Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

by Christopher Moore

  * * *

  "I must be out of my mind," Clay said. His suitcase was on the bed, and he was taking clothes out of the drawers and putting them into the case, while Clair was taking clothes out of the case, grouping them by a precise system he would never understand, and replacing them in the suitcase so that he would never find anything until he returned home and she helped him unpack. They had done this a lot.

  "I must be nuts," Clay said. "I can't just go wandering around the oceans randomly looking for a lost friend. I'll look like that little bird in the book, the one that walks around asking everyone, 'Are you my mother? »

  "Sartre's Being and Nothingness?" Clair offered.

  "Right. That's the one. It's ridiculous to even leave port until we have something to go on — steaming around, burning up fifty gallons of fuel an hour. The Old Broad may have money stashed, but she doesn't have that kind of money."

  "Well, maybe something will turn up in the whale calls."

  "I hope. Libby and Margaret have a lot of sonic data streaming in from Newport, but it's still like looking for a needle in a haystack. Clair, she saw guys climbing into a whale —»

  "So, baby, what's the worst that happens? You go to sea and do your best to find Nate and you fail? How many people ever did their best at anything? You can always sell the ship later. Where is it now anyway?"

  Just then the screen door fired back on its hinges and smacked against the outside wall with the report of a rifle shot. Kona came tumbling through the door waving pages of copy paper as if they were white flags and he was surrendering to everyone in the general Maui area.

  "Bwana Clay!" Kona threw the pages down on Clay's suitcase. "It's the Snowy Biscuit!"

  Clay picked up the pages, looked at them quickly, and handed one to Clair. Over and over the message was repeated:

  41.93625S__76.17328W__-623__CLAY U R NOT NUTS__AMY

  Clay looked at Kona. "This was imbedded in the whale song."

  "Yah, mon. Blue whale, I think. Just came in."

  "Go back and see if there's more. And find the big world map. It's in the storeroom somewhere."

  "Aye, aye," said Kona, who had begun to speak much more nautically since Clay had purchased the ship, making his bid to go along on the voyage to search for Nate. He ran back to the office.

  "You think it's from Amy?" Clair said.

  "I think it's either from Amy or from someone who knows everything about what we're doing, which means it would have to be someone Amy talked to."

  "What are the numbers?"

  "A longitude and a latitude. I'll have to look at the map, but it's somewhere in the South Pacific."

  "I know it's a longitude and a latitude, Clay, but what's the minus six hundred and some?"

  "It's where pilots usually express altitude."

  "But it's a minus."

  "Yep." Clay snatched the phone off of his night table and dialed the Old Broad as Clair looked quizzically at him. "Equipment change," he whispered to Clair, covering the receiver with his hand.

  "Hello, Elizabeth, yes, things are going really well. Yes, they've picked up considerably. Yes. Look, I hate to ask this — I know you've done so much — but I may need one other little thing before we go to look for Nate and your James."

  Clair shook her head at Clay's blatant playing of the missing-husband-shoved-up-a-whale's-bum card.

  "Yes, well, it may be a little expensive," Clay continued. "But I'm going to need a submarine. No, a small submarine will be fine. If you want it to be yellow, Elizabeth, we'll paint it yellow."

  After fifteen minutes of cajoling and consoling the Old Broad, making calls to Libby Quinn and the ship broker in Singapore (who offered him a quantity discount if he bought more than three ships in one month), Clay stood over a world map that was roughly the size of a Ping-Pong table, which Kona had spread out over the office floor, pinning the corners down with coffee cups.

  "It's right there, off the coast of Chile," Clair said. She taught fourth-graders, and therefore basic world geography, so she could read a map like nobody's business. Kona placed a bottle cap on the spot where Clair was pointing.

  "We'll need nautical charts and the ship's GPS to be exact, but, basically, yep, that's where it is." He looked at Kona. "Nothing else since that message?"

  "Same thing for five minutes, then just normal whale gibberish. You think the Snowy Biscuit is with Nate?"

  "I think she knew me well enough to know that I'd be thinking I was crazy to be looking. I also think that even if I believe the Old Broad's story about her husband, that doesn't explain how Amy was able to stay down for an hour on fifteen minutes' worth of air, so there was something going on with her that could be connected to this weirdness. She obviously knows more than we know, but — most important — we have nowhere else to look."

  Kona looked at Clair, as if maybe she would answer his question. She nodded, and he resumed drinking his beer.

  Clay got down on his hands and knees on the map. "The ship broker says there's a deepwater three-man sub here, in Chuuk, Micronesia, that's about to finish up with some filming they're doing of deep shipwrecks."

  Kona put a bottle cap on the atoll of Chuuk, Micronesia.

  "The owners will let me lease it for up to two months, but then a research team has it reserved for a deepwater survey in the Indian Ocean. The Clair is here, just north of Samoa." Clay pointed.

  Kona put a third bottle cap just north of Samoa and did his best to drink off that beer while balancing the other two that he'd opened to get the caps.

  "So the Clair can probably be in Chuuk in three days. I'll fly in and meet them, pick up the sub, and then we can probably steam to these co-ordinates in four or five days if we cruise at top speed," Clay said. "Now we're here —»

  "We can't be, we can't be there," said Kona.

  "Why not?"

  "Out of beers."

  "So you get to that spot. Then what?" Clair asked. "Then I get in a submarine and see what there is to see six hundred and twenty-three feet down."

  "So we're sure it's feet, not meters?"

  "No. I'm not sure."

  "Well, I just want you to know that I am not comfortable with you doing this sort of thing, Clay."

  "But I've always done this sort of thing. I sort of do this sort of thing for a living."

  "So what's your point?" Clair asked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Black and White

  and Red All Over

  Once, off the coast of California, Nate had followed a pod of killer whales as they attacked a mother gray whale and her calf. They first approached in formation to separate the calf from the mother, and then, as one group broke from the pod to keep the mother busy, the others took turns leaping upon the calf's back to drown it — even as the mother thrashed her great tail and circled back, trying to protect her calf. The whole hunt had taken more than six hours, and when it ended, finally, the killer whales took turns hitting the exhausted calf, keeping in a perfect formation even as they ripped great chunks of flesh from its still-living body. Now, in the amphitheater, as the killer whaley boys approached — their teeth flashing, the breath from their blowholes puffing like steam engines — the biologist thought that he was probably experiencing exactly what that gray-whale calf had during that gruesome hunt. Except, of course, that Nate was wearing sneakers, and gray whales almost never did.

  It was a big room. He had space to move. He just had to get around them. His sneakers squeaked on the floor as he came down the steps, faked right, then went left at a full sprint. The whaley boys, while amazingly agile in the water, were somewhat clumsy on land. Half of them fell for the fake so badly that they'd need a postcard to tell them how it all came out. They stooged into a whaley pile near the steps.

  The remaining three pursuers tried to fan out into a new formation, the alpha female coming the closest to getting between Nate and the exit. Nate was running in a wide arc around the amphitheater now, and by virtue of sheer speed he could tell he'd
beat at least two of the remaining killers, but the alpha female was going to intersect with him before he got clear. She probably weighed three times what he did, so there was no going though her with a vicious body check. Maybe if he'd been on skates, he'd have tried it: pit his pure, innate Canadian skating force against her paltry cetacean hunting instinct and drive that bitch to the mother of pearl. But there were no skates, no ice, so at the very last second, as the female was about to slam him in a bone-breaking crunch against one of the benches that lined the walls, Nate pulled a spin fake, a move that was much more Boitano than Gretzky but nevertheless sent the big female tumbling over a bench in a tangle of black-and-white and ivory — like a flaccid piano botching the vaulting horse. Nate high-stepped the last twenty yards to the door, thinking, Yeah, three million years of walking upright not for nothing. Rookie. Meat.

  About the third step into his jubilation, Nate heard the sound of a great expulsion of air from his right, then a wet splat. Suddenly he saw his sneakers waving before his face. He felt the freedom of weightlessness, the exhilaration of flight, and then it was all gone as he slammed to the floor, knocking the wind out of himself. He slid to a stop in the huge loogie of whale spit that one of the trailing males had expectorated at his feet. Had he been able to breathe, he might have called a foul, but instead he struggled to get to his feet as the two males closed on him, showing dagger-toothed grins as they approached. Oh, my God, they're going to eat me! he thought, but then he saw that they both had unsheathed their long pink penises and were leading with a sort of a pelvic thrust. Oh, my God, they're going to fuck me! he thought. But when they got to him, one picked him up by the arms and bent him over forward, and he felt the great teeth scraping his scalp as his head slipped into the whaley boy's mouth. No, they're definitely going to eat me, Nate thought. And in that suspension of time, right before the final crunch, amid the slow motion of an infinite last moment, clarity came to him, even as he screamed, and he thought, This is probably not going to go as well as the last time I was eaten. There's probably not going to be a girl at the end of this one.

  And then the female whistled shrilly, and the male stopped biting down just as his teeth were starting to cut into Nate's cheeks. The biting male pulled back and apologetically wiped saliva and blood from Nate's face, then propped him up and fluffed him a little, as if to show that he was good as new. Nate was still being held fast by the other male, but the biter was grinning sheepishly at the alpha female and making a squeaking noise that Nate, even with his limited understanding of whaleyspeak, understood as meaning "oops."

  A half hour later they threw him into his apartment, and the alpha female grinned at him as she tore the stainless-steel doorknob out of the wall. The wall bled for a while after she left, then clotted over and rapidly began to heal.

  Nate stumbled into his bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. There were bloody gashes down his forehead and cheeks. In another place and time, he realized, he would have gone to the emergency room to get stitched up. His hair was matted with blood, and he could feel at least four deep dents in his scalp where the whaley boy's teeth had broken the skin. There was a large knot at the back of his head where he'd hit the floor when he fell, and evidently he'd hit an elbow, too, because every time he bent his right arm, a sharp, biting pain shot all the way down to his fingertips.

  He pulled off his bloodstained clothes and climbed into the shower. Then, ignoring the strange fixtures that usually gave him pause, he leaned against the shower walls and let the water run over him until the bloody crust was gone from his hair and his fingers had shriveled with the moisture. He dried himself, then collapsed into his bed, wishing for a last time before he fell asleep that Amy was there, safe, next to him.

  He slept deeply and dreamed of a time when all the oceans were filled with a single living organism, wrapped like a cocoon around a single huge land mass. And in his dream he could feel the texture of every shore as if it were pressed against his skin.

  * * *

  Nate awoke in the early hours before light came up in the grotto. He went into his living room and sat in the dark by the big oval picture window that looked out over the street and, ultimately, the Gooville harbor. There were shapes out there moving in the dark. Every now and then he'd catch the reflection of some dim light on a whaley boy's skin, but mostly he could tell they were out there by the sonar clicks that echoed around the grotto and by the low, trilling whistles of whaley-boy conversation.

  After an hour sitting there in the dark, he padded to the door and tried to open it. There was nothing but a smooth scar where the doorknob had been. The seal around the door was so tight it might have been part of the walls that framed it. In trying to work his fingers into the doorjamb, he realized that his elbow wasn't grating as it had been when he went to bed. He reached up to touch the gashes across his forehead and felt the scab flake away as easily and painlessly as dry skin. He immediately went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror under the bright yellow bioluminescence. The gashes were healed. Completely healed. He brushed away the dried blood that had seeped after his shower to find new, healthy skin. It was the same with the dents in his scalp and the great goose egg at the base of his skull. He didn't even have a sore spot.

  He returned to the living room, fell into the chair by the window, and watched the light come up in the grotto. Outside, there was a lot of movement in the street and the harbor, and, watching it, Nate started to feel sick to his stomach, despite his miraculous healing. All the movement outside was that of whaley boys. There wasn't a single human out there anywhere.

  * * *

  For two days he didn't see any other humans in Gooville, and even when he had screwed up his courage to use the buzzy, bug-winged speaky thing on the wall, he realized that he had no idea how to make it connect. By noon on the third day, he decided that he had to get out of the apartment. Not only couldn't he find Amy or do anything else while in here, but he was rapidly running out of food.

  He reasoned that the best time to make a break for it was in the middle of the day, when it seemed that the number of whaley boys out on the street was sparsest, because so many of them went down to the water at that time to swim. He dressed in long pants and sleeves for protection, then made the first attempt at the window. He tore one of the bone chairs from the floor in the kitchen, wiggling it first, as if loosening a baby tooth. He cast the chair at the center of the window with all his strength, preparing as he did to make the ten-foot leap to the street when it went though. But it didn't. It bounced back into the room.

  Next he looked for something sharp to try to puncture the window, but the only thing he could come up with were shards of the mirror in the bathroom, and although the mirror spider-webbed when he struck it, his fist wrapped in a towel, the shards stayed adhered to the bathroom wall, so all he'd really done was create a shiny mosaic. Finally, frustrated after three hours of ineffective attacks on the big window, he decided to hit it with the heaviest thing in the apartment: his body. He backed into the bedroom, sped through the living room, leaped into the air about halfway across, curled into a ball, and braced for impact. The window bulged out about three feet, until it appeared to the whaley boys outside that someone inside was trying to blow a giant bubble, and then it sprang back, trampolining Nate across the room into the far wall. At the bottom of the wall someone had installed a couch for just such an emergency, and Nate slid neatly into it with his newly flattened side down.

  "Well, that was just stupid," he said aloud.

  "Boy, that was stupid," Cielle Nuñez said. She came into the living room and sat in a chair across from where Nate was piled onto the couch. "You want to tell me what in the hell you started?"

  "How did you get in? The knob is gone."

  "Not on the outside. Come on, Nate, what did you do? Every human in Gooville has been locked down for the last three days. If I weren't the captain of a whale ship, I wouldn't have been able to come here either."

  "
I didn't do anything, Cielle, honestly. Where's Amy?"

  "No one knows. Believe me, that was the first place they went."

  "Who?"

  "Who do you think? The whaley boys. They've taken over everything. Humans aren't even allowed near the ships. Ever since some of them heard you yelling about bringing the navy down here."

  "I was. He has Amy, Cielle. I was just trying to get her back."

  "Him? The Colonel? Why would he take Amy? She's one of the few who've ever even seen him. She's a favorite."

  "Yeah, well no one is his favorite now." Right then Nate made a decision. He wasn't going to get out of this place on his own, and the only person he could even consider an ally was sitting right there in front of him. "Cielle, the reason the Colonel called your ships back, the reason no one is allowed to leave the harbor, is that he wants you all here when the place comes down. He's got some plan to get the U.S. Navy, or somebody's navy, to attack Gooville with a nuclear torpedo. He thinks that the Goo is going to destroy the human race if he doesn't destroy it first. He wanted me to go to the navy. He thought I could convince them of the threat because of my scientific credibility, but I said no. That's when he took Amy."

  "So all that yelling I heard you doing in the amphitheater — that wasn't you talking about bringing the navy here, that was just you trying to get Amy back?"

  "Yes. He's a loon, Cielle. I don't have any interest in bringing this place down. He thinks that there's some grand war going on between memes and genes, and that humans and the Goo are on opposite sides of it."

  The whale-ship captain stood and nodded as if confirming something to herself. "Okay, then. That's what I needed to know. That's why he sent me here. I'll try to get them to send you some food."

  "What? Help me get out of here." Nate suddenly had a very bad feeling about this whole exchange.

  "I'm sorry, Nate. They have Cal. The whaley boys have him. You know how that feels. They told me I had to find out if you were plotting against the Colonel. Thank you for telling me. I think they'll let him go now."