Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 33

 
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Could Be Worse,
Could Be Dog Years
"Evidently," said Nate, "where we screwed up was killing the whales."
"No way," said Amy.
"We tipped our hand."
"About being meme machines, right?"
"Yeah. Are you sure you're not spying for him?"
"Nope. Know how you can tell? When I was spying, did I ever touch you here?"
"No. No, you did not."
"And did I ever let you touch me here?" She moved his hand for him.
"No, you did not. Especially not in public."
"Yeah, we should probably go back to your place."
She had called him on his buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing, about which he made a mental note to ask what the name of it was at his first convenience. They'd met for coffee at a Gooville caf that catered to whaley boys. She'd assured him that no one would notice them, and, strangely enough, the whaley boys had completely ignored them. Maybe he was no longer news.
"If they say anything, I'll just tell them that we're having sex," Amy said.
"But you said you didn't think I should tell the Colonel I'd seen you."
"Yeah, but that was before he let you in on his secret plan."
"Right."
"Although I'm a little ashamed of how old you are. We should talk about that."
"So should I move my hand?"
"Yeah, down and a little to the right."
"Let's head back to my place."
Back at his apartment, standing in the kitchen, he said, "Hey, what do you call this thing?" He pointed to that thing.
"The phone."
"No kidding?" He nodded as if he'd known that all along. "So where were we?"
"Killing whales was where we went wrong?"
"Yes."
"Or how old you are?"
"So," he continued, "killing whales was a big mistake."
"Which you knew, because that's what made you want to become a nerd in the first place."
"No, that's not right."
" 'Scuse me, action nerd."
"You want to know how I got into this field, really?"
"No. I mean, sure. You can tell me about the destruction of the human race later."
"You have to promise you won't laugh."
"Of course." She looked incredibly sincere.
"My sophomore year at the University of Sasketchewan in the Sticks  - »
"You're kidding."
"It's a good school. You promised you wouldn't laugh."
"Oh, you meant even this early in the story I'm not supposed to laugh? Sorry."
"I mean, I'm sure it doesn't measure up to Gooville Community College  - »
"Not fair."
"Home of the Gooville Fighting Loogies  - »
"Okay, you made your point."
"Thank you. So a friend and I decided that we're going to go to break out of our boring small-college lives, we were going to take some risks, we were going to  - »
"Talk to a girl?"
"No. We decided to drive all the way to Florida for spring break just like American kids, where we would then drink beer, get sunburned, and then talk to a girl  -  girls."
"So you went."
"Took almost a week to get there, but yes, we drove in his dad's Vista Cruiser station wagon. And I did indeed meet a girl. In Fort Lauderdale. A girl from Fort Lauderdale. And I talked to her."
"You dirty little tramp. Like, 'How's it going, eh? »
"Among other things. We conversed. And so she invited me to go see a manatee."
"He shoots! He scores!"
"But I thought it was an American way of saying matinee. I thought we were going to a movie. You know, you don't think about those things as being real."
"But it was."
"She did volunteer work for a rescue hospital for injured marine mammals, mostly manatees that had been hit by boats. They had a bottlenose dolphin, too. We stayed there for hours, caring for the animals, her teaching me about them. I was hooked. I hadn't even picked my undergrad major, but as soon as I got back to school, I went for biology, and I've been studying marine mammals ever since."
"Oh, my God, you didn't get laid, did you?"
"I found a passion for life. I found something that drives me."
"I can't believe I fell for such a pathetic loser."
"Hey, I'm pretty good at this whale stuff. I'm respected in my field."
"But you're dead."
"Yeah, before then, I mean. Hey, did you say that you fell for me?"
"I said I fell for a pathetic loser, if the shoe fits..."
He kissed her. She kissed him back. That went on for a while. They both found it excellent. Then they stopped.
"You said you wanted to talk about our age difference," Nate said, because he always picked women who broke his heart, and, figuring that his heart was now into this whole thing far enough to be broken, he wanted to get on with it.
"Yeah, we probably should. Maybe we should sit down."
"Couch?"
"No, at the table. You might want a drink."
"No, I'm okay." Yep, heartbreak, he thought. They sat.
"So," she said, curling her legs up under her, sitting like a little kid, making him feel ever more the creepy old guy leching on the young girl, "you know that the whaley boys have been pulling people in here from shipwrecks and plane crashes for years, right?"
"That's what Cielle said."
"She wants you, I can tell, but that's beside the point. Do you know that they pulled whole crews off sunken submarines, plus they've yanked sonar guys out of port for years?"
"I didn't know that."
"Doesn't matter, has nothing to do with what I'm telling you. So you realize that some people who have been lost at sea, like the crew of the American sub Scorpion that sank back in 67, actually ended up here?"
"Okay. That makes sense. More of the Goo looking out for itself. Gaining knowledge."
"Yeah, but that's not the point. I mean, those guys helped put together a lot of the technology you saw on the whale ship, the human technology, but that doesn't matter. The important part is that the world thinks that the crew of the Scorpion is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, even though they're not. Got it?"
"Okay," Nate said, really slowly, the way he had spoken to the Colonel when he was losing the point  -  much the way he was waving in the conversational wind right now.
"And you realize that when I applied with you and Clay, that I gave my real name, which is Amy Earhart, and that Amy is short for Amelia?"
"Oh, my God," Nate said.
"Ha!" Amy said.
The ship broker found Clay's ship in the Philippines, in Manila Harbor. Clay bought it based on faxed photographs, a spec sheet, and a recent hull certification for just under $2 million of the Old Broad's money. It was a 180-foot-long U.S. Coast Guard fisheries patrol vessel built in the late fifties. It had been refitted several times since then, once in the seventies for fishing, once in the eighties for ocean survey, and finally in the nineties as a live-aboard dive boat for the adventure tourist. It had plenty of comfortable cabins as well as compressors, dive platforms, and cranes to raise and lower support vessels onto the rear deck, although, except for the lifeboats, it came with no support craft. Clay thought they could use the rear deck as a helicopter-landing pad, even if there wasn't a budget for a helicopter, but  -  you know  -  someone with a helicopter might want to land there, and it helped no end to have a big H painted on the deck. There was a budget for painting a big H. The ship had efficient, if not quite state-of-the-art, navigation equipment, radar, autopilot, and some old but functioning sonar arrays left over from its days as a fishing ship. It had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower diesel engines and could distill up to twenty tons of freshwater a day for the crew and passengers. There were cabins and support for forty. It was also rated a class-three icebreaker, which was a feature that Clay hoped they wouldn't have to test. He really didn't like cold water.
Through another broker Clay hired the crew of ten men, sight unseen, right off the docks of Manila: a group of brothers, cousins, and uncles with the last name of Mangabay, among whom the broker guaranteed that there were no murderers, or at least no convicted murderers, and only petty thieves. The eldest uncle, Ray Mangabay, who would be Clay's first mate, would sail the ship to Honolulu, where Clay would meet them.
"He's going to be driving my ship," Clay said to Clair after he'd gotten the news that he had a crew and a first mate.
"You have to let your ship go, Clay," Clair said. "If he sinks it, it wasn't really yours."
"But it's my ship."
"What are you going to call it?"
He was thinking about the Intrepid or the Merciless or some other big-dick, blow-shit-up kind of name. He was thinking about Loyal or Relentless or the Never Surrender, because he was determined now to find his friend, and he didn't mind putting that right on the bow. "Well, I was thinking about  - »
"You were thinking deeply about it, weren't you?" Clair interrupted.
"Yes, I thought I'd call her the Beautiful Clair."
"Just the Clair will be fine, baby. You don't want the bow to look busy."
"Right. The Clair." Strangely enough, on second thought, that pretty much encompassed Intrepid, Merciless, Relentless, and Loyal. Plus, it had the underlying meaning of keeper of the booty, which was sort of a bonus in a ship name, he thought. "Yeah, that's a good name for her."
"How long before she gets here?"
"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."
"Well, now that she's called the Clair, I hope they bring her in safe."
"My ship," Clay said anxiously.
"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"
"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.
Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.
"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger  -  and decidedly luscious, I might add  -  woman had chosen you, right?"
"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?
"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent  - »
"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.
"So the age thing? It's a problem?"
"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."
"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."
"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."
"I was just messin' with you. I'm her daughter. Ha!"
"Stop it! This isn't funny, Amy. If you're trying to make a point, you've made it. Yes, you're an attractive young woman, and maybe your youth's a part of why I'm attracted to you, but that's just biology. You can't blame me for that. I didn't make a move on you, I didn't harass you when we were working together. I treated you exactly as I would have treated any research assistant, except maybe you got away with more because I liked you. You can't ridicule me for responding to you sexually down here when you came on to me. The rules had changed."
"I'm not ridiculing you. Amelia Earhart really is my mother."
"Stop it."
"You want to meet her?"
Nate searched her face for signs of a grin or a tremble in her throat that might indicate the rise of an Amy Ha! Nothing there, just that little bit of sweetness that she usually tried to hide.
"So somehow, living down here, you haven't aged. Your mother?"
"We age, but not like on the surface. I was born in 1940. I'm about the same number of years older than you than you were older than me a half hour ago  -  kinda sorta. You going to dump me?"
"It's so hard to believe."
"Why, after you've seen all this? You've seen what the Goo can do. Why is it so hard to believe that I'm sixty-four?"
"Well, for one, you're so immature."
"Shut up. I'm young at heart."
"But for a second there I was so sure we were doomed." Nate rubbed his temples  -  trying to stretch them, maybe  -  to make his head bigger to hold the whole concept of Amy's being sixty-four.
"No, it's okay, we just haven't gotten to that yet. We're still doomed."
"Oh, thank goodness," Nate said. "I was worried."
Later, after they had pushed the world away for a while, made love and napped in each other's arms, Amy made a move to start another round, and Nate awoke to an immediate and uncertain anxiety.
"Are we really doomed?" he asked.
"Oh, goddamn it Nate!" She was straddling him, so she was able to get a good windup before thumping him hard in the chest with her fist. "That's just un-fucking-professional!"
Nate thought about how the praying mantis female will sometimes bite off the male's head during copulation and how the male's body continues to mate until the act is finished.
"Sorry," he said.
She rolled off him and stared up at dim strips of green luminescence on the ceiling. "It's okay. I didn't mean to bite your head off."
"Pardon?"
"Yes, we're probably doomed. We're doomed for the same reason that I look the way I do, that most of the Goos look much younger than we really are. Turn a gene on, you age; turn it off, you don't. I've even seen some people down here who seem to get younger. Flip a switch, pancreatic cancer at age twenty-two; flip another, you can smoke four packs a day and live to be a hundred. If the Goo thinks that the human race is a danger to it, it just has to flip a switch, pick a gene, make a virus, and the human race would blink out. I hadn't really thought about it as a threat before. My whole life I've worked for the Goo. Service, you know? It takes care of us. It's the source."
He didn't know what to say. Did he need to actually take the Colonel's request for help seriously? Did he need to help find a way to kill this amazing creature in order to save his own species? "Amy, I don't know what to do. Two days ago I just wanted to get out of here. Now? The Colonel and you both said I was lucky to be alive. Has the Goo killed people who were close to finding out about it?"
"Honestly, I don't know. I've never seen it or heard of it happening, but I  -  we  -  each just do our own part down here. We don't ask a lot of questions. Not because we're told not to or anything  -  it's just that you can live a long time without asking yourself big questions when your needs are looked after." For the first time Nate could see the experience of years in Amy's face, marked not by wrinkles but by a shadow in her eyes.
"I'm asking," he said.
"Do I think the Goo is ethically capable of killing the human race?"
"I guess."
"I don't even know if the Goo has ethics, Nate. According to the Colonel, it's just a vehicle for genes and we're just vehicles for memes and nature says that a head-on collision is inevitable. What if it's not? This battle has supposedly gone on for millions of years, and now the Colonel wants to force an endgame? What I do know is that you've got to talk him out of trying to kill it."
"But he's your leader."
"Yeah, but he didn't tell any of us about this. I think he's doubting his own judgment. So am I."
"But you said that it could kill everyone on the planet at the flick of a switch."
"Yeah." She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow. "You hungry? I'm hungry."
"I could eat."