Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 23~25

 
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Clair Stirs a Brainstorm
For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.
Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of thirteen knocking the edge off his mental acuity by the concerted application of the most epic smokage that Jah could provide (thanks be unto Him), he was now being called upon to think and remember with a sharpness that was clearly painful.
"Think," said Clair, rapping the surfer in the forehead with the spoon she had only seconds earlier used to stir honey into a cup of calming herbal tea.
"Ouch," said Kona.
"Hey, that's uncalled for," said Clay, coming to Kona's aid. Loyalty being important to him.
"Shut up. You're next."
"Okay."
They were gathered around Clay's giant monitor, which, for all the good it was doing them, could have been a giant monitor lizard. A spectrogram of whale song from Quinn's computer was splashed across the screen, and for the information they were getting from it, it might have been the aftermath of a paint-ball war, which is what it looked like.
"What were they doing, Kona?" Clair asked, spoon  -  steaming with herbal calmness  -  poised to strike. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishment was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education. "Nate and Amy both went through this with you. Now you have to remember what they said."
"It's not these things, it's the oscilloscope," Kona said. "Nate pulled out just the submarine stuff and put it on the spectrum."
"It's all submarine," Clay said. "You mean subsonic."
"Yeah. He said there was something in there. I said like computer language. Ones and ohs."
"That doesn't help."
"He was marking them out by hand," Kona said. "By freezing the green line, then measuring the peaks and troughs. He said that the signal could carry a lot more information that way, but the whales would have to have oscilloscopes and computers to do it."
Clay and Clair both turned to the surfer in amazement.
"And they don't," Kona said. "Duh."
It was as if a storm of coherence had come over him. They just stared.
Kona shrugged. "Just don't hit me with the spoon again."
Clay pushed his chair back to let the surfer at the keyboard. "Show me." Late into the night the three of them worked, making little marks on printouts of the oscilloscope and recording them on yellow legal pads. Ones and ohs. Clair went to bed at 2:00 A.M. At 3:00 A.M. they had fifty handwritten legal-pad pages of ones and ohs. In another time this might have felt to Clay like a job well done. He'd helped analyze data on shipboard before. It killed some time and ingratiated him to whatever scientist was leading the project he was there to photograph, but he'd always been able to hand off the work for someone else to finish. It was slowly dawning on him: Being a scientist sucked.
"This sucks," said Kona.
"No it doesn't. Look at all we have," said Clay, gesturing to all they had.
"What is it?"
"It's a lot, that's what it is. Look at all of it."
"What's it mean?"
"No idea."
"What does this have to do with Nate and the Snowy Biscuit?"
"Just look at all of this," said Clay, looking at all of it.
Kona got up from his chair and rolled his shoulders. "Mon, Bwana Clay, Jah has given you a big heart. I'm goin' to bed."
"What are you saying?" Clay said.
"We got all the heart we need, brah. We need head."
" 'Scuse me?"
And so, in the morning, with the promise of a colossal piece of information for barter (the torpedo range) but without a true indication of what he really needed to know in return (everything else), Clay talked Libby Quinn into coming to Papa Lani.
"So let me get this straight," said Libby Quinn as she paced from Clay's computer to the kitchen and back. Kona and Clay were standing to the side, following her movement like dogs watching meatball tennis. "You've got an old woman who claims that a whale called her and instructed her to have Nate take him a pastrami sandwich?"
"On rye, with Swiss and hot mustard," Kona added, not wanting her to miss any pertinent scientific details.
"And you have a recording of voices, underwater, presumably military, asking if someone brought them a sandwich."
"Correct," said Kona, "No bread, or meat, or cheese, specified."
Libby glared at him. "And you have the navy setting off simulated explosions in preparation to put a torpedo range in the middle of the Humpback Whale Sanctuary." She paused meaningfully and pivoted thoughtfully  -  like Hercule Poirot in flip-flops. "You have a tape of Amy doing a breath-hold dive for what appears to be an hour, with no ill effects."
"Topless," Kona added. Science.
"You have Amy claiming that Nate was eaten by a whale, which we all know is simply not possible, given the diameter of the humpback's throat, even if one were inclined to bite him, which we know they wouldn't." (She was just a deerstalker, a calabash, and a cocaine habit short of being Sherlock Holmes here.) "Then you have Amy taking a kayak out for no apparent reason and disappearing, presumed drowned. And you say that Nate was working on finding binary in the lower registers of the whale song, and you think that means something? Have I got that right?"
"Yeah," said Clay. "But you have the break-in to our offices to get the sound tapes, and you have my boat being sunk, too. Okay, it sounded more connected when we were talking about it last night."
Libby Quinn stopped pacing and turned to look at both of them. She wore cargo shorts, tech sandals, and a running bra and appeared ready at any moment to just take off and do something outdoorsy and strenuous. They both looked down, subdued, as if they were still under the threat of Clair's deadly spoon of calm. Clay had always had a secret attraction to Libby, even while she'd been married to Quinn, and it was only within the last year or so he'd been able to make eye contact with her at all. Kona, on the other hand, had studied dozens of videotapes on the lesbian lifestyle, especially as it pertained to having a third party show up in the middle of an intimate moment (usually with a pizza), so he had long ago assigned a «hot» rating to Libby, despite the fact that she was twice his age.
"Help us," Kona said, trying to sound pathetic, staring at the floor.
"This is what you guys have, and you think because I know a little biology I can make something of all this?"
"And that," said Clay, pointing at the now arranged and collated pages of ones and ohs on his desk.
Libby walked over and flipped through the pages. "Clay, this is nothing. I can't do anything with this. Even if Nate was on to something, what do you think? That even if we recognize a pattern, it's going to mean something to us? Look, Clay, I loved Nate, too, you know I did, but  - »
"Just tell us where to start," Kona said.
"And tell me if you see anything in this." Clay went to his computer and hit a key. A still of the edge view of the whale tail from his rebreather dive was on the screen. "Nate said that he had seen some markings on a whale tail, Libby. Some writing. Well, I thought there was something on this whale, too, before it knocked me out. But this is the best shot of the tail we have. It could mean something."
"Like what?" Her voice was kind.
"I don't know what, Libby. If I knew what, I wouldn't have called you. But there's too much weird stuff going on that almost fits together, and we don't know what to do."
Libby studied the tail still. "There is something there. You don't have a better shot?"
"No, this is something I do know about. This is the best I have."
"You know, Margaret and I were helping a guy from Texas A&.M who was designing a software program that would shift perspective of tail shots, so edge and bad-angle views could be shifted and extrapolated into usable ID photos. You know how many get tossed because of bad angles?"
"You have this program?"
"Yes, it's still in beta tests, but it works. I think we can shift this shot, and if there's something meaningful there, we'll see it."
"Cool runnings," Kona said.
"As far as this binary thing, I think it's a shot in the dark, but if it's going to mean anything, you're going to have to get your ones and ohs in the computer. Kona, can you type?"
"Well, on ones and ohs? I shred most masterful, mon."
"Right. I'll set you up with a simple text file  -  just ones and ohs  -  and we'll figure out if we can do anything with it later. No mistakes, okay?"
Kona nodded.
Clay finally looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Libby."
"I'm not saying it's anything, Clay, but I wasn't exactly fair to Nate when he was around. Maybe I owe him one now that he's gone. Besides, it's windy. Fieldwork would have sucked today. I'm going to call Margaret, have her bring the program over. I'll help you if you promise that you'll put all your weight into stopping this torpedo range and you'll sign Maui Whale on to the petition against low-frequency active sonar. You guys have a problem with that?"
She was giving them the "spoon of death" look, and it occurred to both of them that this might be something that was innate to all women, not just Clair, and that they should be very, very afraid.
"Nope," said Kona.
"Sounds good to me. I'll put on a pot of coffee," said Clay.
"Margaret is absolutely going to shit when she hears about the torpedo range," said Libby Quinn as she reached for Clay's phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Orientation to the Blues
A small explosion went off over his head, and Nate dove under the table. When he looked up, Emily 7 was bent over staring at him with her watery whale eyes and a mild expression of distress, and Nuñez was crouched at the other end of the table smiling.
"That was the blow, Nate," Nuñez said. "A little more intense than the humpback's, huh? These ships act like real whales, remember. The blowhole is right above our heads. Vented to the rest of the ship, but, you know, every twenty minutes or so it's going to go. You get used to it."
"Sure, I knew that," said Nate, crawling out from under the table. He'd been out off of Santa Cruz searching for the blues. You usually found them by the sound of their blows, which you could hear up to a mile and a half away. He looked up, expecting to see sky through the blowhole, but instead he saw just more smooth whaleskin.
"They behave like whales, but the physiology is completely different to allow for the living quarters. I don't really understand it, but for instance the blowhole is vented down the sides somewhere to some axillary lungs that do the oxygen exchange with the blood. I don't know how they got us electricity at all. I mean, I said I wanted a coffeepot, and they put in an outlet. There are circuits all over the bridge for our machinery. The other bodily functions seem to be handled by smaller versions of liver, kidneys, and so forth around the outside of the cabins. The main spine runs over the top of the ship. There's no digestive system. The ship's digestive system is at the base; it hooks up and pumps nutrient-rich blood into the ship, which stores enough energy in blubber to run it for six months at sea, or around the world at least once. We can cruise at twenty knots as long as no one is watching."
"What do you mean, 'no one is watching'?"
"I mean you guys. Biologists. If one of you guys is watching us, we have to slow it down after a couple of hours. Especially if we're tagged."
"This ship has been satellite-tagged? What do you do?"
"We go to silent running for a while. Then we dive, and one of the whaley boys goes outside and pulls the tag off. We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can. If they'd asked me, he'd be the one riding with us now."
"You know who he is?" Nate was aghast. As a scientist, you were always fighting being overwhelmed by what you don't know, but the magnitude of this whole operation  -  it was too much.
"Of course. Since commercial whaling backed off, cetacean biologists have been the main focus of our intelligence program. Why do you think you're here?"
"Okay, why am I here?"
"I don't know the whole story, but it's something to do with the song. Evidently you were a little too close to finding our signal in the song, so they yanked you."
"The aliens were that interested in what I was doing?"
"What aliens?"
"These aliens," Nate said, nodding toward the pilots and Bernard and Emily 7, who had moved to another table on the other side of the corridor.
"The whaley boys aren't aliens. Who told you that?"
"Well, Poynter and Poe implied that they were."
"Those jerks. No, they're not aliens. They're a little weird, but not from-another-planet weird."
Bernard looked up from what appeared to be a chart of some sort and gave a half-assed signature raspberry.
"They do that a lot," Nate said.
"If you had a tongue four inches wide, you'd do that a lot, too. It's sort of a display move with them, like the penis waving that Bernard was doing."
"Like male killer whales do."
"Bingo. See, a guy with your background, this is easy to explain. I didn't understand squat at first."
"I'm sorry, but I can't believe that this ship, the whaley boys, the whole perfection of the way they work, could possibly be products of natural selection. There had to be a design. Someone made all this."
Cielle nodded, smiling. "I've known a number of scientists in my lifetime, Nate, but I'm sure this is the first time I've heard one arguing in favor of a grand designer. What's that called, the 'watchmaker argument'?"
She was right, of course. It was an accepted premise that intelligent design in nature was not necessarily a product of intelligence, but merely the mechanism of natural selection of traits for survival and really, really long periods of time for the selections to assert themselves. Nate's life's work had been built on that assumption, but now he was giving Darwin the old heave-ho simply because his  -  Nate's  -  mind was too small to adapt to the idea of this craft. Well, yes, damn it. Screw Darwin. This was too strange.
"I'm sorry, I'm just having a little trouble getting my head around this. I don't know how you take to being a prisoner, but I don't care for it. On top of that, I could barely sleep on the humpback with the blow going off every few minutes, and I haven't eaten anything but raw fish and water for about five days. I'd be addled even if this didn't seem impossible."
Bernard made a whimpering noise, and Skippy and Scooter followed along in a moment until they sounded like a basketful of hungry puppies, and then they all broke out into wheezing snickers. Emily 7 frowned at them.
"Of course, I understand, Nate," Nuñez said. "Maybe you should finish up your coffee and go to your quarters. I have a few sports shakes in my cabin that will get some carbohydrates to your brain, and I can get you something to help you sleep  -  the ship's doctor has a full stock of Pharmaceuticals." She patted his hand maternally. Nate felt a little ashamed for having complained.
"You're not the only human on this ship, then?"
"No, there are four humans and six whaley boys on board. The others are in their quarters. But they're all excited to meet you. Everyone's been talking about it for weeks."
"You've known for weeks you were going to take me?"
"Well, sort of. We were on standby. We just got the go-ahead the day before we took you."
"And you, and the rest of the crew, you're prisoners, too?"
"Nate, every person on this ship, on any whale ship, has been pulled out of a sinking or sunken ship, a plane crash at sea, or some other disaster that would have killed them. This is a gift of time, and frankly, once you accept where you are and what you're doing, I'm going to ask you where you'd rather be. Okay?"
Nate searched her face for any sign of sarcasm or malice. All he found was a gentle smile. "Okay."
"You go to your quarters now. I'll send around your supplies in a bit. Bernard, would you show Dr. Quinn to his quarters?"
"I'm not really a doctor," Nate whispered.
"Take whatever respect you can get from them, Nate."
Bernard waited at the entry to the corridor, rubbing his shiny-smooth stomach and grinning. A white coffee mug stood out in contrast against Bernard's abdomen, suspended as it was in the grasp of his penis.
"I've always wanted to do that," said Nate, deciding that he wasn't going to let the whaley boy get the satisfaction of intimidating him. "Would be really handy for driving." Nate bowed toward the corridor. "Lead on, Bernard."
Bernard skulked down the hall in what would have been a full pout posture, had he any lips to do the actual pouting. He spilled a trail of coffee along the way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Inner Secrets
of Cetacean Sluts
Nate was just settling into the idea of the organic bunk he was going to be sleeping on before actually settling into the bed. He was not a God kind of guy, but he found himself thanking one nonetheless for the crisp cotton sheets and pillowcase on a feather pillow. He didn't think he really wanted to sleep with his face against whaleskin. There was a soft whistle outside the portal, and the great flap of skin retracted to open to the corridor. Emily 7 stood there with a tray that held two cans of protein shake, a glass of water, and a single small pill. She grinned but did not try to step into the cabin. The small portal required a bit of a crouching and climbing action for Nate to enter, so he guessed she'd dump the tray trying to get through. Then again, she might just be trying to be polite. She waited while Nate took the cans from the tray and set them on the low table, then swung around to take the pill and water from her.
Emily 7 whistled and gave him a sidelong glance, causing her right eye to bulge out at him, as he'd actually seen humpbacks do when checking out a boat at the surface. She gestured for him to take the pill.
"You're not leaving until you see me take my medicine?"
Emily 7 nodded.
"Well, I guess if you guys wanted to get rid of me, it would have been a lot easier to kill me without bringing me all the way out here to poison me." Nate took the pill, downed the water, and opened his mouth to show that the pill was gone. "That okay, nurse?"
Emily whistled and nodded, then gently took the empty glass from Nate's hand. She reached up to hit the node, and the portal closed between them. Nate heard her whistle the first few bars of a lullaby.
She's sweet, Nate thought, in a tall, malevolent rubber-puppet sort of way.
For almost a week the only sleep Nate had been able to get was while he was restrained in the chair in the humpback, and even then it was restless  -  with the ship blowing every few minutes and the whaley boys whistling communications  -  so, despite the blow of the blue-whale ship, he fell into a deep sleep filled with vivid dreams. He dreamed of himself and Amy, their naked bodies entwined, slick with sweat under soft candlelight. Strangely, even as he dreamed, he had the semilucid thought that before, whenever he'd taken a sleeping pill, he didn't remember ever dreaming. But that thought was pushed away by the feel of Amy's smooth skin, his fingers softly caressing her muscular legs, her four long, webbed fingers wrapped lovingly around his  -
"Hey!" Nate opened his eyes. A softly lit fence of spiky teeth smiled over at him, steamy fish breath washed over his face.
"Uh-oh," said Emily 7, her voice high and rasping, verging on duck-speak.
Nate leaped out of bed and bounced off the wall on the other side of the cabin.
Emily 7 pulled the sheet up over her head and burrowed against the wall, digging her melon under the pillow. Then she lay still.
Nate stood trying to catch his breath. As soon as he'd hit the floor, the biolighting had come up to high. He pushed back against the flexible wall, then suddenly became self-conscious and pulled his T-shirt off the back of the chair to cover his erection, which was rapidly losing its will to live.
She was just lying there.
"Hello? I can see you."
Curled up. Not moving. There under the sheets. All whaley.
"You aren't fooling anyone. You're bigger than I am. You're not hidden."
Just the soft sound of her blowhole opening and closing. Nate realized that it might be easier to hide under the covers if one had a blowhole, as one could cover one's mouth and face and still breathe. Addled by sleep deprivation, residual sleep medication, two cups of coffee, and now a few endorphins, he started to speculate on how a creature might adapt for hiding under the covers, then shook off the biologist rising up in him.
"Come on, we're different species and stuff. That's creepy."
Now a bit of a squeak, more like a whimper, followed by a tiny "Uh-oh," like a small elf had been mashed under the covers with a heavy book and had uh-ohed its last pathetic gasp.
"Well, you can't stay here."
He remembered how he'd felt when Libby had left him and by way of explanation she'd said, "Nate, I don't know, I don't even feel like we're the same species." At the time he'd felt as if his stomach were being turned inside out. It had ruined him socially for more than a year. Longer than that if he counted the fiasco attraction to Amy.
He stepped over to the bunk. Emily 7 scrunched into the corner between the wall and the bed. Nate worked the edge of the sheet loose and cautiously slid one leg under the covers. The lump that was Emily 7's head moved as if she was listening.
"You have to stay on your side, okay?"
"Okay," wheezed Emily 7 in the mashed-elf voice.
Nate awoke to the exhultations of killer whales  -  high-pitched hunting calls. The pod seemed to be gleefully celebrating a hunt, or at least calling another pod to come along and help. It occurred to him that he was actually riding in a craft that qualified as food for the orcas, and the ship might be in danger of attack. He'd have to ask Nuñez about that. He swung his feet off the bunk, and the lights came up. He realized that he was alone and sighed with relief.
There was a fresh set of khakis hung over the chair and a bottle of water on the table. There was a small basin on the wall opposite the bunk, no bigger than a cereal bowl and made out of the same skin as the rest of the ship. He hadn't even noticed it the night before. There were three lit nodules above the basin, like those used to activate the portals, but Nate could see nowhere for the water to come out. He pushed one of the nodules, and the basin started filling from a sphincter in the bottom. He pushed another, and the water was sucked out the same orifice. He tried to foster scientific detachment toward the whole thing but failed miserably: He was creeped out. Nate desperately needed a shave and a shower, but he didn't want to try to wash his whole six-foot-two-inch body in an eight-inch bowl with a... well, a butt hole at the bottom. He'd had just about enough of advanced poop-chute technology, thank you. He splashed some water on his face and dressed in the khakis, wondering as he did if the whale ship could actually grow a mirror for him to shave in if he needed it.
The whole crew appeared to be up and milling about the bridge when Nate came in. There were four whaley boys at the table with the charts to the right of the hatch, the two pilots at their consoles. Nuñez stood by the table to the left of the hatch, where there were seated a blond woman in her thirties and two men, one dark, perhaps in his early twenties, and one bald and gray-bearded, a healthy fifty, maybe. Not a very military-looking bunch. Everyone turned when Nate came in. All conversations  -  words or whistles  -  stopped abruptly. The echo of killer-whale calls bounced around the bridge. Emily 7 turned away from Nate's gaze. Nuñez was leaning against the wall near the nook that housed the coffeepot, actively trying not to look at him.
"Hi," Nate said, catching eye contact with the bald guy, who smiled.
"Have a seat," said the bald guy, gesturing toward the empty seat at the table. "We'll get you something to eat. I'm Cal Burdick." He shook Nate's hand. "This is Jane Palovsky and Tim Milam."
"Jane, Tim," Nate said, shaking hands. Nuñez smiled at him, then looked away quickly as if the coffeepot needed some immediate attention or she was going to crack up  -  or both.
Everyone at the table nodded, sort of staring at the spot in front of them, like So here we are on a giant blue-whale ship, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, with killer whales calling about us, and Nate fucked an alien, so...
"Nothing happened," Nate said to the whole bridge.
"What?" said Jane.
"Your quarters satisfactory, then?" asked Tim, an eyebrow raised.
"Nothing happened," Nate repeated, and even though nothing had happened, from the tone of his voice he wouldn't have believed it either. "Really."
"Of course," said Tim.
All of the whaley boys except Emily 7 were snickering. When he looked around, all the males were waving their willies back and forth in time in the air, as if swaying to a pornographic Christmas carol. Emily 7 put her big whaley head down on the table and covered it with her arms.
"Nothing happened!" Nate shouted at them. Silence again on the bridge, just the echo of killer-whale calls. "Are we in danger?" Nate asked Nuñez, trying desperately to change the subject. "Are they going to attack the ship? Those are feeding calls, right?" Often, when killer whales found a whale that was too big to be taken by their family pod, or when they happened on to an especially rich school of fish, they would call to other pods for help. Nate recognized the calls from some work he'd done with a biologist friend in Vancouver.
"No, these are residents," Nuñez said. "They're just excited about a bait ball they've found. Probably sardines." Resident killer whales ate only fish; transients ate mammals, whales and seals. Over the last few years scientists tended to refer to them as completely different species, even though they appeared the same to the layman.
"You know what they are by their call?"
"More than that," Cal said, "we know what they're saying. The whaley boys can translate."
"All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?" said Jane. She had a slight Eastern European accent, Russian maybe. She looked a little amused, her blue eyes dark under the yellow cast of the bioluminescence, but she didn't appear to be joking. She patted the seat next to her, indicating that Nate should sit down.
"Like all the pilots are named Scooter and Skippy?" Nate said.
"Actually, they have numbers like Emily  -  their choice, by the way  -  but since there are never more than one pair of them on a ship, we don't bother with the numbers."
Nate suddenly realize that in all his time on both of the whale ships, except when one of the pilots had gone outside to catch fish, the pilots always seemed to be at the controls. "Don't they ever sleep?"
"Sure," said Jane. "We're pretty sure they sleep with half their brain at a time, like whales, so between two of them the ship always has a full pilot. Without one of them at the controls, it's basically a big lump of meat."
"You said that you're pretty sure. You don't know?"
"Well, they don't know for sure," said Jane, "and they're not very excited about our doing experiments on them. Now that you've joined us, though, maybe you'll be able to figure out what's going on with them. We sort of play it all by ear. The whaley boys and the Colonel run things. Cielle, you didn't tell him all this?"
"He was pretty beat," Nuñez said. "I tried to get him settled in as soon as I could."
Nate wanted to protest the "settled in" comment. After all, he was a prisoner here, but these people didn't behave at all like captors. They immediately impressed him as having the same dynamic that he'd seen in research teams, a "we're all in this together, let's make the best of it" attitude. He didn't want to yell at these people. Still, it made him a little uncomfortable that she was so forthcoming with information. When your kidnappers showed you their faces, they were giving you the message that you weren't going home.
Nuñez set a plate down in front of him. It had a salad of mixed seaweeds, carrots, and mushrooms, a piece of cooked fish, which looked like halibut, and what appeared to be rice.
"Eat up," she said. "A couple of nutrition drinks aren't going to get you back up to speed. We do eat a lot of raw fish, even on the blue, but you need some carbs until you adjust to this diet. There's plenty of rice when you finish that."
"Thanks." Nate dug in while the others, all but Cal, excused themselves to work in other parts of the ship. The older man had obviously been charged with Nate's second orientation lecture.
Cal scratched his beard, looked around at the pilots, then leaned over to Nate and spoke in a lowered voice. "They're very promiscuous. You know how dolphin females will mate with all the males in the pod so no one can be assured of who the father of her calf is? They think it keeps the males from murdering her calf when it's born."
"That's the theory," Nate said.
"They're sort of like that, and back at base you have a big pod to deal with. You start down that path... well, you've got a lot of whaley boys to sex up."
"I didn't sex her up," Nate hissed, spraying rice out over the table. "I'm not sexing up any whaley boys... er, girls  - »
"Whatever. Look, they're very close. Here on the ship they don't have separate quarters  -  they share one big cabin. Sex is very casual with them, but they understand that we're a little more hung up about it. Some of them seem to affect human shyness. We generally don't mix sexually with them. It's not forbidden, but it's... you know, frowned upon. It's only natural for a guy to be curious  - »
Nate put down his fork. "Cal, I did not have sex with anyone  -  I mean, anything."
"Right. And be careful around the males. Especially if you're in the water with them. They'll bung-hole you just to watch you twitch."
"Jeez."
"I'm just telling you for your own good."
"Thanks, but I'm not going to be around long enough to worry about it." Might as well throw it in their faces, Nate thought.
The older man laughed, almost shooting coffee out his nose. When he recovered, he said, "Well, I hope you mean you plan on dying soon, because no one ever leaves."
Nate leaned into Cal's face. "Doesn't it bother you, that you're a prisoner?"
"There's not one of us here who wouldn't be dead if the whaley boys hadn't picked us up."
"Not me."
"Especially you. You were always twelve hours from dead since we started watching you. Certainly it had to occur to you how much easier it would have been just to kill you?"
Nate just stared for a second. Actually, it had occurred to him, and he didn't see the logic in keeping him alive if all they wanted to do was stop his research. He wasn't going to make that argument verbally, but still...
"Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."
"Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."
"You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."
After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of Treasure Island to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate on the book at all. Funny what you learn about yourself in a short conversation. One, that he would rather have been accused of having sex with another species than with another male (even of another species). Interesting prejudice. Two, that he actually was grateful, not only to be alive, but grateful to be having completely new experiences every moment, even as a prisoner. Three, that learning was still a high, but he burned to share it with someone. And finally, that he was feeling a little jealous, a little less special, now that he knew that Emily 7 was having sex with all the male whaley boys on board. That fickle little slut.
He dozed off with Robert Louis Stevenson on his chest and the sound of killer whales calling in the distance.
Outside, the pod of twenty killer whales, most the sons or daughters of the matriarch female, were calling frantically to each other as they worried away at a huge bait ball of herring. Biologists had long speculated on the incredibly complex vocabulary of the killer whale, identifying specific linguistic groups that even «spoke» the same dialect, but they had never been able to put meaning to the calls other than to identify them as "feeding," "distress," or «social» noises. However, had they had the benefit of translation, this is what they would have heard:
"Hey, Kevin, fish!"
"Fish! I love fish!"
"Look, Kevin, fish!"
"Mmmm, fish."
"You, Kevin, take a run down that trench, fake left, go right, hit the bait ball, nothing but fish!"
"Did someone say 'fish'?"
"Yeah, fish. Over here, Kevin."
"Mmmmm, fish."
And it went on like that. Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.