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

Nate did not watch her rub the SPF50 on her legs, over her ankles and feet. He did not watch her strip to her bikini top and apply the sunscreen over her chest and shoulders. (Tropical sun can fry you even through a shirt.) Nate especially did not notice when she grabbed his hand, squirted lotion into it, then turned, indicating that he should apply it to her back, which he did — not noticing anything about her in the process. Professional courtesy. He was working. He was a scientist. He was listening to the song of Megaptera novaeangliae ("big wings of New England," a scientist had named the whale, thus proving that scientists drink), and he was not intrigued by her intriguing bottom because he had encountered and analyzed similar data in the past. According to Nate's analysis, research assistants with intriguing bottoms turned into wives 66.666 percent of the time, and wives turned into ex-wives exactly 100 percent of the time — plus or minus 5 percent factored for post-divorce comfort sex.)

"Want me to do you?" Amy asked, holding out her preferred sunscreen-slathering hand.

You just don't go there, thought Nate, not even in a joke. One incorrect response to a line like that and you could lose your university position, if you had one, which Nate didn't, but still… You don't even think about it.

"No thanks, this shirt has UV protection woven in," he said, thinking about what it would be like to have Amy do him.

Amy looked suspiciously at his faded WE LIKE WHALES CONFERENCE 89 T-shirt and wiped the remaining sunscreen on her leg. " 'Kay," she said.

"You know, I sure wish I could figure out why these guys sing," Nate said, the hummingbird of his mind having tasted all the flowers in the garden to return to that one plastic daisy that would just not give up the nectar.

"No kidding?" Amy said, deadpan, smiling. "But if you figure it out, what would we do tomorrow?"

"Show off," Nate said, grinning.

"I'd be typing all day, analyzing research, matching photographs, filing song tapes —»

"Bringing us doughnuts," Nate added, trying to help.

Amy continued, counting down the list on her fingers, "- picking up blank tapes, washing down the trucks and the boats, running to the photo lab —»

"Not so fast," Nate interrupted.

"What, you're going to deprive me the joy of running to the photo lab while you bask in scientific glory?"

"No, you can still go to the photo lab, but Clay hired a guy to wash the trucks and boats."

A delicate hand went to her forehead as she swooned, the southern belle in hiking shorts, taken with the vapors. "If I faint and fall overboard, don't let me drown."

"You know, Amy," Nate said as he undressed the crossbow, "I don't know how it was at Boston doing survey, but in behavior, research assistants are only supposed to bitch about the humiliating grunt work and lowly status to other research assistants. It was that way when I was doing it, it was that way going back centuries, it has always been that way. Darwin himself had someone on the Beagle to file dead birds and sort index cards."

"He did not. I've never read anything about that."

"Of course you didn't. Nobody writes about research assistants." Nate grinned again, celebration for a small victory. He realized he wasn't working up to standards on managing this research assistant. His partner, Clay, had hired her almost two weeks ago, and by now he should have had her terrorized. Instead she was working him like a Starbucks froth slave.

"Ten minutes," Amy said, checking the timer on her watch. "You going to shoot him?"

"Unless you want to?" Nate notched the arrow into the crossbow. He tucked the windbreaker they used to «dress» the crossbow under the console. It was very politically incorrect to carry a weapon for shooting whales through the crowded Lahaina harbor, so they carried it inside the windbreaker, making it appear that they had a jacket on a hanger.

Amy shook her head violently. "I'll drive the boat."

"You should learn to do it."

"I'll drive the boat," Amy said.

"No one drives the boat." No one but Nate drove the boat. Granted, the Constantly Baffled was only a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat, and an agile four-year-old could pilot it on a calm day like today. Still, no one else drove the boat. It was a man thing, being inherently uncomfortable with the thought of a woman operating a boat or a television remote control.

"Up sounds," Nate said. They had a recording of the full sixteen-minute cycle of the song now — all the way through twice, in fact. He stopped the recorder and pulled up the hydrophone, then started the engine.

"There," Amy said, pointing to the white fins and flukes moving under the water. The whale blew only twenty yards off the bow. Nate buried the throttle. Amy was wrenched off her feet and just caught herself on the railing next to the wheel console as the boat shot forward. Nate pulled up on the right side of the whale, no more than ten yards away as the whale came up for the second time. He steadied the wheel with his hip, pulled up the crossbow, and fired. The bolt bounced off the whale's rubbery back, the hollow surgical steel arrowhead taking out a cookie-cutter plug of skin and blubber the size of a pencil eraser before the wide plastic tip stopped the penetration.

The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air, making a sound like a giant knuckle cracking as the massive tail muscles contracted.

"He's pissed," Nate said. "Let's go for a measurement."

"Now?" Amy questioned. Normally they would wait for another dive cycle. Obviously Nate thought that because of their taking the skin sample the whale might start traveling. They could lose him before getting a measurement.

"Now. I'll shoot, you work the rangefinder."

Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the camera frame when the whale dove. Amy grabbed the laser rangefinder, which looked very much like a pair of binoculars made for a cyclops. By taking a distance measurement from the animal's tail with the rangefinder and comparing the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relative size of the entire animal. Nate had come up with an algorithm that, so far, gave them the length of a whale with 98 percent accuracy. Just a few years ago they would've had to have been in an aircraft to measure the length of a whale.

"Ready," Amy said.

The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers had named them humpbacks in the first place). Amy fixed the rangefinder on the whale's back; Nate trained the camera's telephoto on the same spot, and the autofocus motors made tiny adjustments with the movement of the boat.

The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were — spelled out in foot-high black letters across the white — the words BITE ME!

Nate hit the shutter button. Shocked, he fell into the captain's chair, pulling back the throttle as he slumped. He let the Nikon sag in his lap.

"Holy shit!" Nate said. "Did you see that?"

"See what? I got seventy-three feet," Amy said, pulling down the rangefinder. "Probably seventy-six from where you are. What were your frame numbers?" She was reaching for the notebook as she looked back at Nate. "Are you okay?"

"Fine. Frame twenty-six, but I missed it," he lied. His mind was shuffling though a huge stack of index cards, searching a million article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what he'd just seen. It couldn't possibly have been real. The film would show it. "You didn't see any unusual markings when you did the ID photo?"