Henry Beston 1928—The Outermost House
Somewhere in the Straits of Lahaina, a young humpback practices her first mathematics lesson. Following the example of her tutor, she vocalizes the shape of a circle in two-dimensional frequency space. The teacher proceeds on to the next exercise. Uber makes the necessary adjustments to his vocal tract and sings the shape of a circle in three dimensions, tilted in all three planes relative to the previous circle. The student does not respond but instead, begins to drift up to the surface, leaving a trail of bubbles. Uber watches as she spirals upward in a helical orbit, her movements synchronized in accordance with Archimedes’s principle of buoyancy. With the precision only a mathematician or physicist could appreciate, and against all odds, her breath has designed a perfectly proportioned, one-hundred-foot-diameter bubble ring, its ecliptic plane unerringly parallel to the surface. She is enveloped by the halo’s luminous ascension, encircled by a crown of jewels sparkling amongst beams of liquid light.
Like a high-wire acrobat, she arcs back down in a great loop until she is directly beneath the rising ring. Then she launches straight up, like a quickening missile converging on its target. When her foamy creation bursts through the surface, she rockets directly through the center, and leaps into the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to honor Ying Lee Pines. Racing at the speed of light, she made this book possible with her tireless work ethic and unstinting support. I want to thank my grown children, Josh and Jamie, for challenging me to clarify the premise of the existential themes of my story. This book is my legacy to them and a reminder that we share a world of wonder.
Being a retired engineer and a debut novelist, I struggled with the multi-dimensional challenges of craft development. I’m indebted to my three primary editors, all award-winning fiction writers, for persevering through a literary novice’s steep and prolonged learning curve. With their guidance, the germination of an idea flowered into a dream fulfilled.
I’d like to thank my original mentor, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and the Left Coast Writer’s community for their support in guiding the transformation of my ideas onto the printed page. Linda was both midwife and physician to the birth and development of the first few revisions of the manuscript. Her uncanny ability to intuit the author’s and the protagonist’s personal and story goals laid the foundation of the novel. Molly Dwyer’s application of critical thinking skills to the assessment of point of view, character, and scene credibility helped to elevate The Whale Song Translation from a work in progress to a bona fide narrative. Molly’s literary “tough love” stressed respect for the readers’ sensitivity to intrusive narration and excessive description. Debra Ratner’s dialogue expertise and advocacy for the humanity of all the book’s characters added a layer of personal richness to the story that was sorely lacking.
This book bears the indelible imprint of others. Lynne Michelle’s endless hours of proof reading and copy-editing guidance led me to the promised land of a publishable manuscript. Alan Rinzler’s developmental suggestions helped breathe new life into the narrative voice, led to the selection of the “right” opening scene, and gave birth to an important new character. A handful of friends generously donated their time to peer review an early revision of the manuscript, copyrighted in 2009 as The Turing Translation. Their insights and suggestions have graced subsequent revisions. Brooke Warner’s expertise instilled in me the confidence to take the leap into publishing.
I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to the residents of Maui for their spirit-of-Aloha hospitality and enlightened stewardship of the Valley Isle’s natural bounty. Much of the marine mammal material in this book was culled from the excellent publication Humpbacks of Hawai‘I—The Long Journey Back, written by the co-founders of Maui’s Pacific Whale Foundation. Visit their website: www.PacificWhale.org.
We should all salute the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other environmental and marine mammal organizations, for chronicling the adverse effects of anthropogenic noise pollution on marine mammals. For an overview of the controversial subject of the military sonar experiments depicted in the book, I highly recommend a visit to their website, www.nrdc.org/wildlife/marine/sonar.asp, and the short video narrated by Pierce Brosnan posted there.
And last but not least, I’d like to acknowledge Maui’s humpback whales. This book’s inspiration was spawned the moment I first thrilled to a humpback rocketing from the deep blue sea. I was ultimately compelled to tell this story when, during a “recreational” analysis session of a humpback whale song recording, I grokked the intriguing implications of waveforms eerily similar to frequency-modulated human speech.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a child of the post-Sputnik boomer generation, and as someone captivated by the sixties “Race to the Moon,” I suppose I was destined to be a math and science dude. Since the moment I realized computers could solve math problems at the “speed of light,” I’ve been hooked.
My career passion for software engineering began during the seventies energy crisis as an alternative energy research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After Reagan pulled the plug on that project, I had a smashing good time devising improved designs and tuning strategies for the ion beam lines attached to the lab’s HILAC “atom smasher.” However, it wasn’t until I’d joined a startup company specializing in digital voice products that I discovered my true calling.
My writing is informed by a twenty-five-year Silicon Valley software engineering career that’s led to five patents in wireless voice technology. In the adaptation of voice and modem algorithms for communication devices, I became fascinated by the theoretical and physical foundations of speech. I was amazed to recognize the connection between the natural process that created spoken language and the design of cell phone technology—they had both found the solution predicted by a fundamental law of communications. The realization of this convergence is the inspiration for my fictional trilogy-in-progress, The Torch of Prometheus. The Whale Song Translation is the first installment of the trilogy.
The idea for the book’s “Speakeasy” speech-therapy system is based on a speech-modulated, shape-writing prototype I developed and demonstrated at the Fremont campus of the California School for the Deaf in 1985. My understanding that human speech evolved into a process of shape-writing and shape-matching generated the interspecies communication experiment at the core of the novel. To learn more about the underlying principles common to speech, language, and whale songs and, if my time permits, maybe even a demo of the shape-writing app featured in the book, visit www.HowardStevenPines.com.
Born in Los Angeles and a lifelong Californian, I have a love affair with the Pacific Ocean that is steeped in childhood summers playing in the waves. As an über-fan of speech, sound, and surf, my motto is: “Ride the wave, ride the wave equation.” Entranced by Northern California’s coastline, beaches, and migrating whales, I currently shuttle between the scenic bay and coastal communities of El Cerrito and Mendocino. Maui is a favorite vacation getaway destination, and the inspirational setting of my debut novel and its forthcoming sequel.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 - Whale Watchers Anonymous
2 - A Cetacean Conversation
3 - Haleakala Sunset
4 - Crop Circle Conundrum
5 - A Message from On High
6 - The Laser Ranger
7 - Speech Lab--A Bridge of Light and Sound
8 - Tabloid Mystery
9 - Change of Plan
10 - The Killing Sound
11 - Sharing a Passion
12 - Top Secret
13 - Occupy Pearl Harbor
14 - The Best and the Brightest
15 - Tell Me I'm Not Crazy
16 - Hitting the Bull's-Eye
17 - Engineering Karma
18 - Eureka, Eureka
19
- Meeting of the Minds
20 - Dmitri's Hammer
21 - The Six Thunderclaps of Professor McPinsky
22 - Collusions of an Academic Hit Man
23 - Research in Paradise
24 - Creationists and Luddites--Full of Passionate Intensity
25 - Symphony in the Park
26 - Windward Sea Flight
27 - Victory at Sea
28 - Hatching a Plan
29 - The Turing Translation
30 - The Aquarian Grandmaster
31 - The Lords of Sound
32 - Chain Reaction
33 - The Torch of Prometheus
34 - Last Gasp
35 - Jail House Blues
36 - Cosmology 101
37 - Ivory Tower Tribunal
38 - Paternal Condolences
39 - High-Tech Satori
Epilogue - Behold the Creative Pageant
Acknowledgements
About the Author
The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond Page 35