Christopher Moore - Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

They were both lean and blond and weather-beaten, and one evening, as they were portaging gear from their respective Zodiacs, Libby unzipped her survival suit and tied the sleeves around her waist so she could move more freely. Nate said, "You look good in that."

No one, absolutely no one, looks good in a survival suit (unless a Day-Glo orange marshmallow man is your idea of a hot date), but Libby didn't even make the effort to roll her eyes. "I have vodka and a shower in my cabin," she said.

"I have a shower in my cabin, too," Nate said.

Libby just shook her head and trudged up the path to the lodge. Over her shoulder she called, "In five minutes there's going to be a naked woman in my shower. You got one of those?"

"Oh," said Nate.

They were both still lean, but no longer blond. Nate was completely gray, and Libby was getting there. She smiled when he approached. "We heard about the break-in, Nate. I meant to call you."

"That's okay," he said. "Not much you can do."

"That's what you think," Amy said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet as if she were going to explode or Tigger off across the room any second.

"I think these might mitigate the loss a little," Libby said. She slung her day pack off her shoulder, reached in, and came out with a handful of CDs in paper sleeves. "You forgot about these, I'll bet? You loaned them to us last season so we could pull off any social noises in the background."

"It's all the singer recordings from the last ten years," Amy said. "Isn't that great!"

Nate felt as if he might faint. To lose ten years' work, then reconcile the loss, only to have it handed back to him. He put his hand on Libby's shoulder to steady himself. "I don't know what to say. I thought you gave those back."

"We made copies." Margaret stepped over to Quinn and in doing so got a foot between him and his ex-wife. "You said it would be okay. We were only using them for comparison to our own samples."

"No, it's okay," Nate said. He almost patted her shoulder, but as he moved in that direction she flinched and he let his hand drop. "Thank you, Margaret."

Margaret had interposed herself completely between Nate and Libby, making a barrier of her own body (behavior she'd obviously picked up from her cow/calf studies — a humpback mother did the same thing when boats or amorous males approached her calf).

Amy snatched the handful of CDs from Libby. "I'd better go through these. I can probably come up with a few relevant samples to play along with the slides if I hurry."

"I'll go with you," Margaret said, eyeing Amy. "My handwriting on the catalog numbers leaves something to be desired."

And off they went toward the projection station in the middle of the hall, leaving Nate standing with Libby, wondering exactly what had just transpired.

"She really does have an extraordinary ass, Nate," Libby said as she watched Amy walk away.

"Yep," Nate said, not wanting to have this conversation. "She's very bright, too."

Sometime in the last week a tiny voice in his head had started asking, Could this get any weirder? In two minutes he'd gone from anxiety to embarrassment to anxiety to relief to gratitude to scoping chicks with his ex-wife. Oh, yes, little voice, it can always get weirder.

"I think Margaret may be on a recruiting mission," Libby said. "I hope she checked our budget before she left."

"Amy's working for free," Nate said.

Libby leaned up on tiptoes and whispered, "I believe that a starting position on the all-girl team has just opened up." Then she kissed his cheek. "You knock 'em dead tonight, Nate." And she was off after Amy and Margaret.

Clay and Kona arrived just as Libby walked away, and, irritatingly, Kona was checking out Libby from behind.

"Irie, Boss Nate. Who's the biscuit auntie suckin' face with ya?" (Like many authentic Hawaiians, Kona called any woman a generation older "auntie," even if he was horning after her.)

"You brought him here," Nate said to Clay without turning to face him.

"He's got to learn," Clay said. "Libby seemed friendly."

"She's chasing Amy."

"Oh, she a blackheart thief that would take a man's Snowy Biscuit to have a punaani nosh. That Snowy Biscuit belong our tribe."

"Libby was Nate's third wife," Clay volunteered, as if that would somehow immediately illuminate why the blackheart Libby was trying to steal the Snowy Biscuit from their tribe.

"Truth?" Kona said, shaking his great gorgonation of dreadlocks in rag-doll confusion. "You married a lesbian?"

"Whale willies," said Clay, adding neither insight nor illumination.

"I should go over my notes," Nate said.

"Biology," said the pseudo Hawaiian, "dat bitch make sex puppets of everyone." Clay had just told him the story. The story was this:

Five years into her marriage to Nathan Quinn, Libby had gone for the summer to the Bering Sea to put satellite-tracking tags on female right whales. She had already begun working with Margaret Painborne, who was at the time trying to find out more about the mating and gestation behavior of right whales. The best way to do that was to keep constant tabs on the females. Now, sexing whales can be an incredibly difficult task, as their genitalia, for hydrodynamic reasons, are all internal. Without a biopsy or without being in the water with the animal (which means death in three minutes in the Bering Sea), about the only way to determine sex is to catch a female when she is with her calf or while the animals are mating. Libby and Margaret had decided to tag the animals while they were mating. Their base ship was an eighty-foot schooner loaned to the project by Scripps, but to do the actually tagging they used a nimble twelve-foot Zodiac with a forty-horse engine.

They'd spotted a female trying to evade the advances of two giant males. The right whale is one of the few animals in the world that uses a washout strategy for mating. That is, the females mate with several males, but the one who can wash out the others' seed most efficiently will pass his genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the guy with the largest tackle often wins, and male right whales have the biggest tackle in the world, with testes that weigh up to a ton and ten-foot penises that are not only long but prehensile, able to reach around a female from the side and introduce themselves on the sly.

Libby took the front of the boat, where she braced herself with a fifteen-foot fiberglass pole tipped with a barbed stainless point attached to the satellite unit. Margaret steered the outboard, maneuvering over frigid seven-foot seas, into the position where Libby could set the tag. Right whales are not particularly fast (whalers caught them in rowboats, for Christ's sake), but they are big and broad, and in the frenzy of a mating chase, a small Zodiac provides about as much protection from their thrashing, sixty-ton bodies as would wearing aluminum-foil armor to a joust. And noble Libby, action-girl nerd that she was, did look somewhat like a gallant knight in Day-Glo orange, her lance ready to strike as her trusty warhorse, Evinrude, powered her over the waves.

And as they approached the big female, a male on either side of her, the two sandwiching her so she could not escape, she rolled over onto her back, presenting her genitals to the sky. At that she slowed, and Margaret steered between the two tails of the males so Libby could set the tag. The female stopped then and floated up under the Zodiac. Margaret powered down the motor so as not to rake the animal with the prop.

"Shit!" Libby screamed. "Get us off! Get us off!" A swipe from the flukes of any of the animals would put them in the water, minutes from hypothermia and death. Libby had rolled her survival suit down so she could maneuver the harpoon. She'd be pulled under in seconds.