Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 12~13

 
CHAPTER TWELVE
Here's My Coupon, He Said,
Singing the Redemption Song
Normally, if the whale cops found an unauthorized person on a research vessel, they would simply record the violation, write a ticket, then remove the person from the boat and take him back to Lahaina Harbor. A fine was paid and violations were considered the following year when the permit came up for renewal. By contrast, Kona was delivered to the Maui county jail with both his wrists and ankles shackled and a swath of duct tape over his mouth.
Nate and Amy were waiting in the lobby of the Maui county jail in Wailuku, sitting in metal chairs designed to promote discomfort and waffled butt skin. "It's really okay if he has to stay in overnight," said Nate. "Or for a week or so if it would be easier."
Amy punched Nate in the shoulder. "You creep! I thought it was Kona that got them to let you come to us."
"Still, jail builds character. I've heard that. It might do him good to be off his herb for a few days." Kona had slipped his fanny pack full of pot and paraphernalia to Nate before he'd been taken away.
"Character? If he starts with his native-sovereignty speech stuff in there the real Hawaiians will pound him."
"He'll be okay. I'm worried about you. Don't you want to go get checked?" Clair had taken Clay to the hospital to get a CAT scan and have his scalp stitched up.
"I'm fine, Nate. I was only shaken up because I was worried about Clay."
"You were down a long time."
"Yes, and I went by Clay's dive computer. We decompressed completely. The worst part was I froze my ass off."
"I can't believe you had the presence of mind to decompress with Clay unconscious. I don't know if I would have. Hell, I couldn't have. I'd have run out of air in ten minutes. How did you manage  - »
"I'm small, Nate. I don't use air like you. And I could tell that Clay was breathing okay. I could tell that the cut on his head wasn't that bad either. The biggest danger to both of us was decompression sickness, so I followed the computer, breathed off of Clay's rescue supply when I ran out, and nobody got hurt."
"I'm really impressed," said Nate.
"I just did what I was supposed to do. No big deal."
"I was really scared  -  I thought you  -  You had me worried." He patted her knee in a grandmotherly fashion, and she looked at his hand.
"Careful, I'll get all sniffly over here," Amy said.
They led the surfer into the holding tank, where everyone was wearing the same orange jumpsuit that he was. "Irie, bruddahs," Kona said, "we all shoutin' down Sheriff John Brown in these Great Pumpkin suits, Jah." They all looked up: a giant Samoan who had beaten an Oldsmobile to death with a softball bat when it stalled in the middle of the Kuihelani Freeway, an alcoholic white guy who had fallen asleep on the Four Seasons' private beach in Wailea and made the mistake of dropping his morning business in one of the cabanas, a bass player from Lahaina who had been brought in because at any given time a bass player is probably up to no good, an angry bruddah who had been caught doing a smash-and-grab from a rental car at La Perouse Bay, and two up-country pig hunters who had tried to back their four-wheeler full of pit bulls down a volcano after huffing two cans of spray paint. Kona could tell they were huffers by the glazed look in their eyes and the large red rings that covered their mouths and noses from the bag. "Hey, brah, Krylon?"
One of the pig hunters nodded and briefly lost control of the motion of his head.
"Nothin' like a quality red."
"I hear dat," said the pig hunter. "I hear dat."
Then Kona made his way to the corner of the cell, the guard locked the door, and everyone resumed looking at his shoes, except for the Samoan guy, who was waiting for Kona to make eye contact so he could kill him.
"Ye know, brah," Kona said to him in a friendly, if seriously flawed fake Jamaican accent, "I be learning from my science dreadies to look at tings with the critical eye, don't ya know. And I think I know what the problem with taking a stand against da man on Maui."
"Whad dat?" ask the Samoan.
"Well, it's an island, ain't it, mon? You got to be stone stupid going outlaw here wid nowhere to escape."
"You callin' me stupid, haole?"
"No, mon, just speaking the truth."
"An' what you in for, haole girl?"
"Failing to give a humpback whale the proper scientific handjob, I tink."
"Goin' ta fuck ya and kill ya now."
"Could ya kill me first?"
"Whadeva," said the Samoan, climbing to his feet and expanding to his full Godzilla proportions.
"Thanks, brah. Peace in Jah's mercy," said the doomed surfer.
Forty-five minutes later, after Nate had filled out the requisite papers, the jailer, a compact Hawaiian with weightlifter shoulders, led Kona through the double steel doors into the waiting room. The surfer shuffled in, head down, looking ashamed and a little lopsided. Amy put her arm around his shoulders and patted his head.
"Oh, Sistah Amy, 'twas heinous." He put his arm around Amy, then let his hand slip to the curve of her bottom. "Heinous most true."
The jailer grinned. "Had a disagreement with a big Samoan guy. We stopped it before it got too far. The holding cells are monitored on closed-circuit video."
"Snatched half me dreads out." Kona pulled a handful of orphaned dreadlocks from the pocket of his surf shorts. "Going to cost some deep monies to hook these boys back up. I can feel my strength waning without them."
The jailer waived a finger under Kona's nose. "Just so you know, kid, if it had gone the other way  -  if the Samoan had decided to kill you second  -  I wouldn't have stepped in so early. You understand?"
"Yah, Sheriff."
"You stay out of my jail, or next time I tell him which end to start on, okay?" The jailer turned to Quinn. "They aren't filing any charges that merit incarceration. They just wanted to make a point." Then he leaned close to Nate and whispered, their height difference making it appear as if he were talking to the scientist's shirt pocket, "You need to get this kid some help. He thinks he's Hawaiian. I see these suburban Rasta boys all the time  -  hell, Paia's crawling with them  -  but this one, he's troubled. One of my boys goes that way, I'd pay for a shrink."
"He's not my kid."
"I know how you feel. His girlfriend is cute, though. Makes you wonder how they pick 'em, doesn't it?"
"Thanks, Officer," Nate said. Having shared all the paternal camaraderie he could handle, he turned and walked out into the blinding Maui sun. To Kona, Amy said, "You better now, baby?"
Kona nodded into her shoulder, where he'd been pretending to seek comfort in a nuzzle.
"Good. Then move your hand."
The surfer played his fingers over her bottom like anemones in a tidal wash, anchored yet flowing.
"That's it," Amy said. She snatched a handful of his remaining dreads and quickstepped through the double glass doors, dragging the bent-over surfer behind her.
"Ouch, ouch, ouch," Kona chanted in perfect four/four reggae rhythm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spirits in the Night
Nate spent the whole afternoon and most of the evening trying to analyze spectrograms of whale-song recordings, correlate behavior patterns, and then chart the corresponding patterns of interaction. The problem was figuring out what actually defined interaction for an eighty-thousand-pound animal? Were animals interacting when they were five hundred yards away? A thousand? A mile, ten miles? The song was certainly audible for miles; the low, subsonic frequencies could travel literally thousands of miles in deep ocean basins.
Nate tried to put himself in their world  -  no boundaries, no obstacles. They lived, for the most part, in a world of sound, yet they had acute eyesight, both in and out of the water, and special muscles in the eye that allowed them to change focus for either medium. You interacted with animals you could both see and not see. When Nate and Clay used satellite tags, of which they could afford only a few, or rented a helicopter, from which they could observe animals from a wide perspective, it appeared that the whales were indeed responding to each other from miles apart. How do you study an animal that is socializing over a distance of miles? The key had to be in the song, in the signal somewhere. If for no other reason than that was the only way to approach the problem.
Midnight found him sitting alone in the office, lit only by the glow of his computer monitor, having forgotten to eat, drink, or relieve himself for four hours, when Kona came in.
"What's that?" asked the surfer, pointing to the spectrograph that was scrolling across the screen.
Nate nearly jumped out of the chair, then caught himself and pulled the headphones down. "The part that's scrolling is the spectrograph of the humpback song. The different colors are frequency, or pitch. The wiggly line in this box is an oscilloscope. It shows frequency, too, but I can use it to isolate each range by clicking on it."
Kona was eating a banana. He handed another one to Nate without taking his eyes off the screen. "So this is what it looks like? The song?" Kona had forgotten to affect any of his accents, so Nate forgot to be sarcastic in reply.
"It's a way of looking at it. Humans are visual animals. Our brains are better suited to process visual information rather than acoustic information, so it's easier for us to think about sound by looking at it. A whale or a dolphin's brain is structured to process acoustics more than visuals."
"What are you looking for?"
"I'm not sure. I'm looking for a signal. For some pattern of information in the structure of the song."
"Like a message?"
"Maybe a message."
"And it's not in the musical parts?" Kona asked. "The difference in notes? Like a song? You know the prophet Bob Marley gave us the wisdom of HIM in song."
Quinn swiveled in his chair and paused in midbite of his banana. "HIM? What's that?"
"His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ on earth, son of God. His blessings upon us. Jah, mon."
"You mean Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king who died in the 1970s? That Haile Selassie?"
"Yah mon. HIM, the direct descendant of David as foretold in Isaiah, through the divine consort Solomon and Makeda, the queen of Sheba, and from their sons all the emperors of Ethiopia have come. So we Rastas believe that Haile Selassie is Jesus Christ alive on earth."
"But he's dead, how's that work?"
"It helps to be stoned."
"I see," Nate said. Well, that did explain a lot. "Anyway, to answer your question, yes, we've looked at the musical transmission, but despite Bob Marley I think the answer is here, in this low register, but only because it travels the farthest."
"Can you freeze this?" said Kona, pointing to the oscilloscope, a green line dancing on a field of black.
Nate clicked it and froze a jagged line on the screen. "Why?"
"Those teeth? See, there are tall ones and not so tall ones."
"They're called microoscillations. You can only see them if you have the wave stopped like this."
"What if the tall one is a one and the short one is a zero? What's that?"
"Binary?"
"Yah, mon, what if it's computer talk, like that?"
Nate was stunned. Not because he thought Kona was right, but because the kid had actually had the cognitive powers to come up with the question. Nate wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd walked in on a team of squirrels building a toaster oven. Maybe the kid had run out of pot, and this spike in intelligence was just a withdrawal symptom.
"That's not a bad guess, Kona, but the only way the whales would know about this would be if they had oscilloscopes."
"And they don't?"
"No, they don't."
"Oh, and that acoustic brain? That couldn't see this?"
"No," said Nate, not entirely sure that he hadn't just lied. He'd never thought of it before.
"Okay. I go for to sleep now. You need more grinds?"
"No. Thanks for the banana."
"Jah's blessing, mon. Thanks for getting me out for jail this day. We going go out next morning?"
"Maybe not everyone. We'll have to see how Clay feels tomorrow. He went right to his cabin when Clair brought him home from the hospital."
"Oh, Boss Clay got cool runnings, brah. He having sweet agonies with Sistah Clair. I hear them love jams as I'm coming over."
"Well, good," Nate said, thinking from Kona's tone and his smile that whatever he said must have been good. "Good night, Kona."
"Good night, boss."
Before the surfer was out the door, Nate had turned to the monitor and started mapping out peaks in the wave pattern of the low end of the whale song. He'd need to look up some articles on blue-whale calls  -  the lowest, loudest, longest-traveling calls on the planet  -  and he'd have to see if anyone had done any numerical analysis on dolphin sonar clicks, and that was all he could think of right at the moment. In the meantime he had to have enough of a sample to see if there was any meaning there. It was ridiculous, of course. It would never be so simple, nor could it be so complex. Of course you could assign values of one or zero to parts of the song  -  that was easy. It didn't mean there would be any meaning to it. It wouldn't necessarily answer any of their questions, but it was a different way of looking at things. Whale-call binary, no.
Two hours later he was still assigning ones and zeroes to different microoscillations in wave patterns of different songs and felt as if he might actually, strangely, amazingly, be learning something, when Clay came through the door wearing a knee-length pink kimono emblazoned with huge white chrysanthemums. There was a small bandage on his forehead and what appeared to be a lipstick smear that ran from his mouth to his right ear.
"Any beer in there?" Clay nodded to the kitchen. The office cabin, like all the others at Papa Lani, had once been living quarters for a whole family, so it had a full kitchen in addition to the great room they used for a main office, two smaller rooms they used for storage, and a bathroom. Clay padded past and threw open the refrigerator. "Nope. Water, I guess. I'm really dehydrated."
"You okay," Nate said. "How was the CAT scan?"
"I'm cat free." Clay came back to the office and fell into the chair in front of his broken monitor. "Thirteen stitches in my scalp, maybe a mild concussion. I'll be okay. Clair may kill me yet tonight, though  -  heart attack, stroke, affection. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring out the passion in a woman. You can't believe the stuff that woman is doing to me. And she's a schoolteacher. It's shameful." Clay grinned, and Nate noticed a little lipstick on his teeth.
"So that's shame?" Nate gestured for Clay to wipe his mouth.
The photographer took a swipe across his mug, came up with a handful of color, and examined it. "No, I think that's strawberry lip gloss. A woman her age wearing flavored lip gloss. The shame is in my heart."
"You really had her worried, Clay. Me, too. If Amy hadn't kept her head... well  - »
"I fucked up. I know it. I started living in the viewfinder and forgot where I was. It was an amateurish mistake. But you can't believe the footage I was getting using the rebreather. It's going to be amazing for singers. I'm finally going to be able to get underneath them, beside them, whatever you need. I just need to remember where I am."
"You're unbelievably lucky." Nate knew that any lecture he might come up with, Clay had already put himself through a dozen times. Still, he had to say it. Regardless of the outcome, he had endured the loss of his friend, even if was for only forty minutes or so. "Unconscious, that deep, for that long  -  you used up a lot of lives on that one, Clay. The fact that your mouthpiece stayed in is a miracle."
"Well, that part wasn't an accident. I have the hoses tight because the rebreather is so temperamental about getting water in it. Over the years I've had mouthpieces knocked out of my mouth a hundred times, kicked out by another diver, camera caught on it, hit by a dolphin. Since you have to keep your head back to film most of the time anyway, with the hoses short so the thing stays in your mouth, it's just a matter of keeping the seal. Man's only instinct is to suck."
"And you suck, is that what you're saying?"
"Look, Nate, I know you're mad, but I'm okay. Something was going on with that animal. It distracted me. It won't happen again. I owe it to the kid, though."
"We thought we'd lost her, too."
"She's good, Nate. Really good. She kept her head, she did what needed to be done, and damned if I know how she did it, but she brought my ancient ass up alive and without the bends. Situation was reversed, I would have never done the decompression stops, but it turns out she did the right thing. You can't teach that kind of judgment."
"You're just trying to change the subject."
Clay was indeed trying to change the subject. "How'd Toronto do against Edmonton tonight?"
Oh, sure, thought Nate, try to appeal to his inherent Canadian weakness for hockey. Like playing the hockey card would distract him from  -  "I don't know. Let's check the score."
From outside the screen door came Clair's voice. "Clay Demodocus, are you wearing my robe?"
"Why, yes, dear, I am," said Clay, shooting an embarrassed glance at Quinn, as if he'd only just noticed that he was wearing a woman's kimono.
"Well, that would mean that I'm wearing nothing, wouldn't it?" said Clair. She wasn't close enough to the door for him to actually see her through the screen, but Quinn had no doubt she was naked, had her hip cocked, and was tapping a foot in the sand.
"I guess," said Clay. "We were just going to check the hockey scores, sweetheart. Would you like to come in?"
"There's a skinny kid with a half order of dreadlocks and an erection out here staring at me, Clay, and it's making me feel a little self-conscious."
"I woke up with it, Bwana Clay," Kona said. "No disrespect."
"He's an employee, darling." Clay said reassuringly. Then to Quinn he whispered, "I had better go."
"You better had," said Quinn.
"See you in the morning."
"You should take the day off."
"Nah, I'll see you in the morning. What are you working on anyway?"
"Putting the subsonic part of the song in binary."
"Ah, interesting."
"Feeling vulnerable out here," Clair said. "Vulnerable and angry."
"I had better go," said Clay.
"Night, Clay."
An hour later, just when Nate was getting to the point where he felt he had enough samples marked out in binary to start looking for some sort of pattern, the third spirit in the night came through the door: Amy, in a man's T-shirt that hung to midthigh, yawning and rubbing her eyes.
"The hell you doing up at this hour? It's three in the morning."
"Working?"
Amy padded barefoot across the floor and looked at the monitor where Quinn was working, trying to blink the bleariness out of her eyes. "That the low end of the song?"
"Yeah, that and some blue-whale calls I had, for comparison."
Quinn could smell some kind of berry shampoo smell coming off of Amy, and he became hyperaware of the warmth of her pressing against his shoulder. "I don't understand. You're digitizing it manually? That seems a little primitive. The signal is already digitized by virtue of being on the disk, isn't it?"
"I'm looking at it a different way. It will probably wash out, but I'm looking at the waveform of just the low end. There's no behavior for context, so it's probably a waste of time anyway."
"But still you're up at three in the morning anyway, making ones and zeroes on a screen. Mind if I ask why?"
Quinn waited a second before answering, trying to figure out what to do. He wanted to turn to look at her, but she was so close that he'd be right in her face if he did. This wasn't the time. Instead he dropped his hands into his lap and sighed heavily as if this were all too tedious. He looked at the monitor as he spoke. "Okay, Amy, here's why. Here it is. The whole payoff, the whole jazz of what we do, okay?"
"Okay." She sensed the unease in his voice and stepped back.
Nate turned and looked her in the eye. "It might be out on the boat, as you're coming in for the day  -  or it might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be. That's the jazz, Amy. That's why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."
Amy stood with her hands clenched in front of her, arms straight down, like a little girl trying to ignore a lecture. She looked at the floor. "So you're saying that you're about to have one of these moments and I'm bugging you?"
"No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just telling you why I'm doing it. And that's why you're doing it, too. You just don't know it yet."
"And what if someone told you that you'd never have one of those moments of knowing something again  -  would you keep doing it?"
"That won't happen."
"So you're close to something here? With this binary thing?"
"Maybe."
"Didn't Ryder analyze the song as far as how much information it could carry and come up with something really anemic like point six bits per second? That's not really enough to make it meaningful, is it?" Growl Ryder had been Quinn's doctoral adviser at UC Santa Cruz. One of the first generation of greats in the field, along with Ken Norris and Roger Payne, a true kahuna. His first name was actually Gerard, but anyone who had known him called him Growl, because of his perpetually surly nature. Ten years ago, off the Aleutians, he'd gone out alone in a Zodiac to record blue-whale calls and had never come back. Quinn smiled at his memory. "True, but Ryder died before he finished that work, and he was looking at the musical notes and themes for information. I'm actually looking at waveform. Just from what I've done tonight, it looks like you can get up to fifty, sixty bits per second. That's a lot of information."
"That can't be right. That won't work," Amy said. She seemed to be taking this information a bit more emotionally than Nate would have expected. "If you could move that much information subsonically, the navy would be using it for submarines. Besides, how could the whales use waveform? They'd need oscilloscopes." She was up on her toes now, almost shouting.
"Calm down, I'm just looking into it. Dolphins and bats don't need oscilloscopes to image sonically. Maybe there's something there. Just because I'm using a computer to look at this data doesn't mean I think whales are digital. It's only a model, for Christ's sake." He was going to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but then remembered her attitude toward that at the jail.
"You're not looking at data, Nate, you're making it up. You're wasting your time, and I'm not sure you're not wasting my time. This whole job might have been a big mistake."
"Amy, I don't understand why  - »
But she wouldn't give him a chance to defend himself. "Go to bed, Nate. You're delirious. We have real work to do tomorrow, and you'll be worthless if you don't get some sleep." She turned and stormed out into the night. Even as she moved across the courtyard to her cabin, Nate could hear her ranting to herself. The words "doofus," "deluded," and "pathetic loser" rang out above the tirade to settle on Nate's ego.
Strangely enough, a feeling of relief washed over him as he realized that the delusions of romantic grandeur that he'd been indulging  -  nay, fighting  -  about his research assistant had been just that: delusions. She thought he was a complete joke. At peace with himself for the first time since Amy had come on board, he saved his work, powered down the machine, and went off to bed.