by Dean Ing
A silent ahh, then quick re-runs of the underwater explosion. Vicki’s fingers trembled as she flicked the tape to “hold” again. “Much as I hate to say it,” she poked a finger against an ovoid gray blur on the screen, “that could be a cetacean. Big one, maybe a pseudorca-false killer whale.”
“The sonar says it was live flesh,” Shuler responded, “possibly big enough to haul a cable barrier into position.”
Vicki drummed her fingers against the screen, then flicked off the display. “Could this be the work of terrorists?”
“I was picked because of modest experience in that arena,” Rooker said. “Yes, it obviously is. But up ’til now we’ve counted on human leadership.”
“Didn’t someone take Bondjol away? You said he was alive.”
“We thought you might have some ideas,” Rooker said apologetically. “There are thousands of islands to check, and not enough aircraft. We’ve tried. The witnesses-all citizens of the United States except for Bondjol and his two child concubines-agree on some uncanny points the Indonesians don’t know. One: there was a second blast while they were filling the inflatable lifeboats. Perhaps the Carson wasn’t sinking fast enough?
“In any case, two: almost the moment she went down, every one of the lifeboats was capsized. Not by sharks, in spite of what some of the crew claimed. No one drowned or sustained a shark attack. Two nonswimmers have toothmarks proving they were carried back to the lifeboats by dolphins. Distel Mayer himself says he was buffeted, ah, rudely, by something godawfully big and warm. He shipped a bit of water while it was happening, I’m happy to say.”
“Same thing happened to most of the crew,” Shuler added.
Vicki, to the stoic Shuler: “You think they were being visually identified?”
Rooker: “Don’t you?”
“Maybe.” Vicki stared blindly at the video screen, testing hypotheses, thinking ahead. “But this presupposes that a big group of cetaceans knew exactly whom they were after, and culled him out of a mob. That’s-it’s not very credible,” she said politely.
“We are faced by incredible facts,” Rooker agreed. “Of course Bondjol’s junket of the Carson was previously announced on Radio Indonesia. And in the non-Moslem press, his picture is better known than his father would like.”
Vicki was tempted to offer acid comment on pelagic mammals with radios and bifocals, then recalled that Pius had a video recorder of the latest kind. She tried another last-ditch devil’s advocacy: “What proof do you have that Bondjol didn’t drown?”
Jo Shuler moved to retrieve the classified tape from her. “Show her the glossies, Harriman.” Then, as Rooker exchanged items in his tricky attache case, Shuler went on, “Out of fifty-six people, four were missing when they got to the mangroves near shore. Three were crewmen. They were found in the Carson when divers retrieved the ship recordings. Bondjol wasn’t found. Nobody saw him go under, or knows how he was taken away. But if you can believe our Indonesian friends, here’s what was tossed from the sea into a little patrol boat off Surabaya a week later when everybody figured young Bondjol was only a bad memory.” He flicked a thumb toward the photographs that Rooker held.
The first three photographs showed a scrap of metal, roughly torn from a larger sheet. It looked as though it had been subjected to salt corrosion, then roughly scrubbed, before someone covered it with cryptic marks. Vicki took a guess: “Malayan?”
“Bahasa, the official Indonesian language,” said Rooker. “Roughly translated, ‘Saved from American plot by whales. I am on island in sight of land, but sharks cruise shoreline. Living on coconut milk and fish that come ashore, I am, et cetera, Agung Bondjol, son of et cetera, et cetera.’ I hardly need add that there was no American plot that we know of.”
She ignored his faint stress on his last four words. “I’ll bet there aren’t any sharks around, either. Some dolphin dorsal fins look awfully suspicious to most people.” In spite of herself, she was beginning to accept this awesome scenario. “Dolphins often scare whole schools of fish ashore, right here in Queensland. The aboriginals divide the catch with them, believe it or not.”
Silent nods. She turned her attention to the other glossies, fore and obverse views of a second metal fragment. It looked much like the first one, except for a pattern of dots and lines incised on the obverse side, and Vicki admitted as much.
“The jagged edges appear to fit together,” Rooker said, using a finger to trace torn and evidently matching sides of the metal sheets. “This piece showed up a week ago. Poor little rich boy: ‘Third day, sick of fish and coconuts; small whales will not let me swim. Death to evil Senator Mayer and American imperialists responsible. Finder please remit to Deputy Premier Bondjol, et cetera, signed Agung Bondjol, ad nauseam.’ At least he seems to be rethinking his ideas about evil,” Rooker finished. His eyes held something that could have been cold amusement.
Vicki tapped the last photograph. “How was this one delivered?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Shuler said. “It was literally placed in the hands of a research assistant near the study pens at Coconut Island, last Saturday. By a bottlenose dolphin.”
Vicki could not avoid her yelp. “Oahu? The marine labs?”
“You got it. Halfway across the Pacific at flank speed-maybe just to prove they could do it. The pattern on the back is the simplest code you could imagine: one for “a,” two for “b,” but in binary. Easier to peck it out that way. It reads in clear American English.”
As gooseflesh climbed her spine: “Bondjol didn’t encode it?”
“No-o way! Analysis shows Bondjol scratched his message with sharp coral fragments, but our metal sheet was torn and the obverse incised with some tool. The tool was an alloy of iron, lots of chromium, some manganese, a little selenium-in other words, austenitic stainless steel.”
“Now,” Rooker put in, “do you see why we wonder about Korff?”
She nodded, letting her cold chills chase one another. More than once, cetaceans wearing Korff’s experimental manipulators had escaped the pens-a fact she had mentioned in scholarly papers. “But you’re implying a lot of-of subtlety. For one thing, that they’ve somehow learned much more about human languages than we have about theirs.”
“Unless Alec Korff, or someone like him, is behind it,” Rooker insisted softly. “He could have two motives: money; politics.”
Vicki moved away to the lab’s crockery tea service because it gave her hands something to do while she considered these bizarre ideas. The men accepted the strong brew and waited until she met Rooker’s gaze. With fresh assurance: “Not big money, because he ran from it. Believe me, I know,” she smiled ruefully. “Politics? He didn’t want anyone governing anyone, which is why he used to say ours was the least of a hundred evils. No,” she said with conviction, “I wish-God, you don’t know how I wish-I could believe you. But Korff is-dead. I know it here,” she added, placing a small fist near the hard knot just under her heart.
A searching look passed between the men. “She’s probably right, you know,” Shuler muttered at last.
“So much the worse,” said the diplomat. “We are forced to concede the possibility that cetaceans must be classed as hostile, tool-using entities who can interdict us across three-quarters of the globe.”
“Oh, surely not hostile,” Vicki began, then paused. “All the same, if I were whaling I might seriously consider some less risky line of work. Starting today. Oh: what was the binary message?”
Rooker’s mirth was faint, but it came through. “Assurance that young Boudjol was safe, and a demand for ransom in exchange for his whereabouts.”
“What do they demand, a ton of pickled squid?” Vicki was smiling back until she thought of the gradual attenuation of data on the Pius tapes. If cetaceans were getting subtler, they would reveal only what they wanted to reveal. And Pius had behaved strangely-. She strode to the forgotten tape she had taken from Pius this morning, but paused in disbelief as Rooker answered her question.
&nbs
p; “They demand ten million Swiss francs, in hundreds. They promised to contact us again, and gave Melville Station’s co-ordinates.”
In a near-whisper, Vicki Lorenz held up the Pius cartridge between thumb and forefinger. “I have a terrible suspicion,” she said, and threaded the tape for playback.
She was right, as she had known she would be. Not only did they see an unshaven Bondjol from the viewpoint of Pius just offshore; they could hear the man’s excited cries as he struggled with his dinner. The rest was sunlight filtered through deep water, eerie counterpoint to a long series of flat tones and clicks. Vicki shared unspoken surmise with Shuler as they listened: binary code.
Vicki and Jo Shuler easily programmed the lab computer to print out the simple message as Harriman Rooker stood by. There were a few mistakes in syntax, but none in tactics. They would find a red-flagged float, attach the ransom to it, and tow the float into the bay. They would find Bondjol’s coordinates on the same float, after the ransom was examined.
“I’ve been going on the assumption that it’s counterfeit,” Shuler grinned to his companion.
“Unacceptable risk,” Harriman Rooker said blandly. “We don’t know how much they know. It’s marked, all right-but it’s real.” Shuler’s headshake was quietly negative, but Vicki saw something affirmative cross his face.
It was not yet dark. Vicki hurried from the lab and was not surprised to spy a small channel marker buoy bobbing just outside the sea gate, a crimson cloth hanging from its mast.
Vicki drove the Holden to the sea gate with Harriman Rooker while Shuler, in a dinghy, retrieved the buoy. Rooker unlocked the mail bag, shucked it down from the sealed polycarbonate canister, and smiled as Vicki glimpsed the contents. Vicki mentally estimated its weight at a hundred kilos, obviously crammed with more liquid assets than she had ever seen. The clear plastic, evidently, was to show honest intentions. She turned as Jo Shuler, breathing hard from his exertions, approached them from behind. Something in her frozen attitude made Harriman Rooker turn before, silently, they faced the little man holding the big automatic pistol.
Shuler was not pointing it at anyone in particular. A sardonic smile tugged at his mouth as Jo Shuler, staring at the equivalent of nine million dollars in cash, took one long shaky breath. Then he flung the weapon into the dusk, toward the tall grass, as hard as he could. “Let’s get this crap onto the buoy,” he grunted as the others began to breathe again.
They towed the world’s most expensive channel marker into the bay, hurrying back without conversation, half expecting some dark leviathan to swallow them before they reached shore. They had all seen the buoy plunge beneath the surface like a tiny cork float above a muskellunge.
The trio stood very close on the wharf, sharing a sense of common humanity and, a little, of deliverance as they peered across the darkling water. “Don’t worry,” Vicki said finally. “They’ll keep their end of the bargain.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jo Shuler replied, “back at the car. I couldn’t very well do less.”
As though to himself, Rooker murmured, “The most adept seafarers on the globe, and they could have been such an asset. I don’t share your optimism, Vicki. Isn’t it time you finally gave up on them?”
“I’m more worried about how they intend to use their assets,” Vicki said softly. “And how they’ll raise more money when they want it. Anyway,” she said, turning back toward the Holden, “you ask the wrong question. The real question is, have they finally given up on us?” She wondered now if Korff had outlived his usefulness to the sea people. One thing sure: his surviving work included more than poetry.
Given language, she had said, cetaceans would develop other tools. But given other tools, Korff had argued, they’d develop further linguistically. Since she and Korff had worked to develop cetacean assets at both ends, she knew the argument would never be resolved. But which species would be caught in the middle?
She could almost hear the laughter of Alec Korff.
MILLENNIAL
POSTSCRIPT
Our heroine’s work was the sort that might come in for jeers by officials who think money is wasted on communication studies. In academia I had to deal with that, in a highly personal way. Some folks will never see that, to understand the global ecology, we need far better understandings, and soon, of other creatures we share the planet with. How do their needs and behaviors affect ours, and very much vice-versa?
At this millennial moment the orca, or killer whale, is a troubling case in point. Before 1990 the orca in Alaska’s southern waters fed on seals, hefty sources of protein. There was almost no record of an orca gobbling up sea otters, though the otters were as available as snack food. But humans have overfished waters the seals fished, and local seal populations plummeted. With seals on the decline, orcas are now seen eating otters, which normally eat sea urchins that, in turn, eat kelp. Fewer otters mean an explosive increase in sea urchins, and now the kelp beds are dwindling. Since kelp are forests for many marine fish, the fish populations drop too. The known links in this chain are scary enough, but here’s the next question: when a multiton killer whale runs out of otters, what will he hunt next?
My daughter and her family fish Alaskan waters in small boats. They don’t do much swimming in that cold water by choice, but a hungry orca could easily take away the boat. I suggest that we need to do some hurried fence-mending, because orcas learn fast.
LOST IN
TRANSLATION
“Howie’s dumped a deadline again,” Hawke sighed. “Sorry, Jus’, but if he won’t write progress reports for Delphium, we’ll just have to do it for him.”
“We, meaning Justine Channing,” I said, and slapped a sheaf of notes between my breasts. “I’ll never get my work done if I have to nurse that little creep through every waking hour.”
Cabot Hawke fondled his mustache, a period piece that went with his graying sideburns and tweeds over big shoulders. All of it lent him the panache of a twentieth century colonel. While clawing my way above the ranks, I’d learned to read every one of Hawke’s nuances. Whenever he stroked that brush, he was reminding himself who he was: Projects Director of Delphium Corporation. “More like once a week,” Hawke grunted, leaving his half-acre desk to drape an arm over my shoulder.
I knew that move, too: he was showing me the door. But nicely; when Hawke wasn’t nice during business hours, I could be bitchy at night. Who was it said, “Reciprocity works both ways?”
“Try and forget how the man looks,” Hawke rumbled softly. “To board members, he’s beautiful. The day Howard Prior leaves Delphium, our best CanAm Federation contract goes with him. So you wipe his flat nose for him, find him more old tapes of Vivaldi and Amirov if he wants you to. Whatever.” He patted my rump as if identifying “whatever.”
I stopped in the entryway, using a haute couture stance from modeling days, regarding Hawke through my fall of auburn hair. Narrowing my eyes, I said, “Maybe I will.”
Hawke showed me his strong teeth-half of them implants-and refused the bait. “You’re the most overpaid administrator in CanAmerica,” he slandered, “because you prod my prima donnas to create their polymers and scenarios and translations. I don’t always tell you how to do it, and I refuse to worry about it. So don’t be a prima donna, baby; be an administrator. Go minister.”
“By God, maybe I really will,” I muttered, trying to believe it.
“Just don’t forget to spray,” Hawke’s basso chuckle followed me, loud enough to be heard down the corridor. “God knows what musty corner Howie’s hands have been in. Some of his germs must be centuries old.”
I headed for the lower-level complex and out of executive country, reflecting that Hawke was only half joking. Once, a year before, I’d driven Howie from Baltimore to the remains of a Library of Congress annex-Howie couldn’t find Delphium by himself much less a specific ruin around Washington-and I’d waited while Howie snooped for records of the Sentinel project. That was after the news that the Tau
Ceti expedition had found leavings of a dead civilization.
Delphium had signed Howard Prior up before other thinktanks realized what that news meant in terms of study contracts. But working with Howie was a nightmare: the man could not keep things in proper order. And I key my life to the observance of order. Hawke could joke that I made neatness into a vice, but one day he’d find himself outmaneuvered by my sense of order. Taking my orders.
Nothing will ever divert me from that goal, by that path.
On the annex trip, Howie hadn’t emerged for hours. All his cassettes were used and he looked like he’d been crawling through conduits-grimy, smelly, tear-streaked. Evidently they were tears of joy because the little twit had found a cache of music recordings. Howie’s degrees from Leeds and Yerkes had made him a world-class expert in interspecies communication problems, but his mania was old music.
He was delirious over his finds, music by Purcell and Porta and one, Haydn, I’d heard of. Never mind that he upset my schedule, never mind that the Sentinel Project of the 1980’s was a wipeout-small wonder, since the Tau Ceti civilization had quit transmitting five thousand years before. Still, little Howie began regular forays into those archives. But not with me. Hawke teased me later when I complained. But I say, once burnt by a four-hour fiasco with a filthy little nigger, forever shy!
Actually, Howie was mostly Caucasian, with a British scholar’s accent and a sallow complexion, lighter than Hawke who quicktanned religiously. But Howie’s maternal grandmother had been an aboriginal in Queensland. Those mixed-up-disorderly!-genes made him the image of a loser. Knobby little body, squashed nose, and hair almost kinky enough to be sculptured. The one time I suggested cosmetic surgery to him was the last time Howie tried to get cozy with me for months. I can’t ever forgive the look I saw on his crumpled features.