Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 29~30

 
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."