The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  “Get on the line. On this side. Lars, you on the other … Dru, you can cast us off. All right, everybody, kick.”

  She got the snorkel cleared and sucked a cold lungful. Activity did seem to drive the numbness back, so she kicked, hard, hanging off the Zodiac. The idea seemed to be to use its dull bulk for support and, maybe, camouflage as they approached the pod. They couldn’t fire up the motor, of course. She kept flailing and kicking. Chills shuddered down her flanks. A stitch twisted a needle between her ribs.

  She relaxed her death grip on the line, and her mask sank through the surface. She jerked it up, then realized she could still breathe. The harsh hollow rush rasped in her ears. She blinked, fighting terror, and looked down.

  Into an immense blue depth. Save for strands of some brownish-red substance it was perfectly clear, as if she were floating in blueberry Kool-Aid. Except for the rusty drifting skeins the water was perfectly transparent; she could see every bubble-laced flick of Lars’s fins. When she bobbed up again they were heading off away from the whales. Kick … she swam harder and they straightened out.

  Gradually she noticed muffled clicks and a high-pitched wheezing. A grinding, like tectonic plates colliding. The cold retreated, though her face still prickled with icy pins. She lifted her head. The spouts seemed barely closer.

  They came to packed ice and had to detour. Eddi swam ahead to reconnoiter a lead. A lifted arm beckoned them forward, and she kicked again, getting tired now, breath ragged, limbs lagging.

  Then they were through, and the embayment opened. Above, a wrinkled, gently warping surface, intensely blue. To left and right masses of ice reached down, grown over with shaggy submarine meadows of bluish-green algae. She looked down into infinity, following red-gold rays that descended into the dimness until lost in a powdered midnight blue-black.

  Through those searching beams coursed huge things of such power and slow deliberate grace her breath froze in the plastic tube that contained it. Like locomotives gliding past, but locomotives so perfectly streamlined, so minutely controlled, that the tiniest flick of a massive fluke altered their courses. As one passed she traced the slowly rising and falling tail, the seemingly infinite flexibility of the whole aft three-quarters of the animal. The queer distorted mouth, lower jaw so huge it seemed as if the face were upside down. Buff and white callosities dotted the nose and head, and a school of small fish accompanied it as it slowly passed. She couldn’t locate the eye, but the sea was filled with clicking and grunting. They were definitely being examined. And possibly, discussed.

  She let go, thrust herself under the raft, and finned after the creature, pulse suddenly lumbering with such huge slow beats her vision throbbed. But it moved on, away, unhurried, as if its internal watch ticked in aeons. The great broad tail slowly swept up and down as its outlines blurred into haze. Then it was gone, and she had to rise, lungs aching, and there was the raft, and the outlines of her friends … she surfaced strangling and blowing, and spat out the mouthpiece. “Did you see it? Did you?”

  “We saw,” Madsen said from the far side. “There’s another off to our left. Come on, we’ll swim in among them.”

  She hung on the handropes, panting, catching her breath. Hadn’t he been the one excoriating whale tourists earlier? “Are you joking?”

  “Come on.” He let go, and swam forward.

  She hesitated, looking all around for some dimly dreaded threat. The blue was empty, but it still echoed and groaned. And underneath everything lay that queer low grinding, which had to be ice, but sounded like giant wheels crushing basalt to dust. Dozens of white-and-black torpedoes undulated by at the edge of vision. She goggled, throat closing, before they snapped into scale; penguins, zagging with just as much grace as their vast competitors, but much more rapidly. She let go, retucked the snorkel, and swam after Lars, the pounding of her heart making things tremble in the corner of her vision. She glanced back to see if Eddi was coming, and caught an old-gold flash off a lens pointed her way.

  She finned on, approaching a pulsating, fuzzy ocher cloud that at the edges fizzed apart into tiny creatures. She waved a hand slowly, trying to catch one, but they sensed the motion and evaded her.

  She kicked on into the brown fog and her faceplate was blanked out by a darting, perking soup of tiny beings, so many the sea grew dark. The animals that drew the birds, the whales, the penguins.

  Beautiful as it looked, this blue-and-scarlet world was a battle zone of death and feeding. She suddenly remembered, with a thrill of fear, how the humpbacks had circled, drawing their airy nets around these swarms; then suddenly surged up, enormous mouths agape. But surely all these clicks and buzzings meant they knew she was here. They could sense the trembling, pulsating bubbles of her lungs. Couldn’t they? She looked over one shoulder, thinking to ask Eddi, but she wasn’t in sight.

  Lars jackknifed and sank, driving himself downward. She finned slowly to where he’d dropped away. She was deathly afraid, yet also queerly fearless. As if she too were one of these colossal creatures, masters of an icy universe roofed with undulating sun, floored with forever violet. But what was he doing? Hovering a few feet down, staring into the haze—

  Out of which was taking shape—

  The gigantic right coalesced out of the hazy blue, head-on. The huge curved mouth grinned as it swam, tail pumping up and down every four seconds. Bubbles trailed from its back, forming a silvery stream. They slowly lofted, rocking and glittering like rose pearls. The whale grew, passing just below them, and she saw Madsen had positioned them so. The fissured skin slid by beneath her like a passing asteroid. She reached down and closed her glove on the edge of its dorsal.

  And almost had her arm jerked out of its socket. The current pressed her mask into her cheeks and made the useless snorkel flutter and snap against her ear. She rode for endless seconds, the massive beast undulating beneath her, the surface shimmering above, her whole body flapping like a flag in a high wind; until the whale rose, and she turned her face up and laughed aloud, being towed along in the open air. Then suddenly was all but deafened as a rubbery orifice snapped open and a blast of compressed air and funky water blew her mask askew. She let go and tumbled, and thought for a moment fearfully the tail but the massive slab of black flesh tilted and she was gently lifted, then slid off into the water again. Where she bobbed and spun, rocked by the massive backwash as her living chariot moved serenely off, trailing a vee-shaped train lined with a rocking slip of foam.

  * * *

  She hoisted into the raft and sat shaking as she looked around for Eddi. Her teeth chattered. No sign of the videographer. At last she spotted her, far back toward the boat, sitting atop one of the unstable-looking floes. She lifted a hand, and Auer waved back.

  A splash, a blowing like a porpoise, and Lars surfaced. When he pushed his mask back his face was a livid purplish blue. “We need to get w-warmed up,” she told him.

  “Isn’t this great?” The Dane looked higher than Sara had ever seen him. “This … out here, it’s still Eden. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, yes—it’s fantastic. Incredible. But I’m freezing, Lars. And your face—you look like a Smurf.”

  He made a disgusted moue but hauled himself in, rolling over the gunwale. They paddled back toward the ice. As they neared, Eddi slid down a chute and breaststroked to meet them.

  “Why didn’t you come with us?” Sara asked her, then wished she hadn’t.

  “Oh, I was just … I didn’t want to.”

  “Those are baleens,” Madsen said. “Not toothed whales, Eddi.”

  Sara felt like punching him. It was perfectly obvious why Auer had spooked. If she’d gotten nearly killed, sustained hideous injuries, she’d have had second thoughts herself. Different whales, true. Rights, not killers. But your mind could tell you one thing, and your fears something quite different. She said quickly, “You were probably right to get out of the water. We’re f-frozen through.”

  No one was on deck as they made up on Anemon
e. They shouted up, with no response. Not until Lars tapped the hull with a paddle was there an answering call from inside.

  Dorée stuck her head out of the companionway. Her hair was tousled and she wore a conspiratorial grin. “Sorry, Dru and I were … busy. How was it, Lars?”

  Madsen’s face went blank. He turned away abruptly and busied himself with the line. It uncoiled in the air, nearly striking Dorée. She ducked, still smiling. Then Perrault was there, zipping his jacket, grabbing the line, bending it to a winch. Sara and Eddi scrambled into the cockpit; Lars stayed in the inflatable as Perrault cranked it up the ramp. When the captain straightened, Dorée twined her fingers into his hand. He took it reluctantly, looking trapped.

  “So what’s the plan?” the Dane said tightly, throwing the paddles into a locker with a clatter. “We need to get after the fleet again.”

  “Hard to go anywhere without wind.”

  “You got fuel from the corvette—”

  “We’ll see wind soon,” the captain said. Dorée stroked his hair and he looked pained. Took a step away. “But if we don’t, sure. We could burn some fuel. Head east. Maybe find the processing ship this time. Press on, and see what happens.”

  Madsen stepped out of the inflatable. Without looking at either of them, he brushed past Dorée and the captain, and slammed his way below.

  13

  White Labyrinth

  They stayed near the embayment for the rest of that day and through the Antarctic dusk. Waiting for wind, and for Bodine to come up with a direction to search. Madsen had withdrawn, as much as one could aboard a seventy-eight-foot boat; his answers were short, and when he made chowder that “night” it was barely edible. Bodine, too, looked upset, though Sara could assign less reason. Eddi seemed subdued; Perrault, by turns apologetic and brusque, as if reminding them he was in charge, no matter whom he was sleeping with. Dorée, on the other hand, bubbled, telling animated stories about her rise in pictures, about her first movie lead—in a college-zombies-from-another-planet semi-spoof called Got Brains?—and the practical jokes she and the other actors had played on Wes Craven.

  Sara hit her bunk early and lay there, still shuddering though she was wearing every piece of warm clothing she owned. She stared at the overhead, noticing a spot they’d missed when cleaning the mate’s cabin.

  She closed her eyes, returning to the blue, surrounded once more by the giant creatures they were here to save. She wanted to engrave those moments into her memory, to replay whenever she was downhearted or doubted what she was doing here.

  When they’d left Ushuaia she’d been an agnostic about this voyage (though of course she’d said the right things to the interviewer). But face-to-face, so to speak, with the great animals, she had to admit it: she was converted. To kill one would be nothing less than murder.

  She looked around the table at her shipmates. She’d seen the flaws of each; yet each had also something noble. Dorée was a classic narcissist, but she’d refused the chance to desert. Perrault seemed more sailor than savior, but as such, he’d kept them at sea through storm and breakdown. Eddi was fighting her own demons, that was clear; but she was fighting. Mick and Lars were the hard core, the most dedicated. But each in his way was here to defend something beyond himself, and willing to sacrifice to do it.

  And their newest crew member? Lars and Mick still seemed not to fully trust him, but that was ridiculous. It’d only been the sheerest luck she’d caught sight of his fall; Hy could easily have died in that freezing water. Remembering just how cold now, she shivered so hard the bunk squeaked.

  She rolled over, enjoying the extra space, but missing her little portlight. The mate’s cubby had none. A voice murmured next door. Perrault’s? Dorée’s? Anemone creaked lazily. The last thought that passed through her mind, before unconsciousness succeeded it, was: The wind must be coming up at last.

  * * *

  But when she went topside next morning the breeze barely cooled her cheek. It chased ripples across the water between the ice, but those leads were smaller. The rights were gone, though penguins still wandered the bergs like lost tourists. Then she noticed those bergs had drifted closer, and that a grinding groan almost too low to hear was coming from all around.

  “It’s packing up,” Perrault said, lowering his binoculars. He looked worried. “I hope we can get out.”

  “Is that the noise? You mean we could be trapped?”

  “Not for long. This hull won’t stand much pressure. We’d break up and go down.” He scratched his chin, which Sara noticed was freshly shaven for a change. “We need to find our way back to the open sea. Let’s shake that genoa out and see if we can make steerageway.”

  “Don’t we have a really big sail? A spinnaker? I thought—”

  “We do, but this lull’s not going to last. Trim in that port sheet … that’s good, make it off there.”

  The grind of the winch and the thump of activity on deck brought Eddi up, then the others. Perrault took the wheel, looking from compass, to sail, to the ice around them. The boat gathered speed, but he kept her sheeted out to slow her. Which made sense, given the narrowness of the leads between the floes. If that was the right name for a tortured jumble of ragged blocks, some white, some blue, others stained all the hues of the rainbow. The sea lapped and broke, lifting the lighter chunks, rising and falling on the flanks of the larger. The huge tabular formations fell slowly behind, but if anything the ice cover increased. They picked their way through a wilderness: pieces large as containers, as ferryboats, down to bits that bobbed past smaller than doghouses, but still capable of punching a hole if a spur reached out. She hugged herself, looking down apprehensively as they slid past a low chunk whose submerged wings spread far out to either side, the lighter ice a brilliant turquoise just below the rippled surface.

  “Tricky,” Bodine said. The first time he’d addressed her directly, begun a conversation, since their encounter in the forepeak. He was propped where the cockpit coaming curved into the deck house, limbs splayed out. “This ice.”

  “It seems to be getting heavier.”

  “Driven together by the current, I guess. What was it like, yesterday? Swimming with them?”

  “Unforgettable, Mick. It seems like a dream now, but I’ll remember it forever.”

  “All rights, correct? You didn’t see any sperms?”

  “No. Would you find a sperm in a right whale pod?”

  “You wouldn’t think so. But I’m sure I heard one.”

  She remembered: the five-click signal. “Just the rights, and the dolphins. And penguins, of course.”

  “Calves?”

  “Uh, you could ask Lars.”

  “If the rights can come back, so can the blues. So can all of them.” He squinted off toward where jagged shards clashed slowly as they rose and fell on the long breathing swell. “People are coming around to our way of thinking. Every piece of research that proves their intelligence makes the case stronger. We’ve just got to buy time.”

  “I’m starting to feel the importance, Mick.”

  That sea-green gaze sought hers. “You didn’t before?”

  “Let’s just say I didn’t have the emotional commitment.”

  “Fair enough. Sometimes you have to see things … threatened before you realize how important they are.” He looked away. “Wonder how Jamie’s making out. I wish we’d hear from them. Or from Monaco.”

  “Sara. Mick. I could use some help,” Perrault called.

  He wanted her up on the mast with binoculars, scoping for a channel out of what was looking more and more like a maze. He warned her to keep a safety line fastened, and to come down if she got dizzy. She snapped a halyard to her harness, slung the glasses, and climbed the riveted bent metal steps hand over hand. When she looked down again the deck had shrunk alarmingly. She sucked a cold breath and quickly looked upward. The masttop was far as Heaven. Below forty, no God. She ran out of gumption at the second set of crosstrees and snapped the carabiners, locking her
self on, and fumbled the binocs out.

  The lead they followed was a dark blue crack through rough country. She yelled down, “This dead-ends half a mile ahead.”

  “Crisse de caulisse de cave de tabarnak,” Perrault swore. “Any that lead east?”

  “I’m looking.… We need to backtrack, then take that opening to the left. To port, I mean.”

  From this vantage she could see order in what appeared chaos from on deck. Like shattered glass on a kitchen floor, the ice lay scattered randomly; but this floor undulated, grinding each bit against another. The wind was driving the loose pack into the tabular bergs to the southeast, but they weren’t moving at the same rate, or in the same direction. The ice was shoaling up, packing, and in an immense game of chess Anemone was slowly being checkmated by the massive pieces that drifted and collided in unsettling roars. The engines coughed, then whined, sounding strange from up here. The genoa shrank, winding in as Perrault shifted into reverse.

  The next lead extended a mile before it too was pinched off between two slowly rolling masses of dirty corrosion whose one flat surface attested they’d once been part of a tabular berg. The rest was seamed yellow and green like aged Stilton. Perrault hung back as Sara searched anxiously for a path. Finally the house-sized masses eased apart, and he nudged between them. They crunched as the hull slid past, and spun slowly in the plaited wake.

  Bodine kept feeding the captain recommendations from the radar; Sara climbed a few more feet, snapped on again, and spotted a debris field that seemed to have a darker patch beyond it. She yelled that down, and Mick confirmed the radar showed open water in that direction.

  To get there, though, they’d have to transit a zone of larger bergs about a mile wide. Perrault hesitated for a long time as Anemone rolled, picking up the rhythm of the swells, the engine puttering. Then put her in gear again and eased forward.

  A slam and a lurch threw Sara against the mast. A boot slipped and she gasped, dropping several heart-stopping inches before the harness brought her up with a jerk. “Careful,” Eddi called up. “Want me to spell you?”