The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond

by Howard Steven Pines

  “It’s what both the cetacean and the human brains are visualizing in three dimensions for the first time,” added Seema.

  “It is possible, however, that the acoustic region of Uber’s brain is imaging the symbols in four-dimensional frequency space.” Greg touched a finger to an area on Andrew’s display where colorful columns of numbers scrolled top to bottom. “According to these measurements, Uber’s shifting the energies and frequencies of all four resonance peaks, like when he vocalized the shape of the four-dimensional circle.”

  “I can try to confirm that hypothesis with the mathematicians here at Ivy Tech,” said McPinsky.”

  “Okay, Andrew?” asked Greg.

  “I’m ready to upload the data files, Professor,” said Andrew. “They’re big. They’ll take a while to transmit at our limited data rate.”

  “My god, what if it’s true,” mused McPinsky. “What if we actually validate your 4D hypothesis? It could be the bombshell that will rock the human race. A paradigm shift in planetary consciousness.”

  “Unless we can distribute the data,” replied Greg, “nobody is going to believe it.”

  * * *

  In the aftermath of Uber’s dramatic outburst, an eerie quiescence pervaded both the ship’s control room and the water below. Dmitri gazed up at the astonishing story revealed by both Speakeasy screens: a snapshot of another species’ thoughts. The display was jam-packed with dozens of circular symbols, meticulously organized into a 3D matrix structure of rows and columns. As Uber circulated beneath the boat, Dmitri was intrigued by the humpback’s unusual body language—the herky-jerky motions of his three massive fins. The whale appeared to be studying the images, as if he were trying to interpret their meaning. Dmitri, Lila, and Chris filmed the momentous occasion juggling a variety of cameras. They had captured enough breathtaking imagery to challenge the marine biological community for years to come.

  After the four divers exchanged handshakes and hugs, Dmitri’s arms suddenly flung out in all directions. A hasty three-sixty-degree assessment provoked a surge of anxiety and vertigo. He, Melanie, Chris, and Lila were surrounded at close range by the entire ensemble of Uber’s escort party, encircled in a revolving tower of forty motor-coach-sized humpbacks. The divers whirled helplessly in the slow-motion vortex induced by the circulating mass, a surrealistic barbershop pole spiraling hypnotically.

  Melanie tapped Dmitri on the shoulder, and he followed the line of her arm to a magical sight. A whale calf, dwarfed by the adults like a guppy in an aquarium, suckled its mother’s milk. Lila and Chris went crazy attempting to capture the mammalian ritual with their cameras. Once sated, the nursling, with a startling “zero to sixty” burst of speed, raced up to the boat. She settled next to Uber, who was still fixated on the mysterious images.

  The calf broke the silence, trilling a cavalcade of improbable, high-frequency tones that literally palpated Dmitri’s eardrums. Speakeasy transformed them into the curvilinear brush strokes of inchoate geometric forms, all superimposed upon the palette of Uber’s game symbols. While the calf paused to study her artistic creation, Dmitri, too, gawked at the otherworldly renderings. Since the pace of the pod’s merry-go-round rotations had slackened, the spinning sensation gradually ebbed.

  Dmitri’s brief respite ended when the baby titan flapped her fluke and glided back down, straight toward them on a collision course. As she loomed ever larger, he felt his heart pounding down to his stomach. He estimated her length at approximately fifteen feet and weighing several tons. To his great relief she stopped ten feet away, directly above them, wallowing in the wall of bubbles ascending from the divers. Because she maintained this position for quite some time, Dmitri had an eerie feeling about the encounter. Was she sensing the chemistry of their respiration, or reveling in the tingling sensation of the effervescence, or simply curious? As the drama intensified, Dmitri experienced the lingering convergence as something like a Vulcan mind meld—two species immersed in the synergy of their merged auras. Yet it was not science fiction. It was intensely real.

  The calf eventually drifted down, inching closer and closer, until she was within an arms-length distance of Dmitri’s and Melanie’s faces. Too numb to move, Dmitri stared, seemingly forever, into the calf’s big, shiny, coal-black eye. Her gaze effused purposeful intelligence and evoked in him an unsettling reaction of both fear and wonder. He felt as if he were being “scanned” by a sentient alien being. When she ever so gently brushed a pectoral fin across his chest, Dmitri thought he might wet his wetsuit.

  With a stroking motion, Chris swept his arm back and forth. Melanie responded by removing a glove and, with her bare hand, explored the calf’s body. Encouraged by the whale’s seemingly positive reaction, Dmitri did the same and prayed that a cetacean’s maternal instincts were not akin to a grizzly bear’s. Lila and Chris filmed and photographed the “petting-zoo” images for posterity.

  Dmitri turned his head and saw Melanie’s blissful expression. They were inextricably linked by this unforgettable moment, their hands joined on the body of the baby giant. The calf recaptured their attention with a surprisingly polite five-ton nudge. She basked in the human massage for what seemed to Dmitri an eternity. How would he describe the tactile sensation of stroking a whale calf? His answer, now based on first-hand knowledge: like a combination of buttery, soft leather and slick rubber, her skin smooth, firm, and yet cool to the touch. The calf finally edged away. Then, with two ripples of her tail, she jetted back to her mother.

  Drifting in space, Dmitri rejoiced in the ecstasy of this silent moment. He felt buoyant and free, submerged in an aquamarine sea, and he beheld an unfathomable panorama. In this underwater temple, he was ringed by the awe-inspiring sight of forty gigantic, cetacean Buddhas. Shifting shafts of light pierced the surface, sparkling like stained glass, and wavering in the subtle ocean currents. Gazing up above, the boat and the sky were shimmering apparitions beyond the ocean’s skin.

  Without warning, Uber, who had been stationary beneath their vessel, had begun to revolve. Dmitri aimed the video camera, pressed the RECORD button, and held his breath. Starting from an orientation horizontal to the surface, the leviathan rotated its monolithic frame, steadily and inexorably, around its central axis. With Uber’s pectoral wings fully extended, the powerfully silent moving image jogged Dmitri’s memory of yet another video taken in space: when the ISS Space Station recorded the Space Shuttle performing a one-hundred-eighty-degree rotational “back-flip” against the blue-and-white backdrop of the Earth.

  Thirty seconds later, Uber had attained a perfectly vertical orientation. His head pointing directly up at the glass-bottom Speakeasy display, he remained motionless just twenty feet below the boat. In the ensuing silence, Dmitri’s imagination conjured the mystical, orchestral strains of Holst’s Neptune movement, as he felt a new hush of anticipation within and outside of himself.

  An ethereal tone signaled the end of Dmitri’s trance, as if Uber were tuning his voice for the next performance on the program. Like an impassioned conductor, the precision strokes of his vocal baton unleashed a climactic outburst of sound and vibration, inundating the underwater display in torrents of light. A glissando of geometric figures and esoteric shapes, forged in the mind of Uber, danced before Dmitri’s eyes. Uber projected a dazzling cascade of ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, and shapes he’d never seen upon the canvas of game symbols. Dmitri witnessed and filmed a spectacle of multi-dimensional representations that, like a Copernican thunderbolt, demolished the foundations of human understanding about intelligent life on planet Earth.

  * * *

  Sitting at his workstation, Greg’s gaze was glued to the display of the same cryptic, three-dimensional figures. “I know the Coast Guard is waiting for us, but I just don’t care anymore. This is uncharted territory. Uber’s brain could be the biological equivalent of an analog supercomputer.” Greg’s reverential tone epitomized the expressions on Andrew’s and Seema’s faces. “It’s all so amazingly mathematica
l. Some of the shapes he’s composing look vaguely like Bessel functions or Legendre Polynomials, but I can’t be certain, Professor.”

  “It’s so amazing, it’s spooky,” replied McPinsky.

  “I’m certain of one thing,” said Seema. “These figures are beautiful, surely the creations of an aesthetic mind. But there’s so much more to it. How can Uber have such precise control of his vocalizations? How can he fashion such meticulous drawings of multi-dimensional mathematical functions?”

  “Think about the range of handwriting capabilities in the human population,” replied Greg. “Some people can’t draw a straight line while others can master the most exquisite calligraphy. Uber’s obviously in the latter category.”

  “I have to admit,” said Andrew, “I can’t comprehend any of this either. That they can transition between two, three, and maybe even four dimensions to express the symbols of their thoughts, as smoothly as if they’re shifting the gears of a sports car, is mind-blowing.”

  “Don’t forget,” replied Greg, “when Uber’s driving in the communication fast lane, he needs to downshift into second gear to merge into the right lane of human communications traffic.”

  “I feel like one of Einstein’s awestruck graduate students on the first day of school,” Andrew said. “What does all of this mean, Professor McPinsky?”

  After a sigh and a long pause, McPinsky answered. “Honestly, Andrew, I’m as mystified as you are. What comes to mind is a favorite quotation from a science-fiction movie I remember from my childhood. I never dreamed I’d hear myself repeat it for real. ‘There are times when a mere scientist has gone as far as he can, when he must pause and observe respectfully, when something infinitely greater has assumed control.’ I believe this is one of those times.”

  * * *

  In the water, as Uber’s magnum opus illuminated the screen above him, Dmitri marveled that the tableau of interlaced, light-sculpted figures reminded him of a cubist’s abstract sketches. After Melanie tapped him on the shoulder and gestured down below, he realized the dozens of creatures circling the Research in Paradise had descended to a depth of about one hundred feet directly beneath them. Then the entire pod began to sing the hauntingly familiar song of the humpback. When Dmitri thought it couldn’t get any more sublime, the water started to sizzle. The cetacean celebrants had begun to weave the mother of all bubble nets. He tucked the minicam into the thigh pocket of his dive suit and clasped Melanie’s hands. Together, they were engulfed in the stimulating effervescence, their bodies resonated with the song of the Megapteran chorus, and their eyes pulsed with the afterglow of Uber’s frequency-sculpted bolts. In this multisensory kaleidoscope, Dmitri felt all of his senses maxed to their limits—a rapture beyond description.

  When the melodies had gradually diminished in intensity and the cylindrical curtain of bubbles floated up and away, Dmitri realized to his dismay that the fantasia was dissolving and would soon be a memory. The pod had begun to disperse. Gorman pointed upwards, and when he’d begun to kick to the surface, Dmitri and the others followed. Halfway up to the boat, however, Dmitri felt strange, even uncomfortable. Before he could take another breath, a suffocating surge of pressure deep within his skull had metastasized into an apocalyptic onslaught of sound. His head felt like it was going to explode. Through a squall of pain, he was shocked to see Lila and Chris clutching their hands to their temples. When the retreating whale calf started shrieking and Melanie contorted her face in agony, Dmitri realized the true extent of this developing horror show.

  Though he thought it would never end, the stranglehold of noise and pain mercifully subsided. Nevertheless, Dmitri was stunned to see his face mask blotched with his own blood. He was even more alarmed by the view through Melanie’s mask. A crimson streak dribbled from her nose. He took hold of her limp hand.

  After a brief reprieve, they were blasted by a second wave of noise and torment. Gradually, another layer of sound leaked into Dmitri’s throbbing consciousness. Uber had initiated a new broadcast. A continuous variation of the same theme, it seemed more songlike than the punctuated phrases of his earlier vocalizations. Above all, Dmitri was struck by the song’s sense of urgency.

  Melanie’s shove startled Dmitri, who turned to see two monstrous humpbacks racing toward them. He embraced her without hesitation, placing himself in the path to absorb the initial impact, thinking to prolong her existence by the gift of a millisecond. An instant before their imminent annihilation, the whales deftly adjusted course, slewing their massive bodies in a sideways motion. The compression wave generated by their arcing trajectory sent the four humans plummeting deeper. Dmitri and Melanie clutched one another as they tumbled. Opening his eyes, Dmitri was amazed to see they’d been shepherded to the same location as the distressed calf, still clinging to its mother’s flank.

  Through pulses of pain and the backdrop of Uber’s opus, Dmitri observed the pod’s purposeful movements. They grouped together in pairs. The pairs then distributed themselves equidistantly and symmetrically in a circular formation, surrounding the congregation of the humans, the calf, and its mother. Each of two diametrically-opposed pairs propelled forward, sweeping a great circular arc around their designated circumference in the formation. Clasping Melanie’s hand, Dmitri stared in wonder as the whales orbited around them. To his astonishment, the individuals within each pair, like acrobats, spiraled around an imaginary axis between one another and deposited, in their wake, a braid of bubbles in the pattern of a double helix. Melanie and Dmitri twirled as one in the twisting currents.

  This guild of weavers had fashioned an effervescent shield that encompassed the four humans, the mother humpback, and its calf inside of a huge, spherical cocoon. The singing Uber hovered near the surface and above the pod, so he too was sheathed in bubbly foam. Each of the whale pairs was partially shielded by the mini-shell of a sparkling white cloud as they arced and rotated through the bottom hemisphere.

  Glimpsing Gorman’s thumbs-up gesture, Dmitri realized he was nearly pain-free and that the whale calf’s distress cries had waned to a whimper. Straining to see through the veil of bubbles, Dmitri craned his neck and turned a full three-hundred-sixty degrees to admire the intricate coordination of the humpbacks’ movements. They’d endowed the net with a recursive geometric sophistication, reminding him of an Escher construct. Thinking who would believe this, Dmitri reached for the minicam and joined Lila and Chris in the struggle to document this Neptunian ballet of the giants.

  * * *

  On the surface, the crew on the Coast Guard cutter reacted as the sea boiled all around their vessel. “What the heck?” said the lieutenant commander. “I thought those whales had disappeared. Suspend the order to board.”

  “Yes sir,” replied the lieutenant.

  * * *

  Back underwater, the whales maintained their protective umbrella as the grating, machine-like sounds continued to torture the sea. When the on-and-off cycle of sonic violence had finally ceased, the humpbacks remained in formation until the abrupt finale to Uber’s vocalizations.

  With the restoration of silence and as twilight faded into dusk, the Megapteran entourage ultimately dispersed. As they drifted off into the darkness, Gorman’s pointing gesture was the signal to return to the boat. As the quartet ascended, the calf returned for an encore, weaving in and out amongst the humans in a celebratory farewell. Then she was gone.

  After Dmitri had broken the surface, he felt drained beyond exhaustion. Each step up the ladder rekindled memories of a long-ago, oxygen-deprived ascent to the top of Mount McKinley. Crawling onto the deck, he was shaken by the amplified tones of a human voice and the reminder that they were no longer shielded by the humpback flotilla. “This is the U.S. Coast Guard. Prepare to be boarded.”

  The buddy system of Chris, Greg, and Andrew assisted Melanie, Lila, and Dmitri in the removal of their gear. Seema distributed towels. Once they’d changed into dry clothes, they hustled inside to assess their predicament. Seema addressed Melani
e, who appeared dazed. “Everything was going fine until we were blasted by the crazy racket beneath the boat and through the speakers.”

  “After we peeled back the edge of the video screen, we were scared stiff to see you clutching your heads,” Greg added. “Then you just disappeared from our view through the glass window. What the heck happened down there?”

  Andrew held a dive mask aloft. “Why is there blood on all your masks?” he asked.

  “Are you ok?” McPinsky’s voice echoed from the speakers.

  “Those SOBs.” Gorman was livid. “Those explosive sounds had to be the Navy’s sonar. We just confirmed the rumors about their recent tests in Hawaiian waters.”

  “Did you notice the pain stopped after they wrapped us in their bubble net?” added Melanie.

  Gorman nodded his agreement. “Yes, it makes complete sense. The air in each bubble deflects and attenuates the mechanical energy of the sound waves.”

  “They shielded us,” said Lila, with reverence in her voice.

  “And the calf too,” added Melanie. “They protected us as one of their own.”

  “From an attack by members of our own species,” said McPinsky, “like the Red Cross aiding refugees in a war zone.”

  No one spoke. From the soul-searching stares, Dmitri knew that everyone was as overwhelmed as he.

  Gorman finally broke the silence. “It’s bad news for the Navy. We can publicize the details of these defensive countermeasures to compromise their sonar program.”

  “But we’re about to be seized, and the proof along with us,” replied Andrew.

  “Aren’t the audio files fully transmitted to McPinsky?” Greg asked him.

  “Gimme a sec,” replied Andrew, typing commands on his workstation. “Sorry, but I warned you the link was slow, and I never thought we’d collect so much data. It’ll take at least another fifteen minutes.”