you're prisoners, too?"

"Nate, every person on this ship, on any whale ship, has been pulled out of a sinking or sunken ship, a plane crash at sea, or some other disaster that would have killed them. This is a gift of time, and frankly, once you accept where you are and what you're doing, I'm going to ask you where you'd rather be. Okay?"

Nate searched her face for any sign of sarcasm or malice. All he found was a gentle smile. "Okay."

"You go to your quarters now. I'll send around your supplies in a bit. Bernard, would you show Dr. Quinn to his quarters?"

"I'm not really a doctor," Nate whispered.

"Take whatever respect you can get from them, Nate."

Bernard waited at the entry to the corridor, rubbing his shiny-smooth stomach and grinning. A white coffee mug stood out in contrast against Bernard's abdomen, suspended as it was in the grasp of his penis.

"I've always wanted to do that," said Nate, deciding that he wasn't going to let the whaley boy get the satisfaction of intimidating him. "Would be really handy for driving." Nate bowed toward the corridor. "Lead on, Bernard."

Bernard skulked down the hall in what would have been a full pout posture, had he any lips to do the actual pouting. He spilled a trail of coffee along the way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Inner Secrets of Cetacean Sluts

Nate was just settling into the idea of the organic bunk he was going to be sleeping on before actually settling into the bed. He was not a God kind of guy, but he found himself thanking one nonetheless for the crisp cotton sheets and pillowcase on a feather pillow. He didn't think he really wanted to sleep with his face against whaleskin. There was a soft whistle outside the portal, and the great flap of skin retracted to open to the corridor. Emily 7 stood there with a tray that held two cans of protein shake, a glass of water, and a single small pill. She grinned but did not try to step into the cabin. The small portal required a bit of a crouching and climbing action for Nate to enter, so he guessed she'd dump the tray trying to get through. Then again, she might just be trying to be polite. She waited while Nate took the cans from the tray and set them on the low table, then swung around to take the pill and water from her.

Emily 7 whistled and gave him a sidelong glance, causing her right eye to bulge out at him, as he'd actually seen humpbacks do when checking out a boat at the surface. She gestured for him to take the pill.

"You're not leaving until you see me take my medicine?"

Emily 7 nodded.

"Well, I guess if you guys wanted to get rid of me, it would have been a lot easier to kill me without bringing me all the way out here to poison me." Nate took the pill, downed the water, and opened his mouth to show that the pill was gone. "That okay, nurse?"

Emily whistled and nodded, then gently took the empty glass from Nate's hand. She reached up to hit the node, and the portal closed between them. Nate heard her whistle the first few bars of a lullaby.

She's sweet, Nate thought, in a tall, malevolent rubber-puppet sort of way.

For almost a week the only sleep Nate had been able to get was while he was restrained in the chair in the humpback, and even then it was restless — with the ship blowing every few minutes and the whaley boys whistling communications — so, despite the blow of the blue-whale ship, he fell into a deep sleep filled with vivid dreams. He dreamed of himself and Amy, their naked bodies entwined, slick with sweat under soft candlelight. Strangely, even as he dreamed, he had the semilucid thought that before, whenever he'd taken a sleeping pill, he didn't remember ever dreaming. But that thought was pushed away by the feel of Amy's smooth skin, his fingers softly caressing her muscular legs, her four long, webbed fingers wrapped lovingly around his —

"Hey!" Nate opened his eyes. A softly lit fence of spiky teeth smiled over at him, steamy fish breath washed over his face.

"Uh-oh," said Emily 7, her voice high and rasping, verging on duck-speak.

Nate leaped out of bed and bounced off the wall on the other side of the cabin.

Emily 7 pulled the sheet up over her head and burrowed against the wall, digging her melon under the pillow. Then she lay still.

Nate stood trying to catch his breath. As soon as he'd hit the floor, the biolighting had come up to high. He pushed back against the flexible wall, then suddenly became self-conscious and pulled his T-shirt off the back of the chair to cover his erection, which was rapidly losing its will to live.

She was just lying there.

"Hello? I can see you."

Curled up. Not moving. There under the sheets. All whaley.

"You aren't fooling anyone. You're bigger than I am. You're not hidden."

Just the soft sound of her blowhole opening and closing. Nate realized that it might be easier to hide under the covers if one had a blowhole, as one could cover one's mouth and face and still breathe. Addled by sleep deprivation, residual sleep medication, two cups of coffee, and now a few endorphins, he started to speculate on how a creature might adapt for hiding under the covers, then shook off the biologist rising up in him.

"Come on, we're different species and stuff. That's creepy."

Now a bit of a squeak, more like a whimper, followed by a tiny "Uh-oh," like a small elf had been mashed under the covers with a heavy book and had uh-ohed its last pathetic gasp.

"Well, you can't stay here."

He remembered how he'd felt when Libby had left him and by way of explanation she'd said, "Nate, I don't know, I don't even feel like we're the same species." At the time he'd felt as if his stomach were being turned inside out. It had ruined him socially for more than a year. Longer than that if he counted the fiasco attraction to Amy.

He stepped over to the bunk. Emily 7 scrunched into the corner between the wall and the bed. Nate worked the edge of the sheet loose and cautiously slid one leg under the covers. The lump that was Emily 7's head moved as if she was listening.

"You have to stay on your side, okay?"

"Okay," wheezed Emily 7 in the mashed-elf voice.

Nate awoke to the exhultations of killer whales — high-pitched hunting calls. The pod seemed to be gleefully celebrating a hunt, or at least calling another pod to come along and help. It occurred to him that he was actually riding in a craft that qualified as food for the orcas, and the ship might be in danger of attack. He'd have to ask Nuñez about that. He swung his feet off the bunk, and the lights came up. He realized that he was alone and sighed with relief.

There was a fresh set of khakis hung over the chair and a bottle of water on the table. There was a small basin on the wall opposite the bunk, no bigger than a cereal bowl and made out of the same skin as the rest of the ship. He hadn't even noticed it the night before. There were three lit nodules above the basin, like those used to activate the portals, but Nate could see nowhere for the water to come out. He pushed one of the nodules, and the basin started filling from a sphincter in the bottom. He pushed another, and the water was sucked out the same orifice. He tried to foster scientific detachment toward the whole thing but failed miserably: He was creeped out. Nate desperately needed a shave and a shower, but he didn't want to try to wash his whole six-foot-two-inch body in an eight-inch bowl with a… well, a butt hole at the bottom. He'd had just about enough of advanced poop-chute technology, thank you. He splashed some water on his face and dressed in the khakis, wondering as he did if the whale ship could actually grow a mirror for him to shave in if he needed it.

The whole crew appeared to be up and milling about the bridge when Nate came in. There were four whaley boys at the table with the charts to the right of the hatch, the two pilots at their consoles. Nuñez stood by the table to the left of the hatch, where there were seated a blond woman in her thirties and two men, one dark, perhaps in his early twenties, and one bald and gray-bearded, a healthy fifty, maybe. Not a very military-looking bunch. Everyone turned when Nate came in. All conversations — words or whistles — stopped abruptly. The echo of killer-whale calls bounced around the bridge. Emily 7 turned away from Nate's gaze. Nuñez was leaning against the wall near the nook that housed the coffeepot, actively trying not to look at him.

"Hi," Nate said, catching eye contact with the bald guy, who smiled.

"Have a seat," said the bald guy, gesturing toward the empty seat at the table. "We'll get you something to eat. I'm Cal Burdick." He shook Nate's hand. "This is Jane Palovsky and Tim Milam."

"Jane, Tim," Nate said, shaking hands. Nuñez smiled at him, then looked away quickly as if the coffeepot needed some immediate attention or she was going to crack up — or both.

Everyone at the table nodded, sort of staring at the spot in front of them, like So here we are on a giant blue-whale ship, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, with killer whales calling about us, and Nate fucked an alien, so…

"Nothing happened," Nate said to the whole bridge.

"What?" said Jane.

"Your quarters satisfactory, then?" asked Tim, an eyebrow raised.

"Nothing happened," Nate repeated, and even though nothing had happened, from the tone of his voice he wouldn't have believed it either. "Really."

"Of course," said Tim.

All of the whaley boys except Emily 7 were snickering. When he looked around, all the males were waving their willies back and forth in time in the air, as if swaying to a pornographic Christmas carol. Emily 7 put her big whaley head down on the table and covered it with her arms.

"Nothing happened!" Nate shouted at them. Silence again on the bridge, just the echo of killer-whale calls. "Are we in danger?" Nate asked Nuñez, trying desperately to change the subject. "Are they going to attack the ship? Those are feeding calls, right?" Often, when killer whales found a whale that was too big to be taken by their family pod, or when they happened on to an especially rich school of fish, they would call to other pods for help. Nate recognized the calls from some work he'd done with a biologist friend in Vancouver.

"No, these are residents," Nuñez said. "They're just excited about a bait ball they've found. Probably sardines." Resident killer whales ate only fish; transients ate mammals, whales and seals. Over the last few years scientists tended to refer to them as completely different species, even though they appeared the same to the layman.

"You know what they are by their call?"

"More than that," Cal said, "we know what they're saying. The whaley boys can translate."

"All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?" said Jane. She had a slight Eastern European accent, Russian maybe. She looked a little amused, her blue eyes dark under the yellow cast of the bioluminescence, but she didn't appear to be joking. She patted the seat next to her, indicating that Nate should sit down.

"Like all the pilots are named Scooter and Skippy?" Nate said.

"Actually, they have numbers like Emily — their choice, by the way — but since there are never more than one pair of them on a ship, we don't bother with the numbers."

Nate suddenly realize that in all his time on both of the whale ships, except when one of the pilots had gone outside to catch fish, the pilots always seemed to be at the controls. "Don't they ever sleep?"

"Sure," said Jane. "We're pretty sure they sleep with half their brain at a time, like whales, so between two of them the ship always has a full pilot. Without one of them at the controls, it's basically a big lump of meat."

"You said that you're pretty sure. You don't know?"

"Well, they don't know for sure," said Jane, "and they're not very excited about our doing experiments on them. Now that you've joined us, though, maybe you'll be able to figure out what's going on with them. We sort of play it all by ear. The whaley boys and the Colonel run things. Cielle, you didn't tell him all this?"

"He was pretty beat," Nuñez said. "I tried to get him settled in as soon as I could."

Nate wanted to protest the "settled in" comment. After all, he was a prisoner here, but these people didn't behave at all like captors. They immediately impressed him as having the same dynamic that he'd seen in research teams, a "we're all in this together, let's make the best of it" attitude. He didn't want to yell at these people. Still, it made him a little uncomfortable that she was so forthcoming with information. When your kidnappers showed you their faces, they were giving you the message that you weren't going home.

Nuñez set a plate down in front of him. It had a salad of mixed seaweeds, carrots, and mushrooms, a piece of cooked fish, which looked like halibut, and what appeared to be rice.

"Eat up," she said. "A couple of nutrition drinks aren't going to get you back up to speed. We do eat a lot of raw fish, even on the blue, but you need some carbs until you adjust to this diet. There's plenty of rice when you finish that."

"Thanks." Nate dug in while the others, all but Cal, excused themselves to work in other parts of the ship. The older man had obviously been charged with Nate's second orientation lecture.

Cal scratched his beard, looked around at the pilots, then leaned over to Nate and spoke in a lowered voice. "They're very promiscuous. You know how dolphin females will mate with all the males in the pod so no one can be assured of who the father of her calf is? They think it keeps the males from murdering her calf when it's born."

"That's the theory," Nate said.

"They're sort of like that, and back at base you have a big pod to deal with. You start down that path… well, you've got a lot of whaley boys to sex up."

"I didn't sex her up," Nate hissed, spraying rice out over the table. "I'm not sexing up any whaley boys… er, girls —»

"Whatever. Look, they're very close. Here on the ship they don't have separate quarters — they share one big cabin. Sex is very casual with them, but they understand that we're a little more hung up about it. Some of them seem to affect human shyness. We generally don't mix sexually with them. It's not forbidden, but it's… you know, frowned upon. It's only natural for a guy to be curious —»

Nate put down his fork. "Cal, I did not have sex with anyone — I mean, anything."

"Right. And be careful around the males. Especially if you're in the water with them. They'll bung-hole you just to watch you twitch."

"Jeez."

"I'm just telling you for your own good."

"Thanks, but I'm not going to be around long enough to worry about it." Might as well throw it in their faces, Nate thought.

The older man laughed, almost shooting coffee out his nose. When he recovered, he said, "Well, I hope you mean you plan on dying soon, because no one ever leaves."

Nate leaned into Cal's face. "Doesn't it bother you, that you're a prisoner?"

"There's not one of us here who wouldn't be dead if the whaley boys hadn't picked us up."

"Not me."

"Especially you. You were always twelve hours from dead since we started watching you. Certainly it had to occur to you how much easier it would have been just to kill you?"

Nate just stared for a second. Actually, it had occurred to him, and he didn't see the logic in keeping him alive if all they wanted to do was stop his research. He wasn't going to make that argument verbally, but still…

"Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."

"Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."

"You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."

After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of Treasure Island to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate on the book at all. Funny what you learn about yourself in a short conversation. One, that he would rather have been accused of having sex with another species than with another male (even of another species). Interesting prejudice. Two, that he actually was grateful, not only to be alive, but grateful to be having completely new experiences every moment, even as a prisoner. Three, that learning was still a high, but he burned to share it with someone. And finally, that he was feeling a little jealous, a little less special, now that he knew that Emily 7 was having sex with all the male whaley boys on board. That fickle little slut.

He dozed off with Robert Louis Stevenson on his chest and the sound of killer whales calling in the distance.

Outside, the pod of twenty killer whales, most the sons or daughters of the matriarch female, were calling frantically to each other as they worried away at a huge bait ball of herring. Biologists had long speculated on the incredibly complex vocabulary of the killer whale, identifying specific linguistic groups that even «spoke» the same dialect, but they had never been able to put meaning to the calls other than to identify them as "feeding," "distress," or «social» noises. However, had they had the benefit of translation, this is what they would have heard:

"Hey, Kevin, fish!"

"Fish! I love fish!"

"Look, Kevin, fish!"

"Mmmm, fish."

"You, Kevin, take a run down that trench, fake left, go right, hit the bait ball, nothing but fish!"

"Did someone say 'fish'?"

"Yeah, fish. Over here, Kevin."

"Mmmmm, fish."

And it went on like that. Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Picking the Lock to Davy Jones's Locker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret and Clay just shook their heads.

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

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

"Yah, mon."

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

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

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

"What?" asked Clay.

"What?" asked Libby.

"You said save it," Kona said.

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

"What?" came the chorus.

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

"Truth," said Kona.

"What?" said Libby and Clay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It can't be."

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

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

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

Kona nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

"The sandwich," Clay said ominously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where did this come from?"

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

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

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

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

"Can they read?" Nate asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, "So how deep are we?"

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

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

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

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

"Like me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What? What?" asked Nate.

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

"Sure," said the blonde.

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

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

"I'm a prisoner," said Nate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think I have Stockholm syndrome."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you guys doing?" Clair asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Better," said Clair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you think it is military?"

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

"So what are you going to do?"

"Find him," Clay said.

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