Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Found World

The whale ship opened its mouth, and Nate and the crew spilled out onto the shore like sentient drool, which was some coincidence, since that's exactly what lay beneath the hard shell of the landing. They were met by a group of whaley boys, one of whom handed Nate a pair of Nikes, then went off to trade clicks and squeals and greeting rubs with the returning crew. It was so bright after nearly ten days in the whale ship that Nate couldn't immediately tell what was happening. The rest of the human crew were wearing sunglasses as they sat down on the ground to put on their shoes, only a few feet from the ship's mouth. From the rigid feel of the ground, Nate thought they might be on a dock of some kind, but then Cal Burdick took off his own sunglasses and handed them to Nate.

"Go ahead. I've been looking at all of this for a lot of years, but I think you'll find it interesting."

With the dark glasses, Nate was able to see. His eyes were fine, but his mind was having a hard time processing what they were telling him. It was as light as daylight (on an overcast day, at least), but they were not outdoors. They were inside a grotto so immense that Nate could not even make out the edges of it. A dozen stadiums could have fit inside the space and still left room for a state fair, a casino, and the Vatican if you snipped off a basilica or two. The entire ceiling was a source of light, cold light, it appeared — some sections yellow, some blue — great blotches of light in irregular shapes, as if Jackson Pollock had painted a solar storm across the ceiling. Half of the grotto was water, flat and reflective as a mirror, the smoothness broken by small whaley boys porpoising here and there in groups of five and six, their blowholes sending up synchronized blasts of steam every few yards. Whaley kids, he thought. Fifty or so whale ships of different species pulled up to the shore, their crews coming and going. Huge segmented pipes that looked like giant earthworms were attached to each of the ships, one on each side of the head, and ran off to connections on shore. The ground — the ground was red, and as hard as linoleum, polished, yet not quite shiny. It ran out for hundreds of yards, perhaps over a mile, and appeared to continue halfway up the walls of the immense grotto. Nate could see openings in the walls, oval passages or doorways or tunnels or something. From the size of the people and whaley boys passing in and out, he could tell that some of the openings were perhaps thirty feet around, while others seemed only the size of normal doors. There were windows next to some of the smaller ones — or what he guessed were windows — their shapes all curves and slopes. There wasn't a right angle in the grotto. Hundreds of people moved about amid as many whaley boys, maintaining the ships, moving supplies and equipment on what seemed very normal hand trucks and carts.

"Where in the hell are we?" Nate said, nearly wrenching his neck trying to look at all of it at once. "I mean, what in the hell is this?"

"Pretty amazing," Cal said. "I like to watch people when they see Gooville for the first time."

Nate ran his hand over the ground, or floor, or whatever this surface was they were sitting on. "What is this stuff?" It appeared smooth, but it had texture, pores, a hidden roughness, like stoneware or —

"It's living carapace. Like a lobster shell. This whole place is living, Nate. Everything — the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the passageway in from the sea, our homes — it's all one huge organism. We call it the Goo."

"The Goo. Then this is Gooville?"

"Yes," Cal said, with a big smile that revealed perfect teeth.

"And that would make you?"

"That's right. The Goos. There's a wonderful Seussian logic to it, don't you think?"

"I can't think, Cal. You know how all your life you hear people talk about things that are mind-boggling? It's just a meaningless cliché — a hyperbole — like saying that you're wasted or that something is bloodcurdling?"

"Yep."

"Well, I'm boggled. I'm totally boggled."

"You thought the ships were impressive, huh?"

"Yeah, but this? One living organism shaped itself into this complex… what? System? I'm boggled."

"Imagine how the bacteria who live in your intestinal tract feel about you."

"Well, right now I think they're pissed off at me."

A group of whaley boys was gathering about ten yards away from them, pointing at Nate and snickering.

"They're coming down to check out the newcomer. Don't be surprised if you get rubbed up against in the streets. They're just saying hi."

"Streets?"

"We call them streets. They're sort of streets."

Now, out of the dim yellow light of the whale ships, Nate realized that there was a wide variety in the whaley boys' coloring. Some were actually mottled blue, like the skin of a blue whale, while others were black like a pilot whale, or light gray like a minke whale. Some even had the black-on-white coloring of killers and Pacific white-sided dolphins, while a few here and there were stark white like a beluga. The body shapes of all were very similar, differing only in size, with the killer whaley boys, who were taller by a foot and heavier by perhaps a hundred pounds, having jaws twice the width of the others'. He also noticed in the brighter light that he was the only human who had a tan. The people, even Cal and the crew, looked healthy; it just appeared that none of them had ever seen the sun. Like the British.

Nuñez came over and helped Cal, and then Nate, to his feet.

"How're the shoes?" she asked Nate.

"They're strange after not wearing any for so long."

"You'll be wobbly for a few hours, too. You'll feel the motion when you stand still for a day or so. No different from having been at sea in normal ship. I'll take you to your new quarters, show you around a little, get you settled in. The Colonel will probably send for you before too long. People will help you out, humans and whaley boys. They'll all know you're new."

"How many, Cielle?"

"Humans? Almost five thousand live here. Whaley boys, maybe half that many."

"Where is here? Where are we?"

"I told him about Gooville," said Cal.

Nuñez looked up at Nate and then pulled her sunglasses down on her nose so he could see her eyes. "Don't freak out on me, huh?"

Nate shook his head. What did she think, that whatever she was going to tell him was going to be weirder, grander, or scarier than what he'd seen already?

"The roof above this ceiling — which is thick rock, although we're not exactly sure how thick — anyway, it's around six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. We're about two hundred miles off the coast of Chile, under the continental shelf. In fact, we came in through a cliff in the continental rise, a cliff face.

"We're six hundred feet underwater right now. The pressure?"

"We came in through a very long tunnel, a series of pressure locks that pass the ships along until we're at surface pressure. I would have shown you as we came through, but I didn't want to wake you."

"Yeah, thanks for that."

"Let's get you to your new house. We've got a long walk ahead of us." She headed away from the water, motioning for him to follow.

Nate nearly stumbled trying to look back at the whale ships lining the harbor. Tim caught him by the arm. "It's a lot to take in. People really have freaked out. You just have to accept that the Goo won't let anything bad happen to you. The rest is simply a series of surprises. Like life."

Nate looked into the younger man's dark eyes to see if there was any irony showing there, but he was as open and sincere as a bowl of milk. "The Goo will take care of me?"

"That's right," said Tim, helping him along toward the grotto wall, toward the actual village of Gooville, with its organically shaped doorways and windows, its knobs and nodules, its lobster-shell pathways, its whaley-boy pods working together or playing in the water, where was housed an entire village of what Nate assumed were all happy human wackjobs.

After two days of looking for meaning in hash marks on waveforms and ones and ohs on legal pads that were hastily typed into the machine, Kona found a surfer/hacker on the North Shore named Lolo who agreed to write it all into a Linux routine in exchange for Kona's old long board and a half ounce of the dankest nugs[1].

"Won't he just take cash?" asked Clay.

"He's an artist," explained Kona. "Everyone has cash."

"I don't know what I'm going to put that under for the accountant."

"Nugs, dank?"

Clay looked forlornly at the legal-pad pages piling up on the desk next to where Margaret Painborne was typing. He handed a roll of bills over to Kona. "Go. Buy nugs. Bring him back. Bring back my change."

"I'm throwing in my board for the cause," said Kona. "I could use some time in the mystic myself."

"Do you want me to tell Auntie Clair that you tried to extort me?" Clay had taken to using Clair as a sort of sword of Damocles/assistant principal/evil dominatrix threat over Kona, and it seemed to work swimmingly.

"Must blaze, brah. Cool runnings."

Suddenly something sparked in Clay's head, a déjà vu trigger snapping electric with connections. "Wait, Kona."

The surfer paused in the doorway, turned.

"The first day you came here, the day that Nate sent you to the lab to get the film — did you actually do it?"

Kona shook his head, "Nah, boss, the Snowy Biscuit see me going. She say keep the money and she go to the lab. When I come back with my ganja, she give me the pictures to give to Nate."

"I was sort of afraid of that," Clay said. "Go, blaze, be gone. Get what we need."

So three days later they all stood watching as Lolo hit the return key and the subsonic waveform from a blue-whale call began scrolling across the bottom of the screen, while above it letters were transcribed from the data. Lolo was a year older than Kona, a Japanese-American burned nut brown by the sun with ducky-yellow minidreads and a tapestry of Maori tattoos across his back and shoulders.

Lolo spun in the chair to face them. "I mixed down a fifty-minute trance track with sixty percussion loops that was way harder than this." Lolo's prior forays into sound processing had been as a computer DJ at a dance club in Honolulu.

"It's not saying anything," said Libby Quinn. "It's just random, Clay."

"Well, that's the way it's gone so far, right?"

"But there's been nothing since that first day."

"We knew that might happen, that there couldn't be messages on all of them. We just have to find the right ones."

Libby's eyes were pleading. "Clay, it's a short season. We have to get out in the field. Now that you have this program, you don't need the manpower. Margaret and I will bring back more tapes — we have them coming in from people we trust — but we can't afford to blow off the season."

"And we need to go public with the torpedo range," Margaret added, less sympathetic than Libby had been.

Clay nodded and looked at his bare feet against the hardwood floor. He took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he smiled. "You're right. But don't just blow a whistle and hope someone will notice. Cliff Hyland told me that the diving data was the only thing they were worried about. You're going to need proof that humpbacks dive close to the bottom of the channel, or the navy will claim that you're just being whale buggers and there's no danger to the animals. Even with the range."

"You're okay if we go public, then?" asked Libby.

"People are going to know about the torpedo range soon enough. I don't think that's dangerous for you. Just don't say anything about the rest of this, okay?"

The two women looked at each other, then nodded. "We have to go," Libby said. "We'll call you, Clay. We're not running out on you."

"I know," Clay said.

After they left, Clay turned to the two surfers. Thirty years working with the best scientists and divers in the world, and this was what it came down to: two stoner kids. "If you guys need to go do things, I understand."

"Outta here," said Lolo, on his feet and bounding toward the door.

Clay looked at the screen where Lolo had been sitting. Scrolling across it: WILL ARRIVE GV APPRX 1300 MONDAY__HAVE__SIZE 11 SNEAKERS WAITING FOR QUINN__END MSS__AAAA__BAXYXABUDAB.

"Get him back," Clay said to Kona. "We need to know which tape this was."

"Libby gave them all to him."

"I know that. I need to know where she got it. Where and when it was recorded. Call Libby's cell phone. See if you can get hold of her." Clay was trying to make the screen print before the message scrolled away. "How the hell does this thing work?"

"How you know I'm not leaving?"

"You woke up this morning, Kona. Did you have a reason to get out of bed other than waves or pot?"

"Yah, mon, need to find Nate."

"How'd that feel?"

"I'm calling Libby, boss."

"Loyalty is important, son. I'll go catch Lolo. Confirm which tape it was."

"Shut up, boss. I'm trying to dial."

Behind them the cryptic message scrolled out of the printer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Single-Celled Animal

Stockholm syndrome or not, Nate was starting to get tired of the whole hippie-commune, everything-is-wonderful-and-the-Goo-will-provide attitude. Nuñez had come by for three days running to take him out on the town, and every person he met was just a little too damn satisfied with the whole idea that they were living inside a giant organism six hundred feet under the ocean. Like this was a normal thing. Like he just wasn't getting with the program because he continued to ask questions. At least the whaley boys would blow wet raspberries at him and snicker as he walked by. At least they had some sense of the absurdity of all this, despite the fact that they shouldn't even have existed in the first place, which did seem to be a large point of denial on their part.

They'd installed him in what he guessed was a premier apartment, or what you'd call an apartment, on the second floor, looking out over the grotto. The windows were oval, and the glass in them, although perfectly clear, was flexible. It was like looking out on the world through a condom, and that was just the beginning of the things that creeped him out about this place. He had a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, and a shower — all of which had big honking sphincters in the bottom of them — and the seal on the door around his refrigerator, if that's what you called it, appeared to be made out of slugs, or at least something that left an iridescent slime on you if you brushed up against it. There was also a toothed garbage disposal in the kitchen, which he wouldn't even go near. The worst of it was that the apartment didn't make any attempt to conceal that it was alive. His first day there, when the human crew from the whale ship had come by for a drink — a housewarming — there had been a scaly knob on the wall by the front door that when pushed would cause the door to open. After the crew left and Nate returned from his shower, the doorknob had healed over. There was a scar there in the shell, but that was all. Nate was locked in.

There was a tom-tom thrumming of stones hitting his front picture window. Nate went to the window, looked out on the vast grotto and harbor, then down on the source of his torment. A pod of whaley-boy kids was winging stones at his window. Thump, thump-a, thump. The stones bounced off, leaving no mark. When Nate appeared at the window, the thumping became more furious, as the whaley kids picked up the pace and aimed right at him, as if a well-placed shot might drop him in a dunking tank.

"There's a reason cetaceans don't have hands in the real world!" Nate screamed at them. "You are that reason! You little freaks!"

Thump, thump-a, thump, thump, clack. Occasionally a missed throw hit the shell-like frame of the window, sounding like a marble hitting tile.

I sound like Old Man Spangler yelling at my brother and me for raiding his apple trees, Nate thought. When did I turn into that guy? I don't want to be that guy.

There was a soft knock on the shell of his front door. As he turned, the door flipped open like shutters, two pieces of shell retracting on muscles hidden in the wall. Nate felt like a surprised box turtle. Cielle Nuñez stood in the doorway with canvas shopping bags folded under her arm. She was a pleasant woman, attractive, competent, and non-threatening; Nate was sure that's why she'd been chosen to be his guide.

"You ready to do some shopping, Nate? I called to tell you I was coming, but you didn't answer."

The apartment had a speaking apparatus, a sort of ornate tube thing that whistled and buzzed green metallic beetle wings when there was a call. Nate was afraid of it.

"Cielle, can we drop any pretense that we are just buddies out for the day? You lock me in here when you leave."

"For your own safety."

"Somehow that always seems to be the argument the jailer uses."

"You want to go get some food and clothes or not?" Nate shrugged and followed her out the door. They walked along the perimeter of the grotto, which seemed a cross between an old English village and an Art Nouveau hobbit housing project: irregularly shaped doors and windows looking into shops that displayed baked goods and other prepared foods. Evidently the Goo wasn't big on having fire around for home cooking. All the cooked foods were prepared somewhere else in the complex. There was a warming cabinet in Nate's apartment that looked like a breadbox made out of a giant armadillo shell. It worked great. You rolled the top open, put the food in, then promptly lost your appetite.

"Let's get you something to wear today," Cielle said. "Those khakis are on loan. Only the whale-ship crews are supposed to wear them."

As they walked, a half dozen whaley kids followed them, chirping and giggling all the way.

"So I'd get in trouble if I started kicking whaley kids down the street?"

"Of course," Cielle laughed. "We have laws here, just like anywhere else."

"Evidently not ones that forbid kidnapping and unjustified imprisonment."

Nuñez stopped and grabbed his arm. "Look, what are you complaining about? This is a good place to be. You're not being mistreated. Everyone's been kind to you. What's the problem?"

"What's the problem? The problem is that all you people were yanked out of your lives, taken away from your families and friends, taken from everything that you knew, and you all act like it doesn't bother you in the least. Well, it bothers me, Cielle. It fucking bothers me a lot. And I don't understand this whole colony, or city, or whatever this thing is. How does it even exist without anyone knowing about it? In all these years, why has no one gotten out and spoiled the secret of this place?"

"I told you, we were all going to drown —»

"Bullshit. I don't buy that for a second. That gratitude toward your rescuer only lasts for a short while. I've seen it. It doesn't take over your life. Everyone I've met is blissed out. You people worship the Goo, don't you?"

"Nate, you don't want to be locked in, you won't be locked in. You can have the run of Gooville — go anywhere you want. There's hundreds of miles of passages. Some of them even I haven't seen. Go. Leave the grotto and go down any one of those passages. But you know what? You'll be back looking for your apartment tonight. You are not a prisoner, you're just living in a different place and a different way."

"You didn't answer my question."

"The Goo is the source, Nate. You'll see. The Colonel —»

"Fuck the Colonel. The Colonel is a fucking myth."

"Should we get some coffee? You seem grumpy."

"Damn it, Cielle, my caffeine headache is not relevant." Actually it was, sort of. He hadn't had any coffee today. "Besides, how do I know it's coffee we're drinking? It's probably some mutant sea otter/coffee bean hybrid beverage."

"Is that what you want?"

"No, that's not what I want. What I want is a doorknob. And not an organic nodule thing — I want a dead doorknob. One that always has been dead, too. Not something that you used to be friends with."

Cielle Nuñez had backed away from him several feet, and the whaley kids who'd been following them had quieted down and gone into a defensive pod formation, the big kids on the outside. People who were out walking, and who normally made a point of nodding and smiling as they passed, took a wide detour around Nate. There was an inordinate amount of whistling among the milling whaley boys.

"That going to do it for you?" Nuñez asked. "A doorknob. I get you a doorknob, you're a happy man?"

Why should he be embarrassed? Because he'd scared the kids? Because he'd made his captors uncomfortable? Nevertheless, he was embarrassed.

"I could use some earplugs, too, if you have them. For sleeping." For ten hours out of twenty-four, the grotto went dark. Cielle explained that this was for the comfort of the humans, to help them keep some semblance of their normal circadian rhythms. People needed day and night — without the change many people couldn't sleep. The problem was, the whaley boys didn't sleep. They rested, but they didn't sleep. So when the grotto went dark, they went on about their business. In the dark, however, they were all constantly emitting sonar clicks. At night the grotto sounded like it was being marched upon by an army of tap dancers. Consequently, so did Nate's apartment.

Nuñez nodded. "We can probably do that. You want to go get a steaming hot cup of sea otter now?"

"What?"

"I'm just kidding. Lighten up, Nate."

"I want to go home." He'd said it before he even realized it.

"That's not going to happen. But I'll send word. I think it's time you met with the Colonel."

They spent the day going to shops. Nate found some cotton slacks that fitted him, some socks and underwear, and a pile of T-shirts from one tiny shop. There was no currency exchanged. Nuñez would just nod to the shopkeeper, and Nate would take what he needed. There was little variety in any of the shops, and most of what they carried was goods from the real world: clothes, fabric, books, razor blades, shoes, and small electronics. But a few shops carried items that appeared to have been grown or made right there in Gooville: toothbrushes, soaps, lotions. All the packaging seemed to come out of the seventeenth century — the shopkeepers wrapped parcels in a ubiquitous oilcloth that Nate thought smelled vaguely of seaweed and indeed had the same olive color as giant kelp. Patrons brought their own jars to carry oils, pickles, and other soft goods. Nate had seen everything from a modern mayonnaise jar to hand-thrown crockery that had to have been made a hundred years ago.

"How long, Cielle?" he asked as he watched a shopkeeper count sugared dates into a hand-blown glass jar and seal it with wax. "How long have people been down here?"

She followed his gaze to the jar. "We get a lot of the surface goods from shipwrecks, so don't be impressed if you see antiques; the sea is a good preserver. We may have salvaged it only a week ago. A friend of mine keeps potatoes in a Grecian wine amphora that's two thousand years old."

"Yeah, and I'm using the Holy Grail to catch my spare change. How long?"

"You are so hostile today. I don't know how long, Nate. A long time."

He had dozens, hundreds more questions, like where the hell did they get potatoes when they didn't have sunlight to grow anything? They weren't bringing potatoes up from a shipwreck. But Cielle was letting him get only so far before claiming ignorance.

They had lunch at a four-stool lunch counter where the proprietor was a striking Irishwoman with stunning green eyes and a massive spill of red hair and who, like everyone, it seemed, knew Cielle and knew who Nate was.

"Got you a Walkman then, Dr. Quinn? Whaley boys will drive you to drink with that sonar at night."

"We're going to get him some earplugs today, Brennan," Cielle said.

"Music, that's the way to wash the whaley-boy whistles," the woman said. Then she was off to her kitchen. The walls of the cafe were decorated with a collection of antique beer trays, glued in place, as Nate had learned, with an adhesive that was similar to what barnacles secreted to fasten themselves to ships. Nailing things up was frowned upon, as the walls would bleed for a while if injured.

Nate took a bite of his sandwich, meatballs and mozzarella on good crusty French bread.

"How?" he asked Cielle, blowing crumbs on the counter. "How does any of this stuff get made if there's no flame?"

Cielle shrugged. "No idea. A bakery, I'd guess. They make all the prepared food outside the grotto. I've never been there."

"You don't know how? How can that be?"

Cielle Nuñez put down her own sandwich and leaned on one elbow, smiling at Nate. She had remarkably kind eyes, and Nate had to remind himself that she had been ordered to be his friend. Interesting, he thought, that they'd choose a woman. Was she bait?

"You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Nate?"

"Of course, everybody does."

"And that guy goes back to Camelot from the late nineteenth century and dazzles everyone with his scientific knowledge, mainly because he can make gunpowder, right?"

"Yes, so?"

"You're a scientist, so you might do better than most, but take your average citizen, a guy who works at a discount store, say. Drop him in the twelfth century, you know what he'll achieve?"

"Make your point?"

"Death by bacterial infection, more than likely. And the last words on his lips will probably be, 'There's such a thing as an antibiotic, really. My point is, I don't know how this stuff is made because I haven't needed to know. Nobody knows how to make the things they use. I suppose I could find out and get back to you, but I promise you I'm not holding out on you just to be mysterious. We do a lot of salvage on the whale ships, and we have a trade network into the real world that gets us a lot of our goods. When a freighter leaves pallets of goods for the people on remote islands in the Pacific, all they know is that they've been paid and they've delivered to shore. They don't stay to see who takes the goods away. The old-timers say that it used to be that the Goo provided everything. Nothing came in from the outside that wasn't on their backs when they got here."

Nate took a bite of his sandwich and nodded as if considering what she'd just said. Since he'd arrived in Gooville, he had spent every waking moment thinking about two things: one, how this whole place could possibly function; and two, how to get out of it. The Goo had to get energy from somewhere. The energy to light the huge grotto alone would require tens of millions of calories. If it got energy from outside, maybe you could use that same pathway to get out.

"So do you guys feed it? The Goo?"

"No."

"Well, then-"

"Don't know, Nate. I just don't know. How does dry-cleaning work?"

"Well, I assume that they use solvents, that, uh — Look, biologists don't have a lot of stuff that needs to be dry-cleaned. I'm sure it's not that complicated a process."

"Yeah, well, right back at you on all of your questions about the Goo."

Cielle stood and gathered up her parcels. "Let's go, Nate. I'm taking you back to your apartment. Then I'm going right to the whaley-boy den and find out if they can get the Colonel to see you. Today."

Nate still had a couple bites of his sandwich left. "Hey, I've still got a couple of bites of my sandwich left," he said.

"Really? Well, did you ask yourself where in Gooville we got meatballs? What sort of meat might be in them?"

Nate dropped his sandwich.

"Bit of the whining wussy boy, aren't we?" said Brennan as she came out of the kitchen to take away their plates.

Nate was reading a cheesy lawyer novel that he'd found in the small library in his apartment when the whaley boys came for him. There were three of them, two large males with killer-whale coloring and a smaller female blue. Only when the blue squeaked "Hi Nate" in a mashed-elf voice did he recognize it as Emily 7.

"Wow, hi, Emily. Is just Emily okay, or should I always say the Seven?" Nate always felt awkward with someone afterward, even if there wasn't anything for the ward to be after.

She crossed her arms over her chest and bugged out her left eye at him.

"Okay," Nate said, moving on, "I guess we'll be going, then. Did you see my new doorknob? Brand-new. Stainless steel. I realize it doesn't go with everything else, but, you know, it feels a little like freedom." Right, Nate. It's a doorknob, he thought.

They led him around the perimeter of the grotto, beyond the village, and into one of the huge passageways that led away from the grotto.

They walked for half an hour, tracing a labyrinth of passageways that got narrower and narrower the farther off they went, the bright red lobster-shell surface fading into something that looked like mother-of-pearl the deeper in they went. It glowed faintly, just enough so they could see where they were going.

Finally the passageway started to broaden again and open into a large room that looked like some sort of oval amphitheater, all of it pearlescent and providing its own light. Benches lined the walls around the room, all in view of a wide ramp that led to a round portal the size of a garage door, closed now with an iris of black shell.

"Ooooh, the great and powerful Oz will see you now," Nate said.

The whaley boys, who normally found practically anything funny, just looked away. One of the black-and-whites started whistling a soft tune from his blowhole. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" or a Streisand tune — something creepy, Nate thought.

Emily 7 backhanded the whistler in the chest, and he stopped abruptly. Then she put her hand on Nate's shoulder and gestured for him to go up the steps to the round portal.

"Okay, I guess this is it." Nate started backing up the ramp as the whaley boys started backing away from him. "You guys better not leave me, because I'll never find my way back."

Emily 7 grinned, that lovely hack-a-salmon-in-half smile of hers, and waved him on.

"Thanks, Em. You look good, you know. Did I mention? Shiny." He hoped shiny was good.

The iris opened behind him, and the whaley boys fell to their knees and touched their lower jaws to the floor. Nate turned to see that the pearlescent ramp led into a vibrant red chamber that was pulsing with light and glistening with moisture as the walls appeared to breathe. Now, this looked like a living thing — the inside of a living thing. Really much more what he'd expected to see when the whale had eaten him. He made his way forward. A few steps in, the ramp melded into the reddish flesh, which Nate could now see was shot through with blood vessels and what might be nerves. He couldn't get the size of the space he was in. It just seemed to expand to receive him and contract behind him, as if a bubble were moving along with him inside it. When the iris disappeared into the pink Goo, Nate felt a wave of panic go through him. He took a deep breath — damp, fecund air — and strangely enough he remembered what Poynter and Poe had told him back on the humpback ship: It's easier if you just accept that you're already dead. He took another deep breath and ventured forward a few more feet, then stopped.

"I feel like a friggin' sperm in here!" he yelled. What the hell, he was dead anyway. "I'm supposed to have a meeting with the Colonel."

On cue, the Goo began to open in front of him, like the view of a flower opening from the inside. A brighter light illuminated the newly opened chamber, now just large enough to house Nate, another person, and about ten feet of conversational distance. Reclining in a great pink mass of goo, dressed in tropical safari wear and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat, was the Colonel.

"Nathan Quinn, good to see you. It's been a long time," he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Talking Up the Dead

Nate hadn't seen his old teacher, Gerard «Growl» Ryder, in fourteen years, but except for the fact that he was very pale, the biologist looked exactly the same as Nate remembered him: short and powerful, a jaw like a knife, and a long swoop of gray hair that was always threatening to fall into his pale green eyes.

"You're the Colonel?" Nate asked. Ryder had disappeared twelve years ago. Lost at sea in the Aleutians.

"I toyed with the title for a while. For a week or so I was Man-Meat the Magnificent, but I thought that sounded like I might be compensating for something, so I decided to go with something military-sounding. It was a toss-up between Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues and Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. I finally decided to go with just 'the Colonel. It's more ominous."

"That it is." Once again reality was taking a contextual tilt for Nate, and he was trying to keep from falling. This once brilliant, brilliant man was sitting in a mass of goo talking about choosing his megalomaniacal pseudonym.

"Sorry to keep you waiting for so long before I brought you down here. But now that you're here, how's it feel to stand in the presence of God?"

"Respectfully, sir, you're a fucking squirrel."

"This doesn't feel right," Clay whispered to Libby Quinn. "We shouldn't be having a funeral when Nate's still alive."

"It's not a funeral," said Libby. "It's a service."

They were all there at the Whale Sanctuary. In the front row: Clay, Libby, Margaret, Kona, Clair, and the Old Broad. Moving back: Cliff Hyland and Tarwater with their team, the Count and his research grommets, Jon Thomas Fuller and all of the Hawaii Whale Inc. boat crews, which constituted about thirty people. On back: whale cops, bartenders, and a couple of waitresses from Longee's. From the harbor: live-aboards and charter captains, the harbormaster, booth girls and dive guides, boat hands and a guy who worked the coffee counter at the fuel dock. Also, researchers from the University of Hawaii and, strangely enough, two black-coral divers — all crowded into the lecture hall, the ceiling fans stirring their smells together into the evening breeze. Clay had scheduled the service in the evening so the researchers wouldn't miss a day of the research season.

"Still," said Clay.

"He was a lion," said Kona, a tear glistening in his eye. "A great lion." This was the highest compliment a Rastafarian can bestow upon a man.

"He's not dead," said Clay. "You know that, you doof."

"Still," said Kona

It was a Hawaiian funeral in that everyone was in flip-flops and shorts, but the men had put on their best aloha shirts, the women their crispest flowered dresses, and many had brought leis and head garlands, which they draped over the wreaths at the front of the room that represented Nathan Quinn and Amy Earhart. A Unity Church minister spoke for ten minutes about God and the sea and science and dedication, and then he opened up the floor to anyone who had something to say. There was a very long pause before the Old Broad, wearing a smiling-whale-print muumuu and a dozen white orchids in her hair, tottered to the podium.

"Nathan Quinn lives on," she said.

"Can I get an amen!" shouted Kona. Clair yanked his remaining dreadlocks.

All the biologists and grad students looked at each other, eyes wide, confused, wondering if any of them had actually brought an amen that they could give up. No one had told them they were going to need an amen, or they would have packed one. All the harbor people and Lahaina citizens were intimidated by the science people, and they were not about to give up an amen in front of all of these eggheads, no way. The whale cops didn't like the fact that Kona was not in jail, and they weren't giving him shit, let alone an amen. Finally one of the black-coral divers who had that night found the perfect cocktail for grieving in a hit of ecstasy, a joint, and a forty of malt liquor, sighed a feeble «Amen» over the mourners like a sleepy, stinky, morning-breath kiss.

"And I know," continued the Old Broad, "that if it were not for his stubbornness in procuring a pastrami on rye for that singer in the channel, he would be here with us today."

"But if he were here with us — " whispered Clair.

"Shhhhhh," shushed Margaret Painborne.

"Don't you shush me, or you'll be munching carpet through a straw."

"Please, honey," said Clay.

The Old Broad rambled on about talking to the whales every day for the last twenty-five years, about how she'd known Nate and Clay and Cliff when they first came to the island and how young and stupid they were then, and how that had changed, as now they weren't that young anymore. She talked about what a thoughtful and considerate man Nate was, but how, if he hadn't been so absentminded, he might have found a decent woman to love him, and how she didn't know where he was, but if he didn't get his bottom back to Maui soon, she would twist his ear off when she saw him. And then she sat down to resounding silence and tittering pity, and everyone looked at Clay, who looked at a ceiling fan.

After a long, awkward minute, when the Unity minister had to head-fake to the podium a couple of times, as if he would have to call a conclusion to the service, Gilbert Box — the Count — got up. He wasn't wearing his hat for once, but he still wore his giant wraparound sunglasses, and without the balance of the giant hat, the glasses atop his angular frame made him appear insectlike, a particularly pale praying mantis in khakis. He adjusted the microphone, cleared his throat with great pomp, and said, "I never liked Nathan Quinn…" And everyone waited for the "but," but it never came. Gilbert Box nodded to the crowd and sat back down. Gilbert's grommets applauded.

Cliff Hyland spoke next, talking for ten minutes about what a great guy and fine researcher Nate was. Then Libby actually went forward and spoke at length about Nate's Canadianness and how he had once defended the Great Seal of British Columbia as being superior to all the other provincial seals in that it depicted a moose and a ram smoking a hookah, showing a spirit of cooperation and tolerance, while Ontario's seal depicted a moose and an elk trying to eat a bear, and Saskatchewan's showed a moose and a lion setting fire to a fondue pot — both of which clearly exploited the innate Canadian fear of moose — and the seal of Quebec depicted a woman in a toga flashing one of her boobs at a lion, which was just fucking French. He'd named all the provinces and their seals, but those were the ones Libby could remember. Then Libby sniffled and sat down.

"That's what you could come up with?" hissed Clay. "What, five years of marriage?"

Libby whispered in his ear, "I had to go with something that wouldn't threaten Margaret. I don't see you storming the podium."

"I'm not going to talk about my dead friend when I don't think he's dead."

And before they knew it, Jon Thomas Fuller was at the podium being thankful for Nate's support for his new project, then going on about how much he appreciated how the whale-research community had gotten behind his new "dolphin interaction center," all of which was big news to the whale-research community who was listening. During the short speech, Clair had caught Clay's neck in what appeared to be an embrace of consolation but was in fact a choke hold she'd learned from watching cops on the news. "Baby, if you try to go after him, I'll have you unconscious on the floor in three seconds. That would be disrespectful to Nate's memory." But her effort left Kona unattended on the other side, and he managed to cough «Bullshit» as Jon Thomas took his seat.

Next a grad student who worked for Cliff Hyland stood and talked about how Nate's work had inspired her to go into the field. Then someone from the Hawaiian Department of Conservation and Resources talked about how Nate had always been at the forefront of conservation and protection of the humpbacks. Then the harbormaster talked about Nate's being a competent and conscientious boat pilot. All told, an hour had passed, and when it seemed obvious that no one else was going to stand up, the minister moved toward the podium but was beaten to it by Kona, who had slipped from Clair's steely grip and high-stepped his way to the front.

"Like old Auntie say, Nathan is living on. But no one here today say a thing about the Snowy Biscuit, who — Jah's mercy be on her — is feeding fishes in the briny blue about now." (Sniff.) "I know her only short time, but I think I can say for all of us, that I always want to see her naked. Truth, mon. And when I think upon the round, firm —»

"— she will be missed," Clay said, finishing for the faux Hawaiian. He had clamped a hand over Kona's mouth and was dragging him out the door. "She was a bright kid." With that, the minister jumped to the podium, thanked everyone for coming, and declared, with a prayer, all respects paid in full. Amen.

"Well, yes, mental health can be a problem," said Growl Ryder.

"Being God's conscience is a tough job."

Nate looked around, and, as if following his gaze, the Goo receded around them until they were in a chamber about fifteen feet in diameter — a bubble. It was like camping in someone's bladder, Nate thought.

"That better?" Ryder asked.

Nate realized that the Colonel was the one controlling the shape of the chamber they were in.

"Someplace to sit would be good."

The Goo behind Nate shaped itself into a chaise longue. Nate touched it tentatively, expecting to pull his hand back trailing strings of slime, but although the Goo glistened as if it were wet, on the chair it felt dry. Warm and icky, but dry. He sat down on the chaise. "Everyone thinks you're dead," Nate said.

"You, too."

Nate hadn't thought about it much, but, of course, the Colonel had to be right. They would have thought him long dead.

"You've been here since you disappeared, what, twelve years ago?"

"Yes, they took me with a modified right whale, ate my whole Zodiac, my equipment — everything. They brought me here in a blue whale. I went mad during the trip. Couldn't handle the whole idea of it. They kept me restrained most of the way here. I'm sure that didn't help." Ryder shrugged. "I got better, once I accepted the way things are down here. I understood why they took me."

"And that would be…?"

"The same reason they took you. I was about to figure out their existence from what was hidden in the signal of different whale calls. They took both of us to protect the whale ships and, ultimately, the Goo. We should be grateful they didn't just kill us."

Nate had wondered about that before. Why the trouble? "Okay, why didn't they?"

"Well, they took me alive because the Goo and the people here wanted to know what I knew, and by what path I came to suspect the content in the whale calls. They took you alive because I ordered it so."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, 'why'? Because we were colleagues, because I taught you, because you're bright and intuitive and I liked you and I'm a decent guy. 'Why? Fuck you, 'why? »

"Growl, you live in a slime lair and maintain an identity as the mysterious overlord of an undersea city, you command a fleet of meat dreadnaughts with crews of humanoid whale people, and you're currently reclining in a pulsating mass of gelatinous goo that looks like it escaped from hell's own Jell-O mold — so excuse the fuck out of me if I question your motives."

"Okay, good point. Can I get you something to drink?"

Like many scientists Nate had known, Ryder had plodded on only to realize midcourse that he'd forgotten certain social niceties practiced by other civilized humans, but in this case he was completely missing the point. "No, I don't need anything to drink. I need to know how this happened. What is this stuff? You're a biologist, Growl, you have to have been curious about this."

"I'm still curious. But what I do know is that this stuff makes up everything in Gooville, everything you've seen here, the buildings, the corridors, most of the machinery — although I guess you'd call it biomachinery — all of it is the Goo. One giant, all-encompassing organism. It can form itself into nearly any organism on earth, and it can design new organisms as the need arises. The Goo made the whale ships and the whaley boys. And here's the kicker, Nate: It didn't make them over thirty million years. The entire species isn't more than three hundred years old."

"That's not possible," Nate said. There were certain things that you accepted if you were going to be a biologist, and one of them was that complex life was a process of evolution by natural selection, that you got a new species because the genes that favored survival in a certain environment were replicated in that species, selected by being passed on, often a process that took millions of years. You didn't put in your order and pick up a new species at the window. There was no cosmic fry cook, there was no watchmaker, there was no designer. There was only process and time. "How could you possibly know that anyway?"

"I just know things by being in contact with the Goo, but I'm not far off. It might be less time — two hundred years."

"Two hundred years? The whaley boys are definitely sentient by any definition, and I don't even know what the whale ships are, but they're definitely alive, too. That kind of complexity doesn't happen in that short a time."

"No, I'd say the Goo has probably been here as long as three and a half billion years. The rocks around these caves are some of the oldest in the world. I'm just saying the whaley boys and the ships are new. They're only a few hundred years old because that's how long ago the Goo needed them."

"The Goo needed them, so it made them to serve it? Like it has will?"

"It does have will. It's self-aware, and it knows a lot. In fact, I'd venture to say that the Goo is a repository for every bit of biological knowledge on the planet. This, Nate, this Goo is as close to God as we are ever going to see. It's the perfect soup."

"As in primordial soup?"

"Precisely. Four billion years ago some big organic molecules grouped up, probably around some deep-sea source of geothermal heat, and they learned how to divide, how to replicate. Since replication is the name of life's game, it very quickly — probably in the span of less than a hundred million years — covered the entire planet. Big organic molecules that couldn't exist now because there are millions of bacteria that would eat them, but back then there were no bacteria. At one time the entire oceanic surface of the earth was populated by one single living thing that had learned to replicate itself. Sure, as the replicators were exposed to different conditions they mutated, they developed into new species, they fed on each other, some colonized each other and turned into complex animals, and then more complex animals, but part of that original living animal pulled back into its original niche. By this time chemical information was being exchanged — first by UNA, then by DNA — and as each new species evolved, it carried on all the information for making the next species, and that information came back to the original animal. But it had its safe niche, pulling energy from the earth's heat, sheltered in the deep ocean and by rock. It took in all the information from the animals that it came in contact with, but it changed only enough to protect itself, replicate itself. While a million million species lived and died in the sea, this original animal evolved very slowly, learning, always learning. Think of it, Nate: Within the cells of your body is not only the blueprint for every living thing on earth but everything that has ever lived. Ninety-eight percent of your DNA is just hitching a ride, just lucky little genes that were smart enough to align themselves to other successful genes, like marrying into money, if you will. But the Goo, not only does it have all of those genes, it has the diagram to turn them on and off. That seat you're sitting on may well be three billion years old."

Nate suddenly felt something he'd felt before only when waking up in a hotel with the bedspread pulled up around his face: a deep and earnest hope, motivated by disgust, that in all the time it had been there, someone had cleaned the cast-off genetic material from it. He stood up, just for safety. "How could you possibly know this, Growl? It goes against everything we know about evolution."

"No it doesn't. It completely fits. Yes, a complex process like life can develop, given enough time, but we also know that an animal that fits perfectly into its niche isn't pressured to change. Sharks have remained basically the same for a hundred million years, the chambered nautilus for five hundred million. Well, you're just looking at the animal that found its niche first. The first animal, the source."

Nate shook his head at the magnitude of it. "You might be able to explain the evolutionary path being preserved, but you can't explain consciousness, analytical thought, processes that require a very complex mechanism to perform. You can't pull off that sort of complexity of function with big, fluffy organic molecules."

"The molecules have evolved, but they remembered. The Goo is a complex, if amorphous, life form; there are no analogs for it. Everything is a model of it, and nothing is a model of it."

Nate stepped back from the Colonel, and the Goo flexed to make room for him. The movement gave him a brief moment of vertigo, and he lost his balance. The Goo caught him, the surface moving forward against his shoulder blades just enough to steady him on his feet. Nate whipped around quickly and the Goo pulled back. "God, that's creepy!"

"There you go, Nate. Aware. You'd be amazed at what the Goo knows — at what it can tell us. You can have a life here, Nate. You'll see things here you would never see, you'll do things you could never do. And in the process you can help me unravel the greatest biological riddle in the history of the world."

"I think you're supposed to laugh manically after saying something like that, Colonel."

"If you help me, I'll give you what you've always wanted."

"Despite what you think, what I want is to go home."

"That's not going to happen, Nate. Not ever. You're a bright man, so I won't insult you by pretending the circumstances are any different than they are: You are not ever going to leave these caverns alive, so now you have to make the decision of how you want to spend your life. You can have everything here that you could have on the surface — much more, in fact — but you're not leaving."

"Well, in that case, Colonel, see if you can get your giant booger to duplicate you so you can go fuck yourself."

"I know what the whale song means, Nate. I know what it's for." Nate felt as if he'd been sucker-punched by his own obsession, but he tried not to show the impact.

"Doesn't really matter now, does it?"

"I understand. You take a little time to work into the idea, Nate, but there is some urgency. This isn't just standing back and collecting data — we need to do something. I want your help. We'll talk soon."

The Goo came down and seemed to envelop the Colonel. There was a sound like ripping paper, and a long, pink tunnel opened behind Nate, leading all the way to the iris door through which he'd entered. He took one last look over his shoulder, but there was nothing except Goo, Ryder was gone.

Nate was met in the hall by the two big killer whaley boys, who took one look at his face, then looked at each other, then snickered, with big toothy grins. Emily 7 was nowhere to be seen.

"He's a fucking squirrel," Nate said.

The whaley boys went into wheezing fits of laughter, doubling over as they led Nate down the corridor and back to the grotto. Say what you want, Nate thought. The Goo designed these guys to enjoy themselves.

As soon as Nate entered the apartment, he knew he wasn't alone. There was a smell there, and not just the ubiquitous ocean smell that permeated the whole grotto, but a sweeter, artificial smell. He quickly checked the main living rooms and the bathroom. When the portal to the bedroom opened, he could see a shape under the covers in his double bed. The biolighting hadn't come on in the bedroom as usual. Nate sighed. The shape under the covers nuzzled into the corner of the bed exactly the way she had on the whale ship.

"Emily 7, you are a lovely — ah — person, really, but I'm — " He was what? He had no idea what he was going to say. He was just trying to get to know himself better? He needed some space? But then he realized that whatever, whoever was under the sheets was too small to be the enamored whaley boy. Nuñez, he thought. This was going to be worse than Emily 7. Nuñez was really his only human contact in Gooville, even if she was working for the cause. He didn't want to alienate her. He couldn't afford to. He moved into the room, trying to think of a way that this could possibly not make things worse.

"Look, I know that we've spent a lot of time together, and I like you, I really do —»

"Good," said Amy, throwing back the covers. "I like you, too. You coming in?"

CHAPTER THIRTY Motherfluker

Clay and Kona had spent the day cleaning the muck out of the raised-from-the-deep Always Confused. Now Clay stood on the breakwater at the Lahaina Harbor, watching the sun bubble red into the Pacific and throw purple fire over the island. He was feeling that particular mix of melancholy and agitation that usually comes with drinking coffee and Irish whiskey at the wake of someone you never knew, and it usually ends in a fight. He felt as if he should do something, but he didn't know what. He needed to move, but he didn't know where. Libby had confirmed that the last message about Nate had been recorded more than a week after he'd disappeared, and it seemed to be more evidence that Nate had survived his ordeal in the channel, but where was he? How do you rush in to save someone when you don't know where he is? All their analysis of the tapes since then had yielded nothing but whale calls. Clay was lost.

"What you doing?" Kona, barefoot and smelling of bleach, came up behind him.

"I'm waiting for the green flash." He wasn't, really, but sometimes, just as the sun dipped below the horizon, it happened. He needed something to happen.

"Yeah, I seen that. What cause that?"

"Uh, well" — and that was another thing, he didn't have enough of a handle on the natural sciences to keep this whole project going — "I believe as the sun disappears under the horizon, the residual spectrum bounces off the mucusphere, thus causing the green flash."

"Yah, mon. The mucusphere."

"It's science," said Clay, knowing that it wasn't science.

"When the boat clean, then we going out, record whales and like dat?"

Good question, Clay thought. He could collect the data, but he didn't have the knowledge necessary to analyze it. He had hoped that Amy would do that.

"I don't know. If we find Nate, maybe."

"You think he still living, then? Even after all this time?"

"Yeah. I hope. I guess we should keep up the work until we can find him."

"Yeah. Nate say them Japanese going to kill our minkes if you don't work hard."

"Minke whales, yeah. I've been on one of their ships. Norwegians, too."

"That's some evil fuckery."

"Maybe. The minke herd is large. They're not endangered. The Japanese and the Norwegians aren't really taking enough of them to hurt the population, so why shouldn't we let them hunt them? I mean, what's the argument for stopping them? Because whales are cute? The Chinese fry kitties — we don't protest them."

"The Chinese fry kitties?"

"I'm not saying I agree with killing them, but we really don't have a good argument."

"The Chinese fry kitties?" Kona's voice was getting higher each time he spoke.

"Maybe some of the work we do here can prove that these animals have culture, that they're closer to us than they perceive. Then we'll have an argument."

"Kitties? Like, little meow kitties? They just fry them?"

Clay was musing, watching the sunset and feeling sad and frustrated, and words came out of him like a long, rambling sigh: "Of course, when I was on the whaling ship, I saw how the Japanese whalers looked at the animals. They see them as fish. No more or less than a tuna. But I was photographing a sperm-whale mother and her calf, and the calf got separated from the pod. The mother came back to get the calf and pushed it away from our Zodiac. The whalers were visibly moved. They recognized that mother/child behavior. It wasn't fish behavior. So it's not a lost cause."

"Kitties?" Kona sighed, taking on the same tone of resignation that Clay had used.

"Yeah," said Clay.

"So how we going to find Nate so we can do good work and save them humpies and minkes?"

"Is that what we're doing?"

"No. Not now. Now we just watching for a green flash."

"I don't know any science, Kona. I made that up, about the green flash."

"Ah, I didn't know. Science you don't know just looks like magic."

"I don't believe in magic."

"Oh, brah, don't say dat. Magic come bite you in the ass for sure. You going to need my help for sure now."

Clay felt some of the weight of his melancholy lift by sharing a moment with the surfer, but his need to act was worrying at him like a flea in the ear. "Let's take a drive up-country, Kona."

"They really fry kitties in China?" Kona said, his voice so high now that dogs living around the harbor winced.

"Amy, what, how — what?" The lights had come up, and Nate could see that it was Amy in his bed. It was a lot of Amy that he hadn't seen before.

"They took me, Nate. Just like you. A few days later. It was horrible. Quick, hold me."

"A whale ship ate you, too?"

"Yes, just like you. Hold me, I'm so afraid."

"And they brought you all the way here?"

"Yes, just like you, only it's worse for a dame. I feel… so… so naked. Hold me."

" 'Dame'? No one says 'dame' anymore."

"Well, African-American, then."

"You are not African-American."

"I can't remember all the politically correct terms. Christ, Nate, what do you need, a diagram? Crawl in." Amy flapped the covers, threw them back, then struck a cheesecake pose, grinning.

But Nate backed away. "You put your head in the water to listen for the whale. The only other person I ever saw do that was Ryder."

"Look at my tan line, Nate." She danced her fingertips over her tan line, which to Nate looked more like a beige line. Nevertheless, she had his attention. "I've never had a tan line before."

"Amy!"

"What!"

"You set me up!"

"I'm naked over here. Haven't you thought about that?"

"Yes, but —»

"Ha! You admit it. I was your research assistant. You had firing power over me. Yet there you are, thinking about me naked."

"You are naked."

"Ha! I think I've made my point."

"That 'ha' thing is unprofessional, Amy."

"Don't care. I no longer work for you, and you are not the boss of me anymore, and furthermore, look at this butt." She rolled over. He did. She looked back over her shoulder and grinned. "Ha!"

"Stop that." He looked at the wall. "You spied on me. You caused all this to happen."

"Don't be ridiculous. I was just part of it, but all that is forgiven. Look how luscious I am." Amy did a presentation wave over herself, as if Nate had just won her in a game show.

"Would you stop that?" Nate reached over and pulled the covers up to her chin.

"Lus-cious," she said, pulling the covers down, revealing a breast with each syllable.

Nate walked out of the room. "Put on some clothes and come out here. I'm not going to try to talk to you like that."

"Fine, don't talk," she called after him. "Just crawl in."

"You're just bait," he called from the kitchen.

"Hey, buster, I'm not that young."

"This conversation is over until you come out here fully dressed." Nate sat down at his little dining table and tried to will away his erection.

"What are you, some kind of fruitcake, some kind of sissy boy, some kind of fairy, huh?"

"Yes, that's it," Nate said.

For a moment nothing but quiet from the bedroom. Then: "Oh, my God, I feel like such a maroon." Her voice was softer now. She came stumbling out of the bedroom, the sheet wrapped around her. "I'm really sorry, Nate. I had no idea. You seemed so interested. I wouldn't have —»

"Ha!" Nate said. "See how it feels."

The Old Broad had given them iced ginger tea and set Kona up at one of her telescopes to look at the moon. She sat down next to Clay on the lanai and they listened to the night for a while.

"It's nice up here," Clay said. "I don't think I've been up here at night before."

"Clay, I'm usually in bed by now, so I hope you don't think me dense if I get things clear in my mind."

"Of course not, Elizabeth."

"Thank you. As I see it, for years you and Nate have been telling everyone that I'm a nut job because I said I could communicate with whales. Now you drive up here in a froth — in the middle of the night — to deliver the earth-shattering news that what I've been telling you all along is possible?" She leaned her chin on her fist and looked wide-eyed at Clay. "That about right?"

"We never called you a nut job, Elizabeth," Clay said. "That's an overstatement."

"Doesn't matter, Clay. I'm not mad." She sipped her tea. "And I'm not angry either. I've been in these islands a very long time, Clay, and I've lived on the side of this volcano for most of it. I've spent more time looking down on that channel than most people have spent on the planet, but not once did you or Nate ask me why. Didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess. Easier to think I was just a few bananas short of a bunch than to ask me why I was interested."

Clay felt sweat running down the small of his back. He'd been uncomfortable around the Old Broad before, but in a totally different way — the way one feels when a matron aunt pinches your cheek and starts to ramble inanely about the old days, not like this. This was like getting sandbagged by a prosecutor. "I don't think that Nate or I could answer that question, Elizabeth, so it's not out of order that we didn't ask you."

"That's a load a shark balls, old Auntie," Kona said, not looking away from the eyepiece of the eight-inch mirror telescope.

"He's a sweet boy," the Old Broad said. "Clay, you know that Mr. Robinson was in the navy. Did I ever tell you what it was that he did?"

"No, ma'am, I just assumed he was an officer."

"I can understand how you might think that, but all the money came from my family. No, sweetheart, he was a noncom, a chief petty officer, a sonar man. In fact, I'm told he was the best sonar man in the navy at the time."

"I'm sure he was, Elizabeth, but —»

"Shut up, Clay. You came here for help, I'm helping you."

"Yes, ma'am." Clay shut up.

"James — that was Mr. Robinson's first name — he loved to listen to the humpbacks. He said they made his job a damn sight harder, but he loved them. We were stationed in Honolulu then, but submarine crews were on and off on hundred-day duty shifts, so when he would have time in port, we would come over to Maui, rent a boat, and go out in the channel. He wanted me to be part of the world he lived in all the time — the world of sound under the sea. You can understand that, can't you, Clay?"

"Of course." But Clay was getting a not-so-good feeling about this trip down memory lane. He had things he needed to know, but he wasn't sure that this was part of them.

"That's when I bought Papa Lani with some of my father's money. We thought we'd live there full-time eventually, maybe turn it into a hotel. Anyway, one day James and I decided to rent a little powerboat and camp on the ocean side of Lanai. It was a calm day and an easy trip. On our way over, a big humpback came up beside the boat. It even seemed to change course when we did. James slowed down so we could stay with our new friend. There were no rules then about getting close to the whales like there are now. We didn't even know we were supposed to save them back then, but James loved the humpbacks, and I had come to as well.

"There was no one but the pineapple-company workers on Lanai at that time, so we found a deserted beach where we thought we'd build a fire, cook some dinner, drink highballs from tin cups, swim naked, and… you know, make love on the beach. See there, I've shocked you."

"No you haven't," said Clay.

"Yes I have. I'm sorry."

"No you haven't. Really, I'm fine, tell the story." Old ladies, he thought.

"When the trade winds came up that evening, we pitched the tent a little ways off the beach in a small canyon sheltered from the wind. Well, I gave James my best hummer, and he fell asleep right away."

Clay choked on his iced tea.

"Oh, my dear, did an ice cube go down the wrong pipe? Kona, come here and Heimlich Clay, dear."

"No, I'm fine." Clay waved the surfer away. "Really, I'm okay." Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he wiped his nose on his shirttail. He was suddenly incredibly grateful he hadn't brought Clair. "Just need to catch my breath."

Kona sat down cross-legged at their feet, having suddenly found that he was interested in history. "Go ahead, old Auntie."

"Well, I got a little bit of a headache. So I decided to go back to the boat to get an aspirin from the first-aid kit. Come to think of it, it must have been from the tension in my neck. I always got a crick in my neck when I did that, but James loved it so."

"Jesus, Elizabeth, would you get on with the story," Clay said.

"I'm sorry, dear, I've shocked you, haven't I?"

"No, I'm fine. I'm just curious to find out what happened."

"Well, as long as I didn't shock you. I suppose I should be more discreet in front of the boy, but it is part of the story."

"No, please. What happened on the beach?"

"You know, we could fuck like mad monkeys, all night long, and it never gave me a headache, but one —»

"The beach, please."

"When I got to the beach, there were two men near the boat. It looked like they were doing something to the engine. I ducked behind a rock before they saw me. I watched them in the moonlight, a short one and the tall one. The tall one seemed to be wearing some sort of helmet or diving suit. But then the short one said something, and the tall one started laughing — snickering, really — and I saw his face in the moonlight. It wasn't a helmet, Clay. It was a face — a smooth, shiny face, with a jaw full of teeth. I could see the teeth even from where I was. It wasn't human, Clay.

"Well, I went back and woke James, told him he had to come see. I took him back to my hiding place. The two men, or the man and that thing were still there, but behind them, right there almost on the beach, was also a humpback, a big one. The water couldn't have been ten feet deep where he was, yet he was sitting there calm as could be.

"Well, all James saw was the two men messing with our boat. We had drunk quite a few cocktails, I guess, and James had his big, strong man act to do. He told me to stay where I was and not to move for anything. Then he went after them — shouting at the top of his lungs for them to get away. The tall one, the nonhuman thing, dove under the water right away, but the man looked around like he'd been trapped. He started wading out toward the whale, and James went right in after him. Then, at last, James saw the whale. He just stopped there in the surf and looked. That's when the thing came up out of the water behind him. Suddenly it was just there, looming behind James. I wanted to yell, but I was so afraid. The thing, it hit James with something, maybe a rock, and he fell forward into the water. Then I screamed for all I was worth, but I'm not sure they even heard me over the noise of the wind and the surf.

"The man took one of James's arms, the thing the other, and they swam to the whale with James in tow. Then, Clay, as crazy as this sounds, this is what happened: That whale rolled over, and they stuffed James into it, back by the genital slit, I think. Then they both crawled into it as well. Then the whale kicked its tail until it was in deeper water and swam away. I never saw my husband again." The Old Broad took Clay's hand and squeezed it. "I swear to you, that's how it happened, Clay."

Clay didn't know what to say. Over the years she'd said a lot of crazy-sounding stuff, but this was the mother of all crazy stuff. Yet she was more serious than he'd ever seen her. It didn't matter what he believed — there was only one thing to say to her. "I believe you, Elizabeth."

"That's why, Clay. That's why I've helped finance you over the years, it's why I've watched the channel all these years, it's why I own two acres right near the water, yet I've lived up-country for all these years."

"I don't understand, Elizabeth."

"They came back, Clay. That night the whale came back, and the thing came back to the beach, but I hid. They came back for me. The next day I didn't even go back to the boat. I hiked my way to the pineapple plantation and got help there. They brought me back to Lahaina on one of their big freighters. I haven't been on the water since. The closest I ever go near the water is when there's an event at the sanctuary, and then there are a lot of people around."

Clay thought about the Japanese soldier they'd found on a Pacific island who'd been hiding from the Americans for twenty years after the war was over. Elizabeth Robinson had obviously been hiding from something that wasn't looking for her. "Didn't you tell anyone? Surely the navy would have wanted to find out what happened to one of their best sonar men."

"They asked. I told them. They dismissed it. They said James went swimming at night, he drowned, and I was drunk. They sent some men over there, and so did the Maui police. They found the boat, still on the beach, with everything in working order. They found our camp, and they found an empty bottle of rum. That was the end of it."

"Why didn't you ever tell me? Or Nate?"

"I wanted you to keep doing the work that you do. Meanwhile, I kept watching. I read all the scientific journals, too, you know. I look for anything that might make sense of it. Come with me."

She got up and went into her house, Clay and Kona following without a word. In the bedroom she opened a cedar chest and took out a large scrapbook. She laid it on the bed and flipped it open to the last page. It was Nate's obituary.

"Nathan was one of the best in the field, and that little girl said that a whale ate him. Then she disappeared at sea." She flipped a page. "Twelve years ago this Dr. Gerard Ryder disappeared at sea, also studying whale calls at the time, although blue whales." She flipped another page. "This fellow, a Russian sonar expert who defected to England, disappeared off Cornwall in 1973. They said it was probably KGB."

"Well, it probably was KGB. I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but each of these incidents seems to have a perfectly normal explanation, and they happen over such a long period of time in different places. I don't see what the connection is."

"It's underwater sound, Clay. And they're not normal. All these men, including my James, were experts at listening to the ocean."

"Even so, are you saying that someone has trained whales? That creatures have been abducting sonar guys and shoving them up whales' bums?"

"Don't be crude, Clay. You came to me because you wanted help, I'm trying to give it to you. I don't know who they are, but what you've told me about there being language hidden in the whale song — it just confirms in my mind that they took Nate, and James, and all these other people. That's all I know. I'm telling you that I'm sure that Nate is alive, too. It's another piece to the puzzle."

Clay sat down on the bed next to the scrapbook. There were articles from scientific journals on cetacean biology, on underwater acoustics, news items about whale strandings, some that didn't seem connected at all. It was the search path of someone who didn't know what she was looking for. He'd gone so long thinking of her as crazy that he'd never given her credit for how knowledgeable she really was. He was realizing only now what had been driving her. He felt like a shit.

"Elizabeth, what about the call about the sandwich? What about the crystals and the whales talking to you — all of that? I don't understand."

"I did get the call, Clay. And as for the other, I have dreams of the whales talking to me, and I pay attention to them. Fifty years of searching, I take clues where I can get them. Given what I was looking for, I thought magic and divination as valid a method as any tool in the search."

"See," Kona said, "I told you. Science you don't know? Magic."

"I guess I was casting my faith around carelessly, I just hope I didn't do something awful."

"Nah, old Auntie, Jah's love on ye anyway, even if you're trampin' around your faith like a ho."

"Kona, shut up," Clay said. "What do you mean, you might have done something awful, Elizabeth?"

She picked up the scrapbook, closed it, then sat down on the bed next to Clay and hung her head. A tear dripped down onto the black pasteboard cover of the book.

"When the call came, and the whale said that he wanted a pastrami on rye, I recognized the voice, Clay. I recognized the voice, and I insisted Nathan go out there and take the sandwich with him."

"It was probably a prank, Elizabeth, someone you've met. Nate was going out that day anyway. You didn't cause this."

"No, you don't understand, Clay. Pastrami on rye was my James's favorite. I always had one waiting for him when he came in from submarine duty. The voice on the phone was my James."

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Booty and the Beasts

The second time Amy came out of the bedroom, she was dressed in her familiar hiking shorts, flip-flops, and a WHALES ARE OUR PALS T-shirt. "Better?"

"I don't feel any better, if that's what you're asking." Nate sat at the table with a can of grapefruit juice and a pint of vodka in front of him.

"I mean, are you more comfortable now that I'm dressed? Because I can be naked again in a flash —»

"You want a drink?" Nate needed to forget the whole naked encounter as quickly as possible. Applying alcohol seemed like the most efficient method at this point.

"Sure," she said. She pulled a glass out of one of the kitchen cubbies, the clear door folding back like the protective cover of a frog's eye. "You want a glass?"

Nate had been sipping alternately from the juice can and the vodka bottle until he had enough room in the can to pour in some vodka. "Yeah. I don't like reaching into the cupboards."

"You're kind of squeamish for a biologist, but I guess it does take some getting used to." Amy set the glasses in front of him and let him mix the drinks. There was no ice. "You adjust."

"You seem to have adjusted. When did they take you? You must have been really young."

"Me? No, I was born here. I've always been here. That's why I was perfect to work for you guys. The Colonel has been teaching me cetacean biology for years."

It occurred to Nate that he had seen a few human children around and hadn't really thought about growing up in Gooville. Someone had to teach them. Why not the infamous Colonel? "I should have known. When you were trying to locate the whale by listening for it that last day. I should have known."

"Correction, when I did locate the whale by listening for it, for which you still owe me dinner."

"I think this is one of those all-bets-are-off situations, Amy. You were a spy."

"Nate, before you get too angry, you need to remember the alternative to my spying and finding out what you were working on in detail. That would have been to just kill you. It would have been much easier."

"You and Ryder act like you did me a favor. Like you saved me from some great danger. The only danger I was in was from you in the first place. So stop trying to impress me with the quality of your mercy. You did it all — tore up the lab, sank Clay's boat, all of it — didn't you?"

"No, not directly. Poynter and Poe tore up the lab. The whaley boys sank Clay's boat. I took the negatives out of the packet at the photo lab. I kept them informed, and I made sure you were where they needed you to be, that's all. I never wanted to hurt you, Nate. Never."

"I wish I could believe that. Then you show up here like that, trying to convince me that this is a great place to live right after Ryder has given me the speech." He drained his glass, poured himself another drink, this one with just a splash of grapefruit juice over the top.

"What are you talking about? I haven't seen Ryder since I've been back. I just got in a few hours ago."

"Well, then it's always been a part of the plan: Let Amy lure the biologist into staying."

"Nate, look at me." She took his chin in her hand and looked him right in the eye. "I came here of my own free will, without any instructions from Ryder or anyone else. In fact, no one knows where I am, except maybe the Goo — you can never be sure about that. I came here to see you, with all the masks and the role-playing out of the way."

Nate pulled away from her. "And you didn't think I'd be mad? And what was with the whole 'Look how luscious I am' act?"

She looked down. Hurt, Nate thought. Or acting hurt. If she cried, it wouldn't matter. He'd be useless.

"I knew you'd be mad, but I thought you might be able to get over it. I was just trying to be floozish. I'm sorry if I'm not very good at it. It's not a skill you get to use a lot in an undersea city. Truth be told, the dating pool is sort of shallow here in Gooville. I was just trying to be sexy. I never said I was a good floozy."

Nate reached over and patted her hand. "No, you're a fine floozy. That's not what I was saying. I wasn't questioning your… uh, floozishness. I was just questioning its sincerity."

"Well, it's sincere. I really do like you. I really did come here to see you, to be with you."

"Really?" What was the biological analog for this? A black widow spider male falling for one of her lines, knowing innately where it was going. Knowing right down to his very DNA that she was going to kill and eat him right after they mated, but he would worry about after. So time and again Mr. Black Widow passed his dumb-ass, sex-enslaved genes on to the next generation of dumb-ass, sex-enslaved males who would fall for the same trick. Spinning a little conversation: Interesting name, Black Widow. How'd you come about that? Tell me all about yourself. Me? Nah, I'm a simple guy. I'm doomed by my male nature to follow my little spider libido into oblivion. Let's talk about you. Love the red hourglass on your butt.

"Really," Amy said. There were tears welling in her eyes, and she lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it gently.

"Amy, I don't want to stay here. I'm not — I want — I'm too old for you, even if you weren't a lying, destructive, evil —»

"Okay." She held his hand to her cheek.

"What do you mean, 'okay'?"

"You don't have to stay. But can I stay with you tonight?"

He pulled his hand back from her, but she held his gaze. "I need to be way more drunk for this," he said.

"Me, too." She went over to the scary fridge thing. "Do you have more vodka?"

"There's another bottle over there in that thing — that other thing that I'm afraid of." He caught himself watching her bottom while she found the bottle. "You said 'okay. You mean you know a way out?"

"Shut up and drink. You gonna drink or you gonna talk?"

"This isn't healthy," Nate observed.

"Thank you, Dr. Insight," Amy said. "Pour me one."

"Nice red hourglass."

"What?"

Back at his bungalow at Papa Lani, Clay sat on the bed with his head in his hands while Clair rubbed the knots out of his shoulders. He'd told her the Old Broad's story, and she'd listened quietly, asking a few questions as he went along.

"So do you believe her?" Clair asked.

"I don't even know what I'm admitting to believing. But I believe she thinks she's telling the truth. She offered us a boat, Clair. A ship. She offered to buy us a research vessel, hire a crew, pay them."

"What for?"

"To find Nate and her husband, James."

"I thought she was broke."

"She's not broke. She's loaded. I mean, the ship will be a used one, but it's a ship. It will still run in the millions. She wants me to find one — and a crew."

"And could you find Nate if you had a ship?"

"Where do I look? She thinks he's on an island somewhere, some secret place where these things live. Hell, if she's telling the truth, they could be from outer space. If she's not… well, I can't just run a ship around the world stopping at islands and asking them if they happen to have seen people crawling out of a whale's butt."

"Technically, baby, whales don't have butts. You have to walk upright to have booty. This is why we are the dominant species on the planet, because we have booty."

"You know what I mean."

"It's an important point." She slid into his lap, her arms around his neck.

Clay smiled despite his anxiety. "Technically, man is not the dominant species. There's at least a thousand pounds of termites for every person on earth."

"Well, you can have my termites, thanks."

"So man isn't really dominant, whether it's brains or booty."

"Baby, I wasn't saying that man was the dominant species, I was saying that we are the dominant species. Wo-man."

"Because you have booty?"

She wiggled on his lap by way of an answer, then leaned her forehead against his, looked in his eyes.

"Good point," Clay said.

"What about this ship? You going to let the Old Broad buy it for you? You going to go look for Nate?"

"Where do I start?"

"Follow one of these signals. Find whatever is making it and follow them."

"We'd need location for that."

"How do you do that?"

"We'd need to have someone working the old sonar grid the navy put down all over the oceans during the Cold War to track submarines. I know people at Newport who do it, but we'd have to tell them what we're doing."

"You couldn't just say you were trying to find a certain whale?"

"I suppose we could."

"And if you have your ship and that information, you can follow the whale, or the ship, or whatever it is to its source."

"My ship?"

"Roll over, I'll rub your back."

But Clay wasn't moving. He was thinking. "I still don't know where to start."

"Who has the booty? Turn over, Captain."

Clay slipped off his aloha shirt and rolled over onto his stomach. "My ship," he said.

Nate was suddenly cold, and when he opened his eyes, he was pretty sure that his head was going to explode. "I'm pretty sure my head is going to explode," he said. And someone rudely jostled his bed.

"Come on, party animal, the Colonel sent for you. We need to go."

He peeked between the fingers he was using to hold the pieces of his head together and saw the menacing but amused face of Cielle Nuñez. It wasn't what — who — he expected, and he did a quick sweep of the bed with one leg to confirm that he was alone. "I drank," Nate said.

"I saw the bottles on the table. You drank a lot."

"I didn't get a knob so just anyone could use it anytime they want."

"I noticed your knob. It looks out of place."

About that time Nate realized that he was naked, and Nuñez was standing over his naked body, and he was going to have to let the pieces of his head go where they may if he was going to cover himself. He felt for a sheet, pulled it up as he sat up and threw his legs off the bed.

"I'm going to need a moment."

"Hurry."

"I have to pee."

"That will be fine."

"And throw up."

"Also fine."

"Okay. You go away now."

"Brush your teeth." And she left the room.

Nate looked around the room for signs of Amy, but there were none. He didn't remember where her clothes were, but the last time he'd seen them, he was pretty sure they weren't on her. He stumbled into the bathroom and looked into the basin, mother of pearl with its little siphon fixtures and the green sphincter drain. Seeing that pretty much did it for him, and he heaved into the sink.

"Hi," Amy said, poking her head out of the retracting shower door.

Nate tried to say something — something about trapdoor spiders, in keeping with an arachnid theme he was developing with regard to Amy — but it came out more bubbly and moist than he intended.

"You go ahead," Amy said. "I'll be in here." And the door clicked shut like a frightened clam.

When Nate had finished reviewing the contents of his stomach, he rinsed his face and the sink, emptied his bladder into the thing on which he would not sit, then leaned against the sink and moaned for a second while he gathered his thoughts.

A head popped out of the shower. "So, that went well."

"The water's not running."

"I'm not showering, I'm hiding. I didn't want Nuñez to see me. The Colonel shouldn't know I've been here. I'll leave after you go. Brush your teeth." And then she was back in her shell.

He brushed, rinsed, repeated, then said, "Okay."

Out she came, grabbed him by the hair, kissed him hard. "Nice night," she said. The shower clicked shut, Amy inside.

"I'm too old for this."

"Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that. Not now, later. Go. She's waiting."

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Replicator Versus the Imitator

Nuñez bought him a large cup of coffee at a cafe where whaley boys stood around pouring down lattes the size of fire extinguishers and exchanging clicks and whistles at an irritating volume.

"If ever there was a creature that didn't need caffeine," Nate said.

Nuñez kept him moving, while he kept trying to stop to lean on things. "Don't ever drink with them," Nuñez said. "Especially the males. You know their sense of humor. You're as likely as not to get a wet willy in the ear, and it's a real wet willy."

"I may have to hurl again."

"Don't destroy yourself out of spite, Nate. Just accept things how they are."

He wasn't trying to destroy himself, and he wasn't spiteful. He was just confused, hungover, and kind of in love, or something remotely like love, except that the pain was more localized in his temples rather than being the overall, life-ruining pain it usually caused him. "Can we stop in at the Lollipop Guild and get a couple aspirins?"

"You're late already."

In the corridors she handed him off to a pair of killer whaley boys.

"You should be honored, you know?" Nuñez said. "He doesn't meet with many people."

"You can take my appointment if you want."

The Colonel had a goo recliner waiting for him when he walked through the iris door. Nate sat in it and held his coffee cup like a security blanket against his chest.

"Well, can you see now that life wouldn't be so bad here?"

Nate's mind raced. Amy said the Colonel didn't know, but maybe the Goo knew, but the Colonel was tapped in to the Goo, so did he know? Or had he sent her in the first place and this was all a scam, just like when he'd sent her to Hawaii to spy on him? She'd fooled him for a month there, why couldn't she be fooling him now? He wanted to trust her. But what was Ryder getting at?

"What's different, Growl? When I saw you nine hours ago, I was a prisoner, and I'm a prisoner now."

Ryder seemed surprised. He wiped the lock of gray hair out of his eyes furiously, as if it had caused him to make some sort of mistake. "Right, nine hours. So you've had some time to think." He didn't sound sure.

"I got drunk and passed out. In the clear, lightning-bug light of day, Colonel, I still want to go home."

"You know, time" — Ryder patted the living chair he was sitting in as if he were petting a dog, sending waves of blush through the pink Goo outward from where he touched. Nate shivered at the sight of it — "time is different down here, it's…"

"Relative?" Nate offered.

"It's on a different scale."

"What do you want from me, Colonel? What can I possibly offer you that I get the special treatment of being spared and granted multiple audiences with the… the grand pooh-bah?" Nate was going to say "with the alpha whacko," but he thought of Amy and realized that something had changed. He no longer felt like he had nothing to lose.

Rider swiped at his hair and clutched at the flesh of his chair with the other hand. He began rocking slightly. "I want someone to tell me I'm thinking clearly, I guess. I dream things that the Goo knows, and I think it knows things that I dream, but I'm not sure. I'm overwhelmed."

"You might have thought about that before you declared yourself wizard."

"You think I chose this? I didn't choose this, Nate. The Goo chose me. I don't know how many people have been brought down here over the years, but I was the first biologist. I was the first one who had some idea how the Goo worked. It had the whaley boys bring me to a place like this, where there was raw, unformed animal, and it never let me leave. I've tried to make things better for people in Gooville, but — " Ryder's eyes rolled up in his head as if he were starting to have a seizure, but then he was back again. "Did you see the electricity on the whale ships? I did that. But it's not — It's different now than it has been."

Nate suddenly felt bad for the older man. Ryder was behaving like an early Alzheimer's patient who is realizing that he's losing recognition of his grandchildren's faces. "Tell me," Nate said.

Ryder nodded, swallowed hard, pressed on — hardly the picture of the powerful leader he'd appeared the night before.

"I think that after the Goo found its safe haven here under the sea, it needed to have more information, more DNA sequences to make sure it could protect itself. It produced a minute bacterium that could spread throughout the oceans, be part of the great world ecosystem but could pass genetic information back to the source. We call the bacteria SAR-11. It's a thousand times smaller than normal bacteria, but it's in every liter of seawater on the planet. That worked fine to transmit information back to the Goo for three billion years — everything that could be known was in the sea. Then something happened."

"Animals left the water?"

"Exactly. Until then, everything there was to know — every piece of information that could be known — was transmitted through DNA, replicators, in creatures that lived in the seas. The Goo knew everything. Mind you, it might take a million years to learn how to make an arthropod's segmented shell. It might take two million years to learn to make a gill or, say, twenty million to make an eye, but it had its safe niche, so it had the time — it didn't have anywhere it needed to be. Evolution doesn't really have a destination. It's just dicking around with possibilities. The Goo is the same way. But when life left the water, the Goo got a blind spot."

"I'm having a little trouble seeing the immediacy of your story, Colonel. I mean, why, beyond the obvious that I'm sitting inside this thing, is this supposed to be urgent?"

"Because four hundred million years later, the land creatures came back into the water — sophisticated land animals."

"Early whales?"

"Yes, when mammals came back to the sea, they brought something that even the dinosaurs — the reptiles and amphibians that had come back to the water — didn't have. Something the Goo didn't know. Knowledge that didn't replicate itself through DNA. It replicated through imitation, learned knowledge, not passed on. Memes."

Nate knew about memes, the information equivalent of a gene. A gene existed to replicate itself and required a vehicle, an organism, in which to do it. It was the same with memes, except a meme could replicate itself across vehicles, across brains. A tune you couldn't get out of your head, a recipe, a bad joke, the Mona Lisa — all were memes of sort. They were a fun model to think about, and computers had made the idea of a self-replicating piece of information more manifest with computer viruses, but what did that have to do with — But then it hit him. Why he'd learned about memes in the first place.

"The song," Nate said. "Humpback song is a meme."

"Of course. The first culture, the first exposure the Goo had to something it didn't understand. What, maybe fifteen million years ago it found out it wasn't the only game in town. Three billion years is a long time to get used to living in what you think is your private house only to suddenly find out that someone moved into an apartment above you while you were sleeping.

"For a long time the Goo didn't perceive that genes and memes were at odds. Whales were the first carriers. Big brains because they need to imitate complex behaviors, remember complex tasks, and because they could get the high-protein food to build the brains the memes needed. But the Goo came to terms with the whales. They're an elegant mix of genes and memes, absolute kings of their realm. Huge, efficient feeders, immune from any predation except from each other.

"But then something started killing whales. Killing them in alarming numbers. And it was something from the surface world. It wasn't something the Goo could find out about from its ocean-borne nervous system, so that's when I think it created the whale ships, or a version of them. Late seventeen or early eighteen hundreds, I'd guess. Then, I think when it had somehow gotten back enough samples of human DNA, it made the whaley boys. To stay camouflaged but to watch, to bring people back here so it could learn, watch us. I may have been the final link that started the war."

"What war? There's a war?" Nate had a quick vision of the paranoid megalomaniacs that the Colonel said he'd considered for pseudonyms, Captain Nemo and Colonel Kurtz, both complete bedbugs.

"The war between memes and genes. Between an organism that specializes in the replication of gene machines — the Goo — and one that specializes in the replication of meme machines — us, human beings. I brought electrical and computer technology here. I brought the Goo the theoretical knowledge of memes and genes and how they work. Where the Goo is now and where it was before I came is the difference between being able to drive one and being able to build a car from lumps of raw steel. It's realizing the threat. It's going to figure it out."

Ryder looked at Nate expectantly. Nate looked at him as if he wasn't getting the point. When he'd studied under Ryder, the man had been so cogent, so clear. Grumpy, but clear. "Okay," Nate said slowly, hoping Ryder would jump in, "so you need me to… uh…?"

"Help me figure out a way to kill it."

"Didn't see that coming."

"We're at war with the Goo, and we have to find a way to kill it before it knows what's happening."

"Then don't you think you should keep your voice down?"

"No, it doesn't communicate that way." The Colonel looked perturbed at Nate's comment.

"So you want me to figure out how to kill your god?

"Yes, before it wipes out the human race in one fell swoop."

"Which would be bad."

"And we have to kill it without killing everyone in Gooville."

"Oh, we can do that," Nate said, completely confident, the way he'd seen hostage negotiators in cop movies tell the bank robbers that their demands were being met and the helicopter was on the way. "But I'm going to need some time."

The strangest thing was, as Nate left the Colonel's chamber after being in direct contact with the Goo for only a few minutes, his hangover was completely gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Could Be Worse, Could Be Dog Years

"Evidently," said Nate, "where we screwed up was killing the whales."

"No way," said Amy.

"We tipped our hand."

"About being meme machines, right?"

"Yeah. Are you sure you're not spying for him?"

"Nope. Know how you can tell? When I was spying, did I ever touch you here?"

"No. No, you did not."

"And did I ever let you touch me here?" She moved his hand for him.

"No, you did not. Especially not in public."

"Yeah, we should probably go back to your place."

She had called him on his buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing, about which he made a mental note to ask what the name of it was at his first convenience. They'd met for coffee at a Gooville café that catered to whaley boys. She'd assured him that no one would notice them, and, strangely enough, the whaley boys had completely ignored them. Maybe he was no longer news.

"If they say anything, I'll just tell them that we're having sex," Amy said.

"But you said you didn't think I should tell the Colonel I'd seen you."

"Yeah, but that was before he let you in on his secret plan."

"Right."

"Although I'm a little ashamed of how old you are. We should talk about that."

"So should I move my hand?"

"Yeah, down and a little to the right."

"Let's head back to my place."

Back at his apartment, standing in the kitchen, he said, "Hey, what do you call this thing?" He pointed to that thing.

"The phone."

"No kidding?" He nodded as if he'd known that all along. "So where were we?"

"Killing whales was where we went wrong?"

"Yes."

"Or how old you are?"

"So," he continued, "killing whales was a big mistake."

"Which you knew, because that's what made you want to become a nerd in the first place."

"No, that's not right."

" 'Scuse me, action nerd."

"You want to know how I got into this field, really?"

"No. I mean, sure. You can tell me about the destruction of the human race later."

"You have to promise you won't laugh."

"Of course." She looked incredibly sincere.

"My sophomore year at the University of Sasketchewan in the Sticks —»

"You're kidding."

"It's a good school. You promised you wouldn't laugh."

"Oh, you meant even this early in the story I'm not supposed to laugh? Sorry."

"I mean, I'm sure it doesn't measure up to Gooville Community College —»

"Not fair."

"Home of the Gooville Fighting Loogies —»

"Okay, you made your point."

"Thank you. So a friend and I decided that we're going to go to break out of our boring small-college lives, we were going to take some risks, we were going to —»

"Talk to a girl?"

"No. We decided to drive all the way to Florida for spring break just like American kids, where we would then drink beer, get sunburned, and then talk to a girl — girls."

"So you went."

"Took almost a week to get there, but yes, we drove in his dad's Vista Cruiser station wagon. And I did indeed meet a girl. In Fort Lauderdale. A girl from Fort Lauderdale. And I talked to her."

"You dirty little tramp. Like, 'How's it going, eh? »

"Among other things. We conversed. And so she invited me to go see a manatee."

"He shoots! He scores!"

"But I thought it was an American way of saying matinee. I thought we were going to a movie. You know, you don't think about those things as being real."

"But it was."

"She did volunteer work for a rescue hospital for injured marine mammals, mostly manatees that had been hit by boats. They had a bottlenose dolphin, too. We stayed there for hours, caring for the animals, her teaching me about them. I was hooked. I hadn't even picked my undergrad major, but as soon as I got back to school, I went for biology, and I've been studying marine mammals ever since."

"Oh, my God, you didn't get laid, did you?"

"I found a passion for life. I found something that drives me."

"I can't believe I fell for such a pathetic loser."

"Hey, I'm pretty good at this whale stuff. I'm respected in my field."

"But you're dead."

"Yeah, before then, I mean. Hey, did you say that you fell for me?"

"I said I fell for a pathetic loser, if the shoe fits…"

He kissed her. She kissed him back. That went on for a while. They both found it excellent. Then they stopped.

"You said you wanted to talk about our age difference," Nate said, because he always picked women who broke his heart, and, figuring that his heart was now into this whole thing far enough to be broken, he wanted to get on with it.

"Yeah, we probably should. Maybe we should sit down."

"Couch?"

"No, at the table. You might want a drink."

"No, I'm okay." Yep, heartbreak, he thought. They sat.

"So," she said, curling her legs up under her, sitting like a little kid, making him feel ever more the creepy old guy leching on the young girl, "you know that the whaley boys have been pulling people in here from shipwrecks and plane crashes for years, right?"

"That's what Cielle said."

"She wants you, I can tell, but that's beside the point. Do you know that they pulled whole crews off sunken submarines, plus they've yanked sonar guys out of port for years?"

"I didn't know that."

"Doesn't matter, has nothing to do with what I'm telling you. So you realize that some people who have been lost at sea, like the crew of the American sub Scorpion that sank back in 67, actually ended up here?"

"Okay. That makes sense. More of the Goo looking out for itself. Gaining knowledge."

"Yeah, but that's not the point. I mean, those guys helped put together a lot of the technology you saw on the whale ship, the human technology, but that doesn't matter. The important part is that the world thinks that the crew of the Scorpion is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, even though they're not. Got it?"

"Okay," Nate said, really slowly, the way he had spoken to the Colonel when he was losing the point — much the way he was waving in the conversational wind right now.

"And you realize that when I applied with you and Clay, that I gave my real name, which is Amy Earhart, and that Amy is short for Amelia?"

"Oh, my God," Nate said.

"Ha!" Amy said.

The ship broker found Clay's ship in the Philippines, in Manila Harbor. Clay bought it based on faxed photographs, a spec sheet, and a recent hull certification for just under $2 million of the Old Broad's money. It was a 180-foot-long U.S. Coast Guard fisheries patrol vessel built in the late fifties. It had been refitted several times since then, once in the seventies for fishing, once in the eighties for ocean survey, and finally in the nineties as a live-aboard dive boat for the adventure tourist. It had plenty of comfortable cabins as well as compressors, dive platforms, and cranes to raise and lower support vessels onto the rear deck, although, except for the lifeboats, it came with no support craft. Clay thought they could use the rear deck as a helicopter-landing pad, even if there wasn't a budget for a helicopter, but — you know — someone with a helicopter might want to land there, and it helped no end to have a big H painted on the deck. There was a budget for painting a big H. The ship had efficient, if not quite state-of-the-art, navigation equipment, radar, autopilot, and some old but functioning sonar arrays left over from its days as a fishing ship. It had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower diesel engines and could distill up to twenty tons of freshwater a day for the crew and passengers. There were cabins and support for forty. It was also rated a class-three icebreaker, which was a feature that Clay hoped they wouldn't have to test. He really didn't like cold water.

Through another broker Clay hired the crew of ten men, sight unseen, right off the docks of Manila: a group of brothers, cousins, and uncles with the last name of Mangabay, among whom the broker guaranteed that there were no murderers, or at least no convicted murderers, and only petty thieves. The eldest uncle, Ray Mangabay, who would be Clay's first mate, would sail the ship to Honolulu, where Clay would meet them.

"He's going to be driving my ship," Clay said to Clair after he'd gotten the news that he had a crew and a first mate.

"You have to let your ship go, Clay," Clair said. "If he sinks it, it wasn't really yours."

"But it's my ship."

"What are you going to call it?"

He was thinking about the Intrepid or the Merciless or some other big-dick, blow-shit-up kind of name. He was thinking about Loyal or Relentless or the Never Surrender, because he was determined now to find his friend, and he didn't mind putting that right on the bow. "Well, I was thinking about —»

"You were thinking deeply about it, weren't you?" Clair interrupted.

"Yes, I thought I'd call her the Beautiful Clair."

"Just the Clair will be fine, baby. You don't want the bow to look busy."

"Right. The Clair." Strangely enough, on second thought, that pretty much encompassed Intrepid, Merciless, Relentless, and Loyal. Plus, it had the underlying meaning of keeper of the booty, which was sort of a bonus in a ship name, he thought. "Yeah, that's a good name for her."

"How long before she gets here?"

"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."

"Well, now that she's called the Clair, I hope they bring her in safe."

"My ship," Clay said anxiously.

"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"

"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.

Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.

"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger — and decidedly luscious, I might add — woman had chosen you, right?"

"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?

"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent —»

"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.

"So the age thing? It's a problem?"

"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."

"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."

"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."

"I was just messin' with you. I'm her daughter. Ha!"

"Stop it! This isn't funny, Amy. If you're trying to make a point, you've made it. Yes, you're an attractive young woman, and maybe your youth's a part of why I'm attracted to you, but that's just biology. You can't blame me for that. I didn't make a move on you, I didn't harass you when we were working together. I treated you exactly as I would have treated any research assistant, except maybe you got away with more because I liked you. You can't ridicule me for responding to you sexually down here when you came on to me. The rules had changed."

"I'm not ridiculing you. Amelia Earhart really is my mother."

"Stop it."

"You want to meet her?"

Nate searched her face for signs of a grin or a tremble in her throat that might indicate the rise of an Amy Ha! Nothing there, just that little bit of sweetness that she usually tried to hide.

"So somehow, living down here, you haven't aged. Your mother?"

"We age, but not like on the surface. I was born in 1940. I'm about the same number of years older than you than you were older than me a half hour ago — kinda sorta. You going to dump me?"

"It's so hard to believe."

"Why, after you've seen all this? You've seen what the Goo can do. Why is it so hard to believe that I'm sixty-four?"

"Well, for one, you're so immature."

"Shut up. I'm young at heart."

"But for a second there I was so sure we were doomed." Nate rubbed his temples — trying to stretch them, maybe — to make his head bigger to hold the whole concept of Amy's being sixty-four.

"No, it's okay, we just haven't gotten to that yet. We're still doomed."

"Oh, thank goodness," Nate said. "I was worried."

Later, after they had pushed the world away for a while, made love and napped in each other's arms, Amy made a move to start another round, and Nate awoke to an immediate and uncertain anxiety.

"Are we really doomed?" he asked.

"Oh, goddamn it Nate!" She was straddling him, so she was able to get a good windup before thumping him hard in the chest with her fist. "That's just un-fucking-professional!"

Nate thought about how the praying mantis female will sometimes bite off the male's head during copulation and how the male's body continues to mate until the act is finished.

"Sorry," he said.

She rolled off him and stared up at dim strips of green luminescence on the ceiling. "It's okay. I didn't mean to bite your head off."

"Pardon?"

"Yes, we're probably doomed. We're doomed for the same reason that I look the way I do, that most of the Goos look much younger than we really are. Turn a gene on, you age; turn it off, you don't. I've even seen some people down here who seem to get younger. Flip a switch, pancreatic cancer at age twenty-two; flip another, you can smoke four packs a day and live to be a hundred. If the Goo thinks that the human race is a danger to it, it just has to flip a switch, pick a gene, make a virus, and the human race would blink out. I hadn't really thought about it as a threat before. My whole life I've worked for the Goo. Service, you know? It takes care of us. It's the source."

He didn't know what to say. Did he need to actually take the Colonel's request for help seriously? Did he need to help find a way to kill this amazing creature in order to save his own species? "Amy, I don't know what to do. Two days ago I just wanted to get out of here. Now? The Colonel and you both said I was lucky to be alive. Has the Goo killed people who were close to finding out about it?"

"Honestly, I don't know. I've never seen it or heard of it happening, but I — we — each just do our own part down here. We don't ask a lot of questions. Not because we're told not to or anything — it's just that you can live a long time without asking yourself big questions when your needs are looked after." For the first time Nate could see the experience of years in Amy's face, marked not by wrinkles but by a shadow in her eyes.

"I'm asking," he said.

"Do I think the Goo is ethically capable of killing the human race?"

"I guess."

"I don't even know if the Goo has ethics, Nate. According to the Colonel, it's just a vehicle for genes and we're just vehicles for memes and nature says that a head-on collision is inevitable. What if it's not? This battle has supposedly gone on for millions of years, and now the Colonel wants to force an endgame? What I do know is that you've got to talk him out of trying to kill it."

"But he's your leader."

"Yeah, but he didn't tell any of us about this. I think he's doubting his own judgment. So am I."

"But you said that it could kill everyone on the planet at the flick of a switch."

"Yeah." She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow. "You hungry? I'm hungry."

"I could eat."

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Necrophiliacs Anonymous, Gooville Chapter

Amy was carrying two stoppered porcelain bottles of beer when she entered the Colonel's chambers. The ruler of Gooville came sliding out of the pink wall as if it had given birth to him. He extended his arms to hug her, but instead of returning his embrace, Amy held up a beer.

"I brought you a beer."

"Amy, you know I don't really eat anymore."

"I thought you might like a beer, for old times' sake."

"Why are you here?"

"I hadn't seen you since I got back from Maui. I thought you'd want to debrief me or something."

"I've talked to Nathan Quinn."

"You have?"

"Don't be cute, Amy. I know what's going on between you two."

"I really don't have any choice, Colonel, I am cute. It's the burden I have to bear."

"He doesn't know what you are, does he?"

"Drink your beer, it's getting warm. Why do you keep it so steamy in here anyway?"

The Colonel accepted the beer from her and took a long pull. When he came up for air, he stared at the beer bottle with a look of surprise, as if it had just spoken to him.

"My, that's good. That's really good. I'd forgotten."

Amy toasted him with her own bottle and took a drink. "Colonel, we've known each other a long time. You've been like a father to me, but you are out of touch. I'm worried about you. I think you need to come out of here occasionally, like you used to. Walk around. Have some interaction with the people in town."

"Don't try to get in the way of what I'm doing, Amy."

"What are you talking about? I'm just worried about you."

The Colonel looked at the beer bottle in his hand again, as if it had just been teleported there, then he looked back to Amy with a little panic in his eyes. "Nate didn't tell you, then?"

"Tell me what? Nate doesn't have anything to do with this. You have lost touch."

The Colonel nodded, then leaned back into the wall of Goo behind him. It cradled him and formed a chaise longue, which he sat down on as he rubbed his temples. "Amy, did you ever do anything for a purpose greater than your own ambition? Did you ever feel a duty to something beyond yourself?"

"You mean, like persuading people that I'm something that I'm not to gain their trust so they could be kidnapped or killed in order to preserve my community? Yes, I have some concept of the idea of serving the greater good."

"I guess you do. I guess you do. Forgive me. Perhaps I do spend too much time alone."

"You think?"

"Could you leave me now? I do have to think."

"So you want to be alone now? That's what you're saying? This is how you're going to address the problem of spending too much time alone?"

"Go, Amy, and please don't interfere with Nate."

"Not yet."

"What do you mean, 'not yet'?"

"There's a deposit on that bottle. I'm not leaving without it."

"Then, Nate, he's not a problem? You're sure?" Here the Colonel forced a smile that looked much more like something menacing than an actual smile. "Because I will tell him about you if I must."

"The greater good," Amy said, returning the forced smile with a real one.

"Good," said the Colonel, draining the last of his beer. "Come back. And bring me another of these."

"You got it," Amy said. Then she took the bottle from him and left the chamber. Thin line between genius and full-blown batshit, she thought. Very thin line.

For two weeks the Colonel didn't send for Nate. Cielle Nuñez had stopped by the third morning that Amy was at Nate's apartment. "Well, you don't need me anymore," Cielle had said. "I'd just as soon get back to my ship anyway, although it doesn't look like we're going anywhere soon." Nate was disappointed that she hadn't been jealous.

"He's afraid of the cupboards, the fridge, and the garbage disposal," Cielle told Amy, as if she were talking to the dog sitter. "And you'll need to take him to get his clothes cleaned. You know he's going to be terrified of the washing machines."

"I'm right here," Nate said. "And I'm not afraid of the appliances. I'm just cautious."

"Your mother will be thrilled for you two, Amy. Her ship should be back at base soon."

"No, she's not due in for another six weeks," Amy said.

"Not anymore. The Colonel's called all the ships back to base."

"All of them? Why?"

Cielle shrugged. "He's the Colonel. Ours is not to question why. Well, Nate, it's been a pleasure, really. I'll probably see you around. You're in good hands."

She hugged Nate quickly and started out the door.

"Cielle, wait. I want to ask you something. If you don't mind."

She turned. "Ask away."

"When did your husband's yacht sink?"

Cielle raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Amy. "It's okay," Amy said. "He knows."

"Nineteen twenty-seven, Nate. In retrospect it was a blessing of sorts. He died doing what he liked doing, and two years later he would have been wiped out when the stock market crashed. I'm not sure he would have survived that."

"Thanks. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Cal and I have a really good life."

"Cal? Cal from the ship? You didn't tell me that —»

"He's my husband? The Colonel thought you might be more comfortable with a single woman to orient you. Women down here have never taken their husband's surname, Nate."

"Females run the show in a whale society," Amy explained. "You know, as it should be."

Cielle Nuñez looked from Amy to Nate and smiled. "Oh, Nate, what have you gotten yourself into?" And then she snickered like a whaley boy and left.

"She wanted you," Amy said. "She hides it really well, but I could tell."

From then on they went out together every morning. Nate insisted that Amy take him far into the catacombs during the day. There they found Gooville's underground farms: tunnels where grains of wheat grew right on the walls — no stalks — others where you could pick tomatoes from two-inch stems that seemed to grow directly out of rock.

"How does any of this ripen without photosynthesis?" Nate asked, handling an apricot that was growing not on a tree but on a broad stem like a mushroom.

"Don't know," Amy shrugged. "Geothermal heat. The Colonel says the Goo extends deep under the continent, where it draws heat from the earth. I'll show you the kitchens where they prepare most of the food — it's all geothermal. The old-timers say that at first there was only seafood to eat, but over the years the Goo has provided more and different foods."

"What are these? Chicken nuggets?" He plucked one from the ceiling.

A whaley boy working nearby whistled and clicked harshly.

"He says not to pick them, they're not ripe."

Nate tossed the nugget to the floor of the cave, where a softball-size multilegged thing scurried out of a hatch, retrieved it, and scurried back into its trapdoor.

"I've seen enough here," Nate said.

In the afternoon they did errands and shopping, but still no one asked Nate for any form of payment, and he'd stopped offering. In the evening they usually had dinner in his apartment. After they had shared two meals out at Gooville cafés, Amy had insisted that they eat in.

"You're studying them," she said, meaning the whaley boys.

"No I'm not. I'm just looking at them."

"Who are you kidding? You have that look, that researcher look, that lost-in-your-theories look. You think I don't know that look? I worked with you, remember?"

Nate shrugged. "It's what I do. I study whales." He'd been trying to learn the whaley boys' whistle-and-click language. Emily 7 had come by his apartment a couple of afternoons when Amy was away, and while he thought she might have come for amorous reasons, he managed to channel her energies into lessons on whaleyspeak. They'd become friends of sorts. He hadn't mentioned the lessons to Amy, afraid that she might tease him about Emily the way the whale-ship crew had. "I observe. I collect data and try to find meaning in it."

Amy nodded, thinking about it, then said, "So if rescuing manatees and dolphins got you into the field, why didn't you do something more active to help the animals? Veterinary medicine or something."

"I always wonder. I've thought about the people at Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, putting themselves in harm's way, ramming whaling ships, running Zodiacs in front of harpoon guns to try to protect the animals. I've wondered if that was the way to go."

"And you thought you could do more as a scientist, studying them?"

"No, I thought that being a scientist was something that I could do. There's a path to becoming a biologist — an educational process. There isn't for being a pirate."

"No, you're wrong, there is a school for that. I saw it on a matchbook when I was in Maui. I'm sure it said you could learn to be a pirate if you passed a simple test."

"That's learn to draw a pirate."

"Whatever. So you compromised?"

"Did I? I think what we — what I do has value."

"So do I. I'm not saying that. I'm just wondering, you know, now that you're dead, do you feel your life was wasted?"

"I'm not dead, Amy. Jeez, that's an awful thing to say."

"You know, effectively dead, I mean. Your life being over. Jeepers, does that make me a necrophiliac? When we get out of here, maybe I'll have to go to a meeting or something. Do they have those?"

"Amy, I'm wondering if maybe I don't want to get out of here." He'd been thinking about it a lot. Life here really wasn't bad, and since he'd been looking for a way out on their daily excursions (only to be reminded that he'd have to go through the miles of pressure locks only to emerge six hundred feet below the sea), maybe he and Amy could make a future together. The whole Gooville ecosystem would certainly keep him interested.

"Hi, my name's Amy, and I hump the dead."

"Maybe, if I can talk the Colonel out of his plan, I can stay here with you. You know, adapt."

"I can't imagine that they'd get up at a meeting and say, 'Hi, my name's so-and-so, and I like to bone the dead. It's sort of crude. Although strangely appropriate."

"You're not listening to me, Amy."

"Yes I am. We're not staying here. I'll find a way out, but we can't stay. You have to convince the Colonel not to try to hurt the Goo, but then we're leaving. As soon as possible."

Nate was a little shocked at how adamant she was. She seemed to be staring at nothing, concentrating, thinking about something she didn't want to share, and she didn't seem happy about. But then she brightened. "Hey, you're going to get to meet my mother."

A week later it happened.

"Well, you always said that the jazz of what you do was knowing something that no one else in the world knows," Amy said. "You jazzed?" She took his arm and draped it around her neck as they walked.

They had just left the Gooville apartment of Amelia Earhart.

"She looks good, doesn't she?" Amy asked.

Amelia was a beautiful, gracious woman, and after sixty-seven years in Gooville, the aviatrix didn't look a day over fifty. She'd been just under forty when she disappeared in 1937. In her presence Nate had felt as if he were fifteen again, out on his first date, stuttering and stumbling and blushing — blushing, for Christ's sake — when Amy mentioned that she'd been spending nights at his place. Amelia made Nate sit next to her on the couch and took his hand as she spoke to him.

"Nathan, I hope what I'm about to say to you doesn't sound racist, because it's not, but I want to put your mind at ease. I have had a very long time to get used to the idea of my daughter's being a sexually active adult, and, frankly, if after all these years you are the one that she has chosen to fall in love with, which appears to be the case, I can only tell you how relieved I am that you are of the human species. So please relax."

Nate had shot a look to Amy.

She shrugged. "Every girl has her adventurous period."

"Thank you," Nate said to Amelia Earhart.

Now, out on the street, to Amy he said, "I shouldn't have asked how the flight was."

"She's still a little sensitive about that. Even after all these years. My dad was her navigator. He didn't survive the crash."

"But you said you were born in 1940. How could that be if your father died in 1937?"

"Robust sperms?"

"Three years? That's really robust."

She punched his arm. "I was rounding up. Give me a break, Nate, I'm old. You never grilled the Old Broad for accuracy like this."

"I wasn't sleeping with the Old Broad."

"But you wanted to, didn't you? Admit it? You were hot to get into her muumuu."

"Stop." Nate glanced at some whaley-boy males who were hanging out in front of the bakery (they always seemed to be there) doing a synchronized display wave with their willies, and he was about to defend himself with a comment about Amy's past, but then he decided that there was just no need to watch that little brain movie, let alone use it as some kind of weapon against what was essentially just Amy-style teasing — one of the things he found he adored about her as soon as he'd allowed himself to admit that he could adore someone again.

The whaley boys snickered at him as they passed.

"You guys are all just big, squeaky bath toys," Nate said under his breath, knowing they could hear him anyway. Nate had been insulting them every time he and Amy went by for a week or so, just to irritate them. Maybe Amy was rubbing off on him.

The whaley boys blew a collective sputtering raspberry.

"Sentient? You guys can't even spell sentient," Nate whispered.

And then the reward. He loved watching creatures with four digits try to flip him the middle finger.

"Yeah, I'm the immature one," Amy said.

Life is good, Nate thought. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was happy. Kinda.

In the morning a brace of whaley boys came to take him to the Colonel. Amy wasn't even there to kiss him good-bye.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Yeah, but You Can't Dance to It

The Colonel was standing in the middle of the mother-of-pearl amphitheater when the whaley boys led Nate in.

"You two go on now," the Colonel said to the whaley boys. "Nate can find his way back."

"You came out of your lair," Nate said.

The Colonel looked older, more drawn than when Nate had seen him before.

"I don't want to be in contact with the Goo for what I'm going to tell you."

"I thought it didn't get information that way," Nate said.

The Colonel ignored him. "I was hoping you would have had a brainstorm to solve my problem, Nate, but you haven't, have you?"

"I'm working on it. It's more complex —»

"You've been distracted. I'm disappointed, but I understand. She's a piece of work, isn't she? And I mean that in the best sense of the word. Never forget that I chose to send her to you."

Nate wondered how much the Colonel knew about them and how he knew it. Reports from the whaley boys? From the Goo itself, through osmosis or some extended nervous system? "Distraction has nothing to do with it. I've thought a lot about your problem, and I'm not sure I agree with you. What makes you think the Goo is going to destroy humanity?"

"It's a matter of time. That's all. I need you to carry a message for me, Nate. You'll be responsible for saving the human race. That should go some measure toward consoling you."

"Colonel, is there any chance you can be more direct, less cryptic, and tell me for once what the hell you're talking about?"

"I want you to go to the U.S. Navy. They need to know about the threat of the Goo. One well-placed nuclear torpedo should do it. It's deep enough that they shouldn't have any problem justifying it to other countries. There won't be any fallout. They're just going to need someone credible to convince them of the threat. You."

"What about the people down here? I thought you wanted to save them."

"I'm afraid they're going to be a necessary sacrifice, Nate. What are five thousand or so people, most of whom have lived longer than they would have on the surface, compared with the whole human race, six billion?"

"You crazy bastard! I'm not going to try to convince the navy to nuke five thousand people and all the whaley boys as well. And you're more deluded than I thought if you think they'd do it on my word."

"Oh, I don't expect that. I expect they'll send down their own research team to confirm what you tell them, but when they get here, I'll see to it that they get the message that the Goo is a threat. In any case you'll survive."

"I think you're wrong about the Goo finding us dangerous. And even if you were right, what if it just decides to wait us out? On the Goo's time scale, it can just take a nap until we're extinct. I'm not doing it."

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Nate. I guess I'll have to find another way."

Nate suddenly realized that he'd blown it — his chance to escape. Once he was outside Gooville, there would have been nothing to force him to do what the Colonel wanted. Or maybe there would be. Right then he wanted very badly to see Amy.

"Look, Colonel, maybe I can do something. Couldn't you just evacuate Gooville? Drop all the people on an island. Let the whaley boys find somewhere else to live. I mean, if I reveal the Goo to the world, it's all sort of going to be out of the bag anyway. I mean —»

"I'm sorry, Nate, I don't believe you. I'll take care of it. Evacuation wouldn't make any difference to the people here anyway. And the whaley boys shouldn't exist in the first place. They're an abomination."

"An abomination? That's not the scientist I knew talking."

"Oh, I admit that they are fabulous creatures, but they would have never evolved naturally. They are a product of this war, and their purpose has been served. As has mine, as has yours. I'm sorry we didn't see eye to eye on this. Go now."

Just like that, this crazy bastard was going to plan B, and Nate had no idea how to stop him. Maybe that was what he was really brought here for. Maybe the Colonel was like someone who makes a suicide attempt as a cry for help, rather than an earnest attempt to end his life. And Nate had missed it.

He started to back away from the Colonel, desperately trying to think of something he could say to change the situation, but nothing was coming to him. When he reached the passageway, the Colonel called out to him from the steps by the giant iris.

"Nate. I promised you, and you deserve to know."

Nate turned and came a few steps back into the room.

The Colonel smiled, a sad smile, resolved. "It's a prayer, Nate. The humpback song is a prayer to the source, to their god. The song is in praise of and in thanks to the Goo."

Nate considered it. A life's work contemplating a question, and this was the answer? No way. "Why only male singers, then?"

"Well, they're males. They're praying for sex, too, aren't they? The females choose the mates — they don't need to ask."

"There's no way to prove that," Nate said.

"And no one to prove it to, Nate, not down here, but it's the truth. Whale song was the first culture, the first art on this planet, and, like most of human art, it celebrates that which is greater than the artist. And the Goo likes it, Nate, it likes it."

"I don't believe it. There's no evolutionary pressure for it to be prayer."

"It's a meme, Nate, not a gene. The song is learned behavior, not passed by birth. It has its own agenda: to be replicated, imitated. And it was reinforced. Have you ever seen a starved humpback, Nate?"

Nate thought about it. He'd seen sick animals, and injured animals, but he'd never seen a starved humpback. Nor had he ever heard of one.

The Colonel must have seen something in Nate's reaction. "There's your reinforcement. The Goo looks after them, Nate. It likes the song. I wouldn't be surprised if all of whale evolution — size, for instance — was accelerated by the Goo. We should have never started killing them. We wouldn't be at this juncture if we hadn't killed them."

"But we've stopped," was all that Nate could think to say.

"Too late," the Colonel said with a sigh. "Our mistake was getting the Goo's attention. Now it has to end. The gene has had its three and a half billion years as the driving force of life. I suppose now the meme will have its turn. You and I will never know. Good-bye, Nate."

The iris opened, and the Colonel walked into the Goo.

Nate ran all the way home, not sure how he had navigated through the labyrinth of tunnels, but found his way without having to backtrack. Amy wasn't at his apartment.

His pulse was throbbing in his temples as he approached the buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing to try to call her, but he decided instead to go directly to her on foot. He checked at her place, and then at her mother's, then at every place they'd ever been together. Not only was Amy gone, but no one had seen her mother either. Nate slept fitfully, tortured by the notion of what the Colonel might have done to Amy because of his own stubbornness. In the morning he went searching for her again, asking everyone he encountered, including the whaley boys by the bakery, but no one had seen her. On the second day he went back through the corridors to the Colonel's mother-of-pearl amphitheater and pounded on the giant black iris until his fists were bruised. There was no response but a dull thud that echoed in the huge empty chamber.

"I'll do what you want, Ryder!" Nate screamed. "Don't hurt her, you crazy fuck! I'll do what you want. I'll bring the navy down on this place and sterilize it, if that's what you want — just give her back."

When at last he gave up, he turned and slid down the iris facing the amphitheater. There were six killer-whale-colored whaley boys standing in the passageway opposite him, watching. They weren't grinning or snickering for once — just watching him. The largest of them, a female, let loose a quick whistle, and they crossed the amphitheater, walking in a crescent-shaped hunting formation toward him.

Short of being a professional surfer or a bong test pilot for the Rastafarian air force, Kona thought he had found the perfect job. He sat in a comfortable chair watching sound spectrograms scroll across one computer monitor, while on another a program picked out the digital sequence in the subsonic signal and broke it into text. All Kona had to do was watch for something meaningful to come across the screen. Strange thing was, he really had started to learn about spectrographs and waveforms and all manner of whale behavior, and he was meeting the day feeling as if he was really doing something.

He ran his hand over his scalp and shuddered as he read the nonsense text that was scrolling across the window. Auntie Clair had bought him four forties of Old English 800 malt liquor, then waited until he'd drunk them, before persuading him to let her cut his dreads down so they matched on both sides (because his true natural state should be one of balance, she said. She was tricky, Auntie Clair). The problem was, in jail his dreads had been almost completely torn off on one side, so by the time she finished evening things out, he was pretty much bald. Out of deference to his religious beliefs (to allow him a reservoir for his abundant strength in Jah, mon), Clair had left him a single dread anchored low on the back of his head, which made it look as if a fat worm was exiting his skull after a hearty meal of brain cells in ganja sauce.

And speaking of the sacred herb, Kona was just on the verge of sparking up a bubbling smoky scuba snack of the dankest and skunkingish nugs when the text scrolling across the screen ceased being nonsense and started being important. He took a quick sip of bong water to steady his nerves, placed the sacred vessel on the floor at his feet, then hit the key that sent the streaming text to the printer.

He stood and waited, bouncing on the balls of his feet for the printer to expectorate three sheets of text, then snatched the pages and dashed out the door to Clay's cabin.

"I must be out of my mind," Clay said. His suitcase was on the bed, and he was taking clothes out of the drawers and putting them into the case, while Clair was taking clothes out of the case, grouping them by a precise system he would never understand, and replacing them in the suitcase so that he would never find anything until he returned home and she helped him unpack. They had done this a lot.

"I must be nuts," Clay said. "I can't just go wandering around the oceans randomly looking for a lost friend. I'll look like that little bird in the book, the one that walks around asking everyone, 'Are you my mother? »

"Sartre's Being and Nothingness?" Clair offered.

"Right. That's the one. It's ridiculous to even leave port until we have something to go on — steaming around, burning up fifty gallons of fuel an hour. The Old Broad may have money stashed, but she doesn't have that kind of money."

"Well, maybe something will turn up in the whale calls."

"I hope. Libby and Margaret have a lot of sonic data streaming in from Newport, but it's still like looking for a needle in a haystack. Clair, she saw guys climbing into a whale —»

"So, baby, what's the worst that happens? You go to sea and do your best to find Nate and you fail? How many people ever did their best at anything? You can always sell the ship later. Where is it now anyway?"

Just then the screen door fired back on its hinges and smacked against the outside wall with the report of a rifle shot. Kona came tumbling through the door waving pages of copy paper as if they were white flags and he was surrendering to everyone in the general Maui area.

"Bwana Clay!" Kona threw the pages down on Clay's suitcase. "It's the Snowy Biscuit!"

Clay picked up the pages, looked at them quickly, and handed one to Clair. Over and over the message was repeated:

41.93625S__76.17328W__-623__CLAY U R NOT NUTS__AMY

Clay looked at Kona. "This was imbedded in the whale song."

"Yah, mon. Blue whale, I think. Just came in."

"Go back and see if there's more. And find the big world map. It's in the storeroom somewhere."

"Aye, aye," said Kona, who had begun to speak much more nautically since Clay had purchased the ship, making his bid to go along on the voyage to search for Nate. He ran back to the office.

"You think it's from Amy?" Clair said.

"I think it's either from Amy or from someone who knows everything about what we're doing, which means it would have to be someone Amy talked to."

"What are the numbers?"

"A longitude and a latitude. I'll have to look at the map, but it's somewhere in the South Pacific."

"I know it's a longitude and a latitude, Clay, but what's the minus six hundred and some?"

"It's where pilots usually express altitude."

"But it's a minus."

"Yep." Clay snatched the phone off of his night table and dialed the Old Broad as Clair looked quizzically at him. "Equipment change," he whispered to Clair, covering the receiver with his hand.

"Hello, Elizabeth, yes, things are going really well. Yes, they've picked up considerably. Yes. Look, I hate to ask this — I know you've done so much — but I may need one other little thing before we go to look for Nate and your James."

Clair shook her head at Clay's blatant playing of the missing-husband-shoved-up-a-whale's-bum card.

"Yes, well, it may be a little expensive," Clay continued. "But I'm going to need a submarine. No, a small submarine will be fine. If you want it to be yellow, Elizabeth, we'll paint it yellow."

After fifteen minutes of cajoling and consoling the Old Broad, making calls to Libby Quinn and the ship broker in Singapore (who offered him a quantity discount if he bought more than three ships in one month), Clay stood over a world map that was roughly the size of a Ping-Pong table, which Kona had spread out over the office floor, pinning the corners down with coffee cups.

"It's right there, off the coast of Chile," Clair said. She taught fourth-graders, and therefore basic world geography, so she could read a map like nobody's business. Kona placed a bottle cap on the spot where Clair was pointing.

"We'll need nautical charts and the ship's GPS to be exact, but, basically, yep, that's where it is." He looked at Kona. "Nothing else since that message?"

"Same thing for five minutes, then just normal whale gibberish. You think the Snowy Biscuit is with Nate?"

"I think she knew me well enough to know that I'd be thinking I was crazy to be looking. I also think that even if I believe the Old Broad's story about her husband, that doesn't explain how Amy was able to stay down for an hour on fifteen minutes' worth of air, so there was something going on with her that could be connected to this weirdness. She obviously knows more than we know, but — most important — we have nowhere else to look."

Kona looked at Clair, as if maybe she would answer his question. She nodded, and he resumed drinking his beer.

Clay got down on his hands and knees on the map. "The ship broker says there's a deepwater three-man sub here, in Chuuk, Micronesia, that's about to finish up with some filming they're doing of deep shipwrecks."

Kona put a bottle cap on the atoll of Chuuk, Micronesia.

"The owners will let me lease it for up to two months, but then a research team has it reserved for a deepwater survey in the Indian Ocean. The Clair is here, just north of Samoa." Clay pointed.

Kona put a third bottle cap just north of Samoa and did his best to drink off that beer while balancing the other two that he'd opened to get the caps.

"So the Clair can probably be in Chuuk in three days. I'll fly in and meet them, pick up the sub, and then we can probably steam to these co-ordinates in four or five days if we cruise at top speed," Clay said. "Now we're here —»

"We can't be, we can't be there," said Kona.

"Why not?"

"Out of beers."

"So you get to that spot. Then what?" Clair asked. "Then I get in a submarine and see what there is to see six hundred and twenty-three feet down."

"So we're sure it's feet, not meters?"

"No. I'm not sure."

"Well, I just want you to know that I am not comfortable with you doing this sort of thing, Clay."

"But I've always done this sort of thing. I sort of do this sort of thing for a living."

"So what's your point?" Clair asked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Black and White and Red All Over

Once, off the coast of California, Nate had followed a pod of killer whales as they attacked a mother gray whale and her calf. They first approached in formation to separate the calf from the mother, and then, as one group broke from the pod to keep the mother busy, the others took turns leaping upon the calf's back to drown it — even as the mother thrashed her great tail and circled back, trying to protect her calf. The whole hunt had taken more than six hours, and when it ended, finally, the killer whales took turns hitting the exhausted calf, keeping in a perfect formation even as they ripped great chunks of flesh from its still-living body. Now, in the amphitheater, as the killer whaley boys approached — their teeth flashing, the breath from their blowholes puffing like steam engines — the biologist thought that he was probably experiencing exactly what that gray-whale calf had during that gruesome hunt. Except, of course, that Nate was wearing sneakers, and gray whales almost never did.

It was a big room. He had space to move. He just had to get around them. His sneakers squeaked on the floor as he came down the steps, faked right, then went left at a full sprint. The whaley boys, while amazingly agile in the water, were somewhat clumsy on land. Half of them fell for the fake so badly that they'd need a postcard to tell them how it all came out. They stooged into a whaley pile near the steps.

The remaining three pursuers tried to fan out into a new formation, the alpha female coming the closest to getting between Nate and the exit. Nate was running in a wide arc around the amphitheater now, and by virtue of sheer speed he could tell he'd beat at least two of the remaining killers, but the alpha female was going to intersect with him before he got clear. She probably weighed three times what he did, so there was no going though her with a vicious body check. Maybe if he'd been on skates, he'd have tried it: pit his pure, innate Canadian skating force against her paltry cetacean hunting instinct and drive that bitch to the mother of pearl. But there were no skates, no ice, so at the very last second, as the female was about to slam him in a bone-breaking crunch against one of the benches that lined the walls, Nate pulled a spin fake, a move that was much more Boitano than Gretzky but nevertheless sent the big female tumbling over a bench in a tangle of black-and-white and ivory — like a flaccid piano botching the vaulting horse. Nate high-stepped the last twenty yards to the door, thinking, Yeah, three million years of walking upright not for nothing. Rookie. Meat.

About the third step into his jubilation, Nate heard the sound of a great expulsion of air from his right, then a wet splat. Suddenly he saw his sneakers waving before his face. He felt the freedom of weightlessness, the exhilaration of flight, and then it was all gone as he slammed to the floor, knocking the wind out of himself. He slid to a stop in the huge loogie of whale spit that one of the trailing males had expectorated at his feet. Had he been able to breathe, he might have called a foul, but instead he struggled to get to his feet as the two males closed on him, showing dagger-toothed grins as they approached. Oh, my God, they're going to eat me! he thought, but then he saw that they both had unsheathed their long pink penises and were leading with a sort of a pelvic thrust. Oh, my God, they're going to fuck me! he thought. But when they got to him, one picked him up by the arms and bent him over forward, and he felt the great teeth scraping his scalp as his head slipped into the whaley boy's mouth. No, they're definitely going to eat me, Nate thought. And in that suspension of time, right before the final crunch, amid the slow motion of an infinite last moment, clarity came to him, even as he screamed, and he thought, This is probably not going to go as well as the last time I was eaten. There's probably not going to be a girl at the end of this one.

And then the female whistled shrilly, and the male stopped biting down just as his teeth were starting to cut into Nate's cheeks. The biting male pulled back and apologetically wiped saliva and blood from Nate's face, then propped him up and fluffed him a little, as if to show that he was good as new. Nate was still being held fast by the other male, but the biter was grinning sheepishly at the alpha female and making a squeaking noise that Nate, even with his limited understanding of whaleyspeak, understood as meaning "oops."

A half hour later they threw him into his apartment, and the alpha female grinned at him as she tore the stainless-steel doorknob out of the wall. The wall bled for a while after she left, then clotted over and rapidly began to heal.

Nate stumbled into his bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. There were bloody gashes down his forehead and cheeks. In another place and time, he realized, he would have gone to the emergency room to get stitched up. His hair was matted with blood, and he could feel at least four deep dents in his scalp where the whaley boy's teeth had broken the skin. There was a large knot at the back of his head where he'd hit the floor when he fell, and evidently he'd hit an elbow, too, because every time he bent his right arm, a sharp, biting pain shot all the way down to his fingertips.

He pulled off his bloodstained clothes and climbed into the shower. Then, ignoring the strange fixtures that usually gave him pause, he leaned against the shower walls and let the water run over him until the bloody crust was gone from his hair and his fingers had shriveled with the moisture. He dried himself, then collapsed into his bed, wishing for a last time before he fell asleep that Amy was there, safe, next to him.

He slept deeply and dreamed of a time when all the oceans were filled with a single living organism, wrapped like a cocoon around a single huge land mass. And in his dream he could feel the texture of every shore as if it were pressed against his skin.

Nate awoke in the early hours before light came up in the grotto. He went into his living room and sat in the dark by the big oval picture window that looked out over the street and, ultimately, the Gooville harbor. There were shapes out there moving in the dark. Every now and then he'd catch the reflection of some dim light on a whaley boy's skin, but mostly he could tell they were out there by the sonar clicks that echoed around the grotto and by the low, trilling whistles of whaley-boy conversation.

After an hour sitting there in the dark, he padded to the door and tried to open it. There was nothing but a smooth scar where the doorknob had been. The seal around the door was so tight it might have been part of the walls that framed it. In trying to work his fingers into the doorjamb, he realized that his elbow wasn't grating as it had been when he went to bed. He reached up to touch the gashes across his forehead and felt the scab flake away as easily and painlessly as dry skin. He immediately went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror under the bright yellow bioluminescence. The gashes were healed. Completely healed. He brushed away the dried blood that had seeped after his shower to find new, healthy skin. It was the same with the dents in his scalp and the great goose egg at the base of his skull. He didn't even have a sore spot.

He returned to the living room, fell into the chair by the window, and watched the light come up in the grotto. Outside, there was a lot of movement in the street and the harbor, and, watching it, Nate started to feel sick to his stomach, despite his miraculous healing. All the movement outside was that of whaley boys. There wasn't a single human out there anywhere.

For two days he didn't see any other humans in Gooville, and even when he had screwed up his courage to use the buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing on the wall, he realized that he had no idea how to make it connect. By noon on the third day, he decided that he had to get out of the apartment. Not only couldn't he find Amy or do anything else while in here, but he was rapidly running out of food.

He reasoned that the best time to make a break for it was in the middle of the day, when it seemed that the number of whaley boys out on the street was sparsest, because so many of them went down to the water at that time to swim. He dressed in long pants and sleeves for protection, then made the first attempt at the window. He tore one of the bone chairs from the floor in the kitchen, wiggling it first, as if loosening a baby tooth. He cast the chair at the center of the window with all his strength, preparing as he did to make the ten-foot leap to the street when it went though. But it didn't. It bounced back into the room.

Next he looked for something sharp to try to puncture the window, but the only thing he could come up with were shards of the mirror in the bathroom, and although the mirror spider-webbed when he struck it, his fist wrapped in a towel, the shards stayed adhered to the bathroom wall, so all he'd really done was create a shiny mosaic. Finally, frustrated after three hours of ineffective attacks on the big window, he decided to hit it with the heaviest thing in the apartment: his body. He backed into the bedroom, sped through the living room, leaped into the air about halfway across, curled into a ball, and braced for impact. The window bulged out about three feet, until it appeared to the whaley boys outside that someone inside was trying to blow a giant bubble, and then it sprang back, trampolining Nate across the room into the far wall. At the bottom of the wall someone had installed a couch for just such an emergency, and Nate slid neatly into it with his newly flattened side down.

"Well, that was just stupid," he said aloud.

"Boy, that was stupid," Cielle Nuñez said. She came into the living room and sat in a chair across from where Nate was piled onto the couch. "You want to tell me what in the hell you started?"

"How did you get in? The knob is gone."

"Not on the outside. Come on, Nate, what did you do? Every human in Gooville has been locked down for the last three days. If I weren't the captain of a whale ship, I wouldn't have been able to come here either."

"I didn't do anything, Cielle, honestly. Where's Amy?"

"No one knows. Believe me, that was the first place they went."

"Who?"

"Who do you think? The whaley boys. They've taken over everything. Humans aren't even allowed near the ships. Ever since some of them heard you yelling about bringing the navy down here."

"I was. He has Amy, Cielle. I was just trying to get her back."

"Him? The Colonel? Why would he take Amy? She's one of the few who've ever even seen him. She's a favorite."

"Yeah, well no one is his favorite now." Right then Nate made a decision. He wasn't going to get out of this place on his own, and the only person he could even consider an ally was sitting right there in front of him. "Cielle, the reason the Colonel called your ships back, the reason no one is allowed to leave the harbor, is that he wants you all here when the place comes down. He's got some plan to get the U.S. Navy, or somebody's navy, to attack Gooville with a nuclear torpedo. He thinks that the Goo is going to destroy the human race if he doesn't destroy it first. He wanted me to go to the navy. He thought I could convince them of the threat because of my scientific credibility, but I said no. That's when he took Amy."

"So all that yelling I heard you doing in the amphitheater — that wasn't you talking about bringing the navy here, that was just you trying to get Amy back?"

"Yes. He's a loon, Cielle. I don't have any interest in bringing this place down. He thinks that there's some grand war going on between memes and genes, and that humans and the Goo are on opposite sides of it."

The whale-ship captain stood and nodded as if confirming something to herself. "Okay, then. That's what I needed to know. That's why he sent me here. I'll try to get them to send you some food."

"What? Help me get out of here." Nate suddenly had a very bad feeling about this whole exchange.

"I'm sorry, Nate. They have Cal. The whaley boys have him. You know how that feels. They told me I had to find out if you were plotting against the Colonel. Thank you for telling me. I think they'll let him go now."

She walked to the door, and Nate followed her. "Get me out of here, Cielle, at least —»

"Nate, there's nowhere to go. The only way out of here is a whale ship, and whaley-boy pilots are the only ones who can run them. They've been on notice not to let you on since we got here. Right now I couldn't leave if I wanted to." She pounded on the door. "Open!"

The door clicked open, and two all-black whaley boys stood outside waiting. They caught Nate by the shoulders and threw him back into the apartment as he tried to rush by them.

"My own crew, Nate," Cielle said. "See what you've done."

"He's going to kill you all, Cielle. Don't you see that? He's crazy."

"I don't believe you, Nate. I think you're the crazy one."

The door slammed shut.

Back at Papa Lani, Clay was doing a final check on the equipment he was taking with him to meet his new ship. Diving and camera equipment lay spread out across the office floor. Kona was going through the checklist on the clipboard with a felt-tip pen.

"So you tink the Snowy Biscuit going to be there?"

"I'm going. I just wish that we could answer her. Tell her I'm on my way."

"You mean, like, put the digital in the whale sound and send it?"

"Yeah, I know, we can't do it. Did you find a canister of soda lime for the rebreather's CO2 scrubbers?"

"I can do that." Kona held up the canister Clay was looking for and checked it off the list.

"You can?"

"I been looking at it long time. She not that hard to put that message back in the call. But how you going to send it? You need some gi-grandious big speakers under the water, mon. We don't have nothing like dat."

Clay stopped his inventory and pulled Kona's clipboard down so he could see his eyes. "You can put a message into the waveform so it would come out the same way we've been taking it out?"

Kona nodded.

"Show me," Clay said. He went to the computer. Kona took the chair and pulled up a low-frequency waveform that looked like a jagged comb, and then he hit a button that took a small section and expanded it, which smoothed out the jags.

"See, this part here. We know this a letter B, right? We just cut it and paste with other letters, make a goofy whale call. I got the all the letters but a Q and a Z figured."

"Don't explain, just do it. Here." Clay scribbled a short message in the margin of Kona's checklist. "Then play it for me."

"I can play, but you won't hear it. It's subsonic, brah. Like I say, you going need some thumpin' speakers to send it. You know where we can steal some?"

"We might not have to steal them."

While Kona pieced together the message, Clay grabbed the phone off his desk and dialed Cliff Hyland. The biologist answered on the second ring. "Cliff, Clay Demodocus. I need a favor from you. That big sonar rig of yours, will it broadcast subsonic frequencies?… Good, I need you to take us out on your boat tonight, with your rig."

Kona looked at Clay. Clay grinned and raised his eyebrows.

"No, it has to be tonight. I'm flying out for Chuuk in the morning. If I need to send out a signal, what can I plug in to it? Tape, disk recorder, what? Anything with a pre-amp?" Clay covered the receiver with his hand. "Can you put it on an audio disk?"

"No problems," Kona said.

"No problem," Clay said into the phone. "We'll meet you at the harbor at ten, okay?"

Clay waited. He was listening, pacing in a little circle behind the surfer. "Yeah, well, we were just talking about that, Cliff, and we figured that if you said no, we'd just have to steal your boat and your rig. I could probably figure out how the rig works, right?"

There was another pause and Clay held the phone away from his ear. Kona could hear an irritated voice coming out of the earpiece.

"Because we're friends, Cliff, that's why I'd tell you in advance that I was going to steal your boat. Jeez, you think I'd just steal it like some stranger? All right, then, we'll see you at ten o'clock." He hung up the phone.

"Okay, kid, get this right. We have to have it ready and to the harbor by ten."

"But what you gonna do the bad guys get it?"

"Even if they do, only Amy will know what it means," Clay said.

"Cool runnings, brah." Kona was concentrating on putting the message together, his tongue curled out the corner of his mouth as an antenna for focus.

Clay leaned over his shoulder and watched the waveform come together on the screen. "How did you figure this out, kid? I mean, it doesn't seem like you."

"How's a man supposed to work his science dub wid you yammerin' like a rummed-up monkey?"

"Sorry," Clay said, making a mental note to give the kid a raise if any of this actually worked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN A Whaley Death

Nate was five more days alone in the apartment before they came for him. It started at dawn on the sixth day, when he noticed a group of whaley boys gathering around below his window. There had been humans out on the streets since the day he'd told Cielle about the Colonel's plan, but Gooville hadn't quite returned to normal (given that normal in Gooville was still extraordinarily weird to begin with). He could tell that the humans and whaley boys alike were on edge. Today there were no humans in the streets, and all the whaley boys were emitting a shrill call that he was sure he'd heard before, but strangely enough it hadn't been in the city under the sea. Hearing the hunting call in these circumstances made him shudder.

He watch them gather, rubbing up against one another as if to strengthen the bond among them, milling around in small walking pods as if working off nervous energy, each of them raising his head occasionally and letting go the hunting call — flashing teeth, jaws snapping like bear traps. He knew they were coming.

Nate was dressed and waiting for them when they came through the door. Four of them took him, lifted him in the air by his legs and shoulders, and carried him over their heads down the stairs to the street, then on into the passageways. The whole crowd moved into the passageways, their calls becoming more frequent and deafeningly shrill in the smaller confines.

Even as his captors' long fingers dug into his flesh, a calm resolve came over Nate — an almost trancelike state, the acceptance that it was all going to be over soon. He looked to either side, only to have mouthfuls of teeth snarl at him, and even among the frenzy, here and there he heard the characteristic hissing snicker of a whaley-boy laugh. Well, they do know how to have a good time, he thought.

He soon recognized the path they were taking him down. He could hear the calls of hundreds of them echoing through the caverns from the mother-of-pearl amphitheater. Maybe the entire whaley-boy population was waiting there.

As they entered the amphitheater and the calls reached a crescendo, Nate stretched his neck and saw two big killer-whale-colored females holding the Colonel in the middle of the floor. The whaley boys holding Nate lowered him to his feet, and then two of them pulled him back against the benches to watch with the others.

One of the big females holding the Colonel shrieked a long, high call, and the crowd calmed down, not quite silent, but the hunting calls stopped. The Colonel's eyes were wide, and Nate wouldn't have been surprised if the old man had started to bark and foam at the mouth. When things quieted down enough for him to be heard, he started shouting. The big female who was holding him clamped a hand over his mouth. Nate could see the Colonel fighting for breath, and he struggled against his own captors in empathy. Then the female started to speak — in their whistling, clicking language — and the crowd stopped even snickering. Their eyes bulged, and they turned their heads to the side to better hear her.

Nate couldn't understand much of what she was saying, but you didn't have to know the language to understand what she was doing. She was listing the Colonel's crimes and pronouncing a sentence. It was no small irony, Nate thought, that the whaley boys who saw to justice were colored like the killer whales, the most intelligent, most organized, most glorious and horrible of all the marine mammals. The only animal other than man that had exhibited both cruelty and mercy, for one was not possible without potential for the other. Maybe memes were triumphing over genes after all.

When she finished speaking, she handed the Colonel's arm to the other female, so that he was bent over forward, his hands held together high behind him. Then the female let out another extended shrill call, and the whole ceiling of the amphitheater dimmed until it was completely dark. When she finished her call, the light came back up again. The Colonel was screaming at the top of his lungs, random curses and mad pronouncements — calling the whaley boys abominations, monsters, freaks, railing like some mad prophet, his brain fried by God's fingerprint. But when the light was full again, he caught Nate's eye, just for a second, and he was quiet. There was something there, the depth and wisdom that Nate had once known the man to possess, or maybe it was just sadness, but before Nate could decide, the big female bent over and bit off the Colonel's head.

Nate felt himself start to pass out. His vision tunneled down to a pinpoint and he fought to stay conscious, to concentrate on his breathing, which he realized had stopped momentarily. His vision came back, as did his breath, harsh and panicked through his gritted teeth as he watched.

The killer spit the head across the amphitheater to a group of whaley kids, who picked it up and tore at it with their teeth. Then the female started tearing great chunks of meat out of the Colonel's body with her teeth, even as it twitched in the hands of her cohort — throwing the chunks to the crowd, who shrilled the hunting calls even more frantically than before.

Nate couldn't tell how long it went on, but when it was finally done, and the Colonel was gone, there was a large red circle in the middle of the amphitheater floor, and all around him he saw bloody teeth flashing in whaley grins. Even the two whaley boys who held Nate's arms had partaken in the communion, grabbing chunks of meat and eating them with their free hands. One had hissed and sprayed blood in Nate's face. Then they dragged Nate to the middle of the amphitheater.

He felt faint, the pulse banging away in his ears, drowning out all other sound. Everywhere he looked, he saw bloody teeth and bulging eyes, but he felt strangely detached. As the big female began another oration, he remembered a thought he'd had right after the humpback whale had eaten him. It came through to him like a malicious déjà vu: What an incredibly stupid way to die.

Then there was another long, whistling call and Nate closed his eyes, waiting for the death blow, but it didn't come. The crowd had gone quiet again. He squinted through one eyelid, almost regretful that the moment had been delayed, and he saw teeth before him, but not the bloody teeth of the killers.

The shrill whistle went on and on, made by the mottled blue whaley-boy female that had come out of the passageway and was striding across the amphitheater toward Nate. At her side was a very determined, petite brunette with unnatural maroon highlights, wearing hiking shorts and a tank top. The whaley boys holding Nate seemed confused. The female who had killed the Colonel was looking for some sort of guidance from the one holding Nate when Amy pulled the stun gun from her pocket and blasted her in the chest, knocking her back five feet to convulse on the bloody floor.

"Let him go," Amy commanded the one who was holding Nate, and for some reason, maybe just because it sounded so definitive, she let go of Nate's arms, and he fell, at which time Amy pulled up a second stun gun and pressed it to the big killer's chest, knocking her to the floor to twitch with her companion. Through it all, Emily 7 had continued to whistle.

"You okay?" Amy asked Nate. He looked around at the situation, not sure at all if he was okay, but he nodded.

"Okay, Em," Amy said, and Emily stopped whistling.

Before the crowd could react or a murmur of whaleyspeak start, Amy shouted, "Hey, shut up!"

And they did.

"Nate didn't do anything," she continued. "The whole thing was the Colonel's idea, and none of us knew anything about it. He brought Nate here to help him destroy our city, and Nate said no. That's all you need to know. You all know me. This is my home, too. You know me. I wouldn't lie to you."

Just then the first big female started to recover, and Amy leaped in front of Nate to stand over the killer. "You get up, bitch, I'll knock you on your ass again. Your choice." The female froze. "Oh, fuck it," Amy said, and she zapped the big female on the nose with both stun guns at once, then wheeled on the other one, who was getting up but quickly dropped and played dead under Amy's gaze. "Good," Amy said.

"So we clear?" Amy shouted to the crowd.

There was whaleyspeak murmuring, and Amy screamed, "Are we fucking clear, people?"

"Yeah, clear," came a dozen little mashed-elf voices in English.

"Sure, sure, sure, you know it," said one little voice.

"Clear as a window," came another.

"Just kidding," said an elf-on-helium voice.

"Good," Amy said. "Let's go, Nate."

Nate was still trying to find his feet. His knees had gone a little rubbery when he thought his head was going to be bitten off. Emily 7 caught him by the arm and steadied him. Amy started to lead them out of the amphitheater, then stopped. "Just a second."

She went back to where the lead killer female was just climbing to her feet and zapped her in the chest with the stun gun, which knocked her flat on her back again.

As Amy strutted past Nate and Emily 7, she said, "Okay, now we can go."

"Where are we going?" Nate asked.

"Em says you slept with her."

Nate looked at Emily 7, who grinned, big and toothy, and snickered.

"Yeah, slept. Just slept. That's all. Tell her, Emily."

Emily whistled, actually a tune this time, and rolled her eyes.

"Really," Nate said.

"I know," Amy said.

"Oh." Nate heard squeaks coming from behind them in the corridor. "Wasn't that a little risky, taking on a thousand whaley boys with a couple of stun guns?"

"I love these things," Amy said, clicking the buttons to make miniature blue lightning arc across the contacts. "No, I didn't take on a thousand whaley boys, I took on one — an alpha female. Know what that makes me?" She smiled and then, without even breaking stride, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. "And never forget it."

"I won't." Then that last week's anxiety about losing her came tumbling back over him. "Hey, where did you go? I thought the Colonel had taken you."

"I went out on my mother's ship to send a message."

"What message?"

"I was calling our ride. All the whaley boys had been put on notice: No pilot was going to take his ship out of here with you on board, still won't. But I could go, so I went out with my mother to pick up some supplies. And I called a ride."

"What, Emily 7 can't pilot a ship?"

"Uh-uh," squeaked Emily 7.

"Only pilots can pilot a ship, duh. Anyway" — Amy checked her watch — "your ride should be in the harbor soon. I have to go by my place and grab something I want to take."

An hour later they stood at the water's edge in the harbor, and Amy was checking her watch again. "I am so pissed," she said, tapping her foot frantically.

It seemed as if every thirty seconds they had been cornered by some human resident of Gooville, and Amy had to tell the story again. Emily 7 was the only one of the whaley boys, other than the crew of Amy's mother's ship, that was still in the grotto.

"You think they'll revolt, hurt humans?" Nate asked.

"No, they'll be fine. That was a first. It's not every day you find out that your messiah is plotting to kill you. Give 'em a day or two to get over the embarrassment — everything will be back to normal."

"I guess it's just as well that we're getting out of here. You don't want to face those two females you zapped."

"Bring it on," Amy said, patting the pockets of her shorts. "Besides, I'm sort of special here, Nate. I don't want to sound egotistical, but they really all do know me, know who I am, what I am. No one will bother me."

Just then Nate spotted a light coming from deep in the mirror-calm water.

"That's him," Amy said.

"Him?"

"Clay, coming to take you home."

"Me? You mean us."

"Em, can I get a minute?" Amy said.

" 'Kay," said Emily 7, skulking away from the shore toward town.

When Emily was out of hearing range, Amy put her arms around Nate and leaned back to look at him. "I can't go with you, Nate. I'm staying."

"What do you mean? Why?"

"I can't go. There's something about me you don't know. Something I should have told you before, but I thought you wouldn't… well, you know — I thought you wouldn't love me."

"Please, Amy, please don't tell me you're a lesbian. Because I've been through that once, and I don't think I could survive it again. Please."

"No, nothing like that. It's about my parents… well, my father really."

"The navigator?"

"Uh, no, not really. Actually, Nate, this is my father. She pulled a small specimen jar out of her pocket and held it up. There was a pink, jellylike substance in it.

"That looks like —»

"It is, Nate. It's the Goo. My mother was never intimate with her navigator, or with anyone in the first three years she was here, but one morning she woke up pregnant."

"And you're sure it was the Goo, not just that she had way too many mai-tais at the Gooville cabana club?"

"She knows it, and I know it, Nate. I'm sort of not normal."

"You feel normal." He pulled her closer.

"I'm not. For one thing, I don't just look a lot younger than I really am, but I'm also a lot stronger than I look, especially as a swimmer. Remember that day I found the humpback ship by sound? I really can hear directional sound underwater. And my muscle tissue is different. It stores oxygen the way a whale's tissue does, I can stay underwater without breathing for over an hour, longer if I don't exert myself. I'm the only one like me, Nate. I'm not really, you know… human."

Nate listened, trying to weigh what it really meant in the bigger picture, but he couldn't think of anything except that he wanted her to go with him, wanted her to be with him, no matter what she said she was. "I don't care, Amy. It doesn't matter. Look, I got over all this" — he gestured to all that — "and the fact that you're sixty-four years old and your mother is a famous dead aviatrix. As long as you don't start liking girls, I'll be fine."

"That's not the point, Nate. I can't leave here, not for long anyway. None of us can. Even the ones who weren't born here. The Goo becomes part of you. It takes care of you, but you become attached to it, almost literally. Like an addiction. It gets in your tissues by contact. That's how my mother had me. I've been gone a lot already this year. If I left now, or if I left for longer that a few months at a time, I'd get sick. I'd probably die."

At that moment a yellow research submersible bubbled up to the surface of the lagoon, a dozen headlights blazing into the grotto around a great Plexiglas bubble in the front.

"That's it, then. I'll stay. I don't mind, Amy. I'll stay here. We can live here. I could spend a lifetime learning about this place, the Goo."

"You can't do that either. It will become part of you, too. If you stay too long, you won't be able to leave either. You had to have noticed that first night we got drunk together, how fast you recovered from the hangover."

Nate thought about how quickly his wounds had healed, too — weeks, maybe months of healing overnight. There was no other explanation. He thought about spending his life with only fleeting glimpses of sunlight, and he said, "I don't care. I'll stay."

"No you won't. I won't let you. You have things to do." She shoved the specimen jar in his pocket, then kissed him hard. He kissed her back, for a long time.

The hatch at the top of the dry exit tower on the sub opened, and Clay popped up to see Nate and Amy for the first time since they'd both disappeared.

"Well, that's unprofessional," Clay said.

Amy broke the kiss and whispered, "You go. Take that with you." She patted his pocket. Then she turned to Clay as she checked her watch again. "You're late!"

"Hey, missy, I set a time when I'd be at the coordinates you sent — six hundred and twenty-three feet below sea level — and I was there. You didn't mention that I had another mile of submarine cave with some of the scariest-looking rock formations I've ever seen." He glanced at Nate. "They looked alive."

"They are alive," Amy said.

"Are we close to the surface? The pressure is —»

"I'll explain on the way," Nate said. "We'd better go." Nate stepped onto the sub as Clay slipped down inside the hatch to allow him to pass. Nate crawled into the hatch and looked back to Amy before he closed it.

"I'll stay, Amy. I don't care. For you I'll stay. I love you. You know that, right?"

She nodded and brushed tears out of her eyes. "Yeah," she said, Then she spun around quickly and started walking away. "You take care of yourself, Nathan Quinn," she shouted over her shoulder, and Nate heard her voice break when she said his name.

He climbed down into the sub and secured the hatch above him.

Clay had watched Amy walk away from the big, half-submerged Plexiglas bubble in the front of the sub.

"Where's Amy going?"

"She can't come home, Clay."

"She's okay, though?"

"She's okay."

"You okay?"

"I've been better."

They were quiet for the long ride through the pressure locks to the outside ocean, just the sound of the electric motors and the low hum of instruments all around them. The lights of the sub barely reached out to the walls of the cave, but every hundred yards or so they would come to a large, pink disk of living tissue, like a giant sea anemone, which would fold back to let them pass, then expand to fill the passageway once they had gone through. Nate watched the pressure gauge rise one atmosphere every time they passed through one of the gates, and it was then that he realized he wasn't escaping at all. The Goo knew exactly where and what they were, and it was letting him go.

"You're going to explain what all this is, right?" Clay said, not even looking away from the controls.

Nate was startled out of his reverie. "Clay, I can't believe — I mean, I believe it, but — Thanks for coming to get me."

"I never told you, you know — it's not really appropriate or anything — but I have pretty strong feelings about loyalty."

"Well, I respect that, Clay, and I appreciate it."

"Yeah, well, don't mention it."

Then they were both a bit embarrassed and both pretended that something was irritating their throats and they had to cough and pay attention to their breathing for a while, even though the air in the little submarine was filtered and humidified and perfectly clean.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Pirates

Nate was standing with Clay on the flying bridge of the Clair as she steamed into the Au'au Channel.

"You'd better put on some sunscreen, Nate."

Nate looked down at his forearms. He'd lost most of his color while in Gooville, and he could feel the sun cooking him, even through his T-shirt.

"Yeah." He looked off toward Lahaina, the harbor he'd piloted into a thousand times. They'd have to anchor far outside the breakwater with a ship this size, but it still had the feeling of coming home. The wind was warm and sweet, the water the heartbreak blue of a newborn's eyes. A humpback fluked about eight hundred yards to the north of them, its tail glistening in the sun as if it were covered with sequins.

"There's still a month left of the season," Clay said. "We can still get some work done."

"Clay, I've been thinking. Maybe we can be a little more purposeful in what we're doing. Maybe a little more active, conservation-wise."

"I could go for that. I like whales."

"I mean, we have the resources now, and even if I could prove the meaning of the song — somehow decipher the vocabulary of it — I could never prove the purpose. You know, without compromising Gooville."

"Not a good idea." During the trip home Nate had explained it all.

"I mean, there's no reason we can't do good science and still, you know —»

"Kick some ass."

"Well, yeah."

Clay affected an exaggerated Greek accent. "Sometimes, boss, you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble."

"Zorba?"

"Yeah." Clay grinned.

"Great book," Nate said. "Is that the Always Confused?"

Clay pulled up a pair of binoculars and focused on a speedboat that was rounding the Lahaina breakwater, showing more wake than she should in the harbor. Kona was driving the Always Confused.

"My boat," Clay said, somewhat distressed.

"You need to get over that, Clay."

The speedboat came around to a parallel course with the Clair as the ship cut her engines in preparation to drop anchor. Kona was waving and screaming like a madman. "Irie, Bwana Nate! Irie! The lion come home! Praise Jah's mercy. Irie!"

Nate came down the steps from the flying bridge to the deck. Whatever resentment he might have had for the surfer at one time was gone. Whatever threat he might have felt from the boy had melted away. Whatever irrelevancy Kona's youth and strength might have underscored in his own character was irrelevant. Maybe it was time to be an example instead of a competitor. Besides, he was genuinely glad to see the kid. "Hey, kid, how you doing?"

"Jammin' now, don't you know."

"That's good. How'd you like to go be a pirate?"

Because the Navy didn't maintain permanent offices on Maui, Captain L. J. Tarwater had been given a small office that the navy sublet for him in the Coast Guard building, which meant that, unlike on a naval base, here the public could pretty much come and go as they wished. So Tarwater wasn't that surprised to see someone come strolling through his office door. What he was surprised by was that it was Nathan Quinn, whom he thought quite drowned, and who was carrying a four-gallon glass jar full of some clear liquid.

"Quinn, I thought you were lost at sea."

"I was. I'm found now. We need to have a chat." He set the jar on Tarwater's desk, leaving a wet ring on some papers there, then went back and shut the door to the outer offices.

"Look, Quinn, if this is some kind of stunt, like spray-painting fur, you're wasting your time. You guys act like the military is the great Satan. I'm here to study these animals. I grew up in the same generation you did, and so did most of the people in the navy who do what I do. We don't want to hurt these animals."

"Okay," Nate said. "We only have two things to talk about here. Then I'll show you something."

"What's in the jar? That better not be kerosene or anything."

"It's seawater. I got it at the beach about ten minutes ago. Don't worry about it. Look, first you're going to finish your study and you're going to strongly recommend that the navy's torpedo range not be moved into the sanctuary. You will not let that happen. The animals do dive to depths where they can be hurt by the explosions, and they will be hurt by the explosions, which you'll be setting off not to defend the country but just so you guys can practice."

"There's no evidence that they ever dive deeper than two hundred feet."

"There will be. I've got data tags coming in from the mainland, I'll have data in a month."

"Still…"

"Shut up," Nate said, then thought better of it and added, "Please." Then he continued. "Second, you need to do everything in your power to back off of testing low-frequency active sonar. We know that it kills deepwater hunters like beaked whales, and there's probably some chance that it also injures the humpbacks, and under no circumstances do you want to do that."

"And why would that be?"

"You know what my work has been for the last twenty-five years, right?"

"You've been studying the humpback song. What, trying to figure its purpose?"

"I found it, Tarwater. It's a prayer. The singers are praying."

"That's preposterous. There's no way you could know that."

"I'm positive of it. Absolutely positive. I know it's a prayer, and that the torpedo base and LFA will harm a God-fearing animal." Nate paused to let it sink in, but Tarwater just looked at him like he was an annoying rodent that had crawled in from the cane fields.

"How could you possibly know that, Quinn?"

"Because their prayers are answered." Nate took a portable tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and set it on the desk next to the seawater, into which he'd already mixed part of the Goo that Amy had given him. He pushed the «play» button, and the sound of humpback-whale song filled the office.

"This is ridiculous," Tarwater said.

"Watch," Nate said, pointing to the water, which began to swirl, a tiny pink vortex forming in the middle.

"Get out of here. I'm not impressed with your Mr. Wizard tricks, Quinn."

"Watch," Nate said again. As they watched, the pink vortex expanded while the whale song played, until half the jar was filled with a moving pink stain. Then Nate turned off the tape.

"So what?" Tarwater said.

"Look more closely." Nate opened the jar, reached in, strained out some of the pink, and threw it on Tarwater's desk. Tiny shrimp — each only an inch long — flipped about on the blotter. "Krill," Nate said.

Tarwater didn't say anything. He just looked at the krill, then scraped a couple into his hand and examined them more closely. "They are krill."

"Uh-huh."

"What, it's like Sea Monkees, right? You had brine-shrimp eggs in there."

"No, Captain Tarwater, I did not. The humpbacks are praying, and God is answering them, giving them food. We could run this little experiment a hundred times, and that water would be clear when we started and full of krill when we ended. Trust me, I've done it." And he had. The little bit of Goo in the water created the krill out of the other life in there, the ubiquitous SAR-11 bacteria that existed in every liter of seawater on the planet.

Tarwater held up the krill. "But I thought they didn't eat when they were here."

"You're thinking on too small a scale. They don't feed for four months, and then they do nothing but feed. They're thinking in advance — the way you might think about breakfast before you go to bed at night. Doesn't matter, really. What you need to do, Captain, is everything in your power and influence to stop the range and the LFA testing."

Tarwater looked stunned now. "I'm just a captain."

"But you're an ambitious captain. I can have a jar of seawater on the secretary of the navy's desk in ten hours. Do you really want to be the one to explain to this administration that you're hurting an animal that prays to God? Particularly this administration?"

"No, sir, I do not," said Tarwater, looking decidedly more frightened than he had been just a second before.

"I thought you were an intelligent man. I trust you'll handle this, and this will be the last anyone will hear of my jar."

"Yes, sir," Tarwater said, more out of habit than respect.

Nate took his tape recorder and his jar and walked out, grinning to himself, thinking about the praying humpbacks. Of course, it's not your particular God, he thought, but they do pray, and their god does feed them.

He headed back to Papa Lani to make the calls and write the paper that would torpedo any hope of Jon Thomas Fuller's ever building a captive dolphin petting zoo on Maui.

A pirate's work is never done.

Three months later the Clair cruised into the cold coastal waters off Chile on her way to Antarctica to intercept, stop, harass, and generally make business difficult for the Japanese whaling ship Kyo Maru. Clay was at the helm, and when the ship reached a precise point on the GPS receiver, he ordered the engines cut. It was a sunny day, unusually calm for this part of the Pacific. The water was so dark blue it almost appeared black.

Clair was below in their cabin. She'd been seasick for most of the voyage, but she had insisted on coming along despite the nausea, using her saber-edged persuasive skills on the captain. ("Who's got the pirate booty? All right, then, help me pack.")

Nate stood on the deck at the bow, his arm around Elizabeth Robinson. Above them swung an eighteen-foot rigid-hull Zodiac on a crane, ready to drop into the water whenever it was needed. There was another one on the stern, where once the submarine had been stowed. Up on the flying bridge, Kona scanned the sea around them with a pair of «big-eye» binoculars on a heavy iron mount that was welded to the railing.

"There's one, a thousand yards."

Clay came out onto the walkway beside Kona. They all looked to starboard, where the residual cloud of a whale blow was hanging over the calm water.

"Another one!" Clay shouted, pointing to a second blow closer to the ship off the port bow.

Then they started firing into the air as if triggered by a chained fuse: whale blows of different shapes, heights, and angles — great explosions of spray erupting so close to the ship now that the decks started to glisten with the moisture. Then the backs of the great whales rolled in the water around them, gray and black and blue, hills of slick flesh on all sides, moving slowly, then lying in the water. Nate and Elizabeth moved up to the bow railing and watched a group of sperm whales lolling in the water like logs just a few feet off the bow. Next to them a wide right whale floated, bobbing gently in the swell, only a slow wave of the tail revealing that the creature was alive. It rolled to one side, and its eye bulged as it looked at them.

"You okay?" Nate asked Elizabeth, squeezing her shoulder. This was the first time she'd been out on the water in over forty years. In her hands she clutched a brown paper lunch bag.

"They're still amazing up close. I'd forgotten."

"Just wait."

There were probably a hundred animals of different species around the ship now, most rolled on their side, one eye bulged out to focus in the air. Their blows settled into a syncopated rhythm, like cylinders of some great engine firing in succession.

Kona jumped up and down next to Clay, praising Jah and laughing as each animal breathed or flicked a tail. "Irie, my whaley friends!" he shouted, waving to the animals close to the boat. Clay desperately resisted the urge to grab up cameras and start blasting film or digital video. It felt like he had to pee, really badly, from his eyes.

"Nate," Clay called, and he pointed to a bubble net forming just outside the ring of floating whales. They'd seen them dozens of times in Alaska and Canada, one humpback circling and releasing a stream of bubbles to corral a school of fish while others plunged up through the middle to catch them. The circle of bubbles became more pronounced on the surface, as if the water were boiling, and then a single humpback breached through the ring, cleared the water completely, and landed on its side in white crater of splash and spray.

"Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth said. Flustered, she pressed her face into Nate's jacket, then looked back quickly, lest she miss something.

"They're showing off," Clay said.

The lolling whales lazily paddled out of the way, opening a corridor to the ship. The humpback motorboated toward the bow, its knobby face riding on top of the water. When it was only ten yards from the bow, the animal rose up in the water and opened its mouth. Amy stood up, and next to her stood James Poynter Robinson.

"Hey, can we get a ladder down here?" Amy shouted.

"Praise Jah's mercy," Kona said, "the Snowy Biscuit has come home."

Nate threw a cargo net over the side, then climbed halfway down and pulled Amy up onto the net. He held her there as the ship moved in the swell, and she tried to kiss him and nearly chipped a tooth.

"Help me with Elizabeth," Nate said.

Together they got the Old Broad down the cargo net and handed her to her husband, who stood on the tongue of a whale and hugged his bride after not seeing her for four decades.

"You look so young," Elizabeth said.

"We can fix that," he said.

"You'll get old?"

"Nope." He looked back to Nate and saluted. Nate could hear whaley-boy pilots snickering inside the whale.

"I brought you a pastrami on rye," she said.

Poynter took the paper bag from her as if he were accepting the Holy Grail.

Nate and Amy scrambled up the cargo net and stood at the bow as the whale drifted away from the bow.

"Thank you, Nate," the Old Broad said, waving. "Thank you, Clay."

Nate smiled. "We'll see you soon, Elizabeth."

"We will, you know," Amy said as the whale ship closed and sank back into the waves.

"I know."

"I have to come back here every few months, you know."

"I know."

"Forever."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm the new colonel now. I'm sort of in charge down there, you know, since I'm sort of the daughter of their god. So we'll have to spend time down there."

"Do I have to call you 'Colonel'?"

"What, you have a problem with that?"

"No, I'm okay with that."

"You realize that the Goo really could decide to wipe out the human species at any minute."

"Yep. Same as it's always been."

"And you know if I live out here, I'm not always going to, you know, look like this?"

"I know."

"But I will always be luscious, and you — you will always be a hopeless nerd."

"Action nerd," Nate corrected.

"Ha!" Amy said.