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

Nate tried to put himself in their world — no boundaries, no obstacles. They lived, for the most part, in a world of sound, yet they had acute eyesight, both in and out of the water, and special muscles in the eye that allowed them to change focus for either medium. You interacted with animals you could both see and not see. When Nate and Clay used satellite tags, of which they could afford only a few, or rented a helicopter, from which they could observe animals from a wide perspective, it appeared that the whales were indeed responding to each other from miles apart. How do you study an animal that is socializing over a distance of miles? The key had to be in the song, in the signal somewhere. If for no other reason than that was the only way to approach the problem.

Midnight found him sitting alone in the office, lit only by the glow of his computer monitor, having forgotten to eat, drink, or relieve himself for four hours, when Kona came in.

"What's that?" asked the surfer, pointing to the spectrograph that was scrolling across the screen.

Nate nearly jumped out of the chair, then caught himself and pulled the headphones down. "The part that's scrolling is the spectrograph of the humpback song. The different colors are frequency, or pitch. The wiggly line in this box is an oscilloscope. It shows frequency, too, but I can use it to isolate each range by clicking on it."

Kona was eating a banana. He handed another one to Nate without taking his eyes off the screen. "So this is what it looks like? The song?" Kona had forgotten to affect any of his accents, so Nate forgot to be sarcastic in reply.

"It's a way of looking at it. Humans are visual animals. Our brains are better suited to process visual information rather than acoustic information, so it's easier for us to think about sound by looking at it. A whale or a dolphin's brain is structured to process acoustics more than visuals."

"What are you looking for?"

"I'm not sure. I'm looking for a signal. For some pattern of information in the structure of the song."

"Like a message?"

"Maybe a message."

"And it's not in the musical parts?" Kona asked. "The difference in notes? Like a song? You know the prophet Bob Marley gave us the wisdom of HIM in song."

Quinn swiveled in his chair and paused in midbite of his banana. "HIM? What's that?"

"His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ on earth, son of God. His blessings upon us. Jah, mon."

"You mean Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king who died in the 1970s? That Haile Selassie?"

"Yah mon. HIM, the direct descendant of David as foretold in Isaiah, through the divine consort Solomon and Makeda, the queen of Sheba, and from their sons all the emperors of Ethiopia have come. So we Rastas believe that Haile Selassie is Jesus Christ alive on earth."

"But he's dead, how's that work?"

"It helps to be stoned."

"I see," Nate said. Well, that did explain a lot. "Anyway, to answer your question, yes, we've looked at the musical transmission, but despite Bob Marley I think the answer is here, in this low register, but only because it travels the farthest."

"Can you freeze this?" said Kona, pointing to the oscilloscope, a green line dancing on a field of black.

Nate clicked it and froze a jagged line on the screen. "Why?"

"Those teeth? See, there are tall ones and not so tall ones."

"They're called microoscillations. You can only see them if you have the wave stopped like this."

"What if the tall one is a one and the short one is a zero? What's that?"

"Binary?"

"Yah, mon, what if it's computer talk, like that?"

Nate was stunned. Not because he thought Kona was right, but because the kid had actually had the cognitive powers to come up with the question. Nate wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd walked in on a team of squirrels building a toaster oven. Maybe the kid had run out of pot, and this spike in intelligence was just a withdrawal symptom.

"That's not a bad guess, Kona, but the only way the whales would know about this would be if they had oscilloscopes."

"And they don't?"

"No, they don't."

"Oh, and that acoustic brain? That couldn't see this?"

"No," said Nate, not entirely sure that he hadn't just lied. He'd never thought of it before.

"Okay. I go for to sleep now. You need more grinds?"

"No. Thanks for the banana."

"Jah's blessing, mon. Thanks for getting me out for jail this day. We going go out next morning?"

"Maybe not everyone. We'll have to see how Clay feels tomorrow. He went right to his cabin when Clair brought him home from the hospital."

"Oh, Boss Clay got cool runnings, brah. He having sweet agonies with Sistah Clair. I hear them love jams as I'm coming over."

"Well, good," Nate said, thinking from Kona's tone and his smile that whatever he said must have been good. "Good night, Kona."

"Good night, boss."

Before the surfer was out the door, Nate had turned to the monitor and started mapping out peaks in the wave pattern of the low end of the whale song. He'd need to look up some articles on blue-whale calls — the lowest, loudest, longest-traveling calls on the planet — and he'd have to see if anyone had done any numerical analysis on dolphin sonar clicks, and that was all he could think of right at the moment. In the meantime he had to have enough of a sample to see if there was any meaning there. It was ridiculous, of course. It would never be so simple, nor could it be so complex. Of course you could assign values of one or zero to parts of the song — that was easy. It didn't mean there would be any meaning to it. It wouldn't necessarily answer any of their questions, but it was a different way of looking at things. Whale-call binary, no.

Two hours later he was still assigning ones and zeroes to different microoscillations in wave patterns of different songs and felt as if he might actually, strangely, amazingly, be learning something, when Clay came through the door wearing a knee-length pink kimono emblazoned with huge white chrysanthemums. There was a small bandage on his forehead and what appeared to be a lipstick smear that ran from his mouth to his right ear.

"Any beer in there?" Clay nodded to the kitchen. The office cabin, like all the others at Papa Lani, had once been living quarters for a whole family, so it had a full kitchen in addition to the great room they used for a main office, two smaller rooms they used for storage, and a bathroom. Clay padded past and threw open the refrigerator. "Nope. Water, I guess. I'm really dehydrated."

"You okay," Nate said. "How was the CAT scan?"

"I'm cat free." Clay came back to the office and fell into the chair in front of his broken monitor. "Thirteen stitches in my scalp, maybe a mild concussion. I'll be okay. Clair may kill me yet tonight, though — heart attack, stroke, affection. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring out the passion in a woman. You can't believe the stuff that woman is doing to me. And she's a schoolteacher. It's shameful." Clay grinned, and Nate noticed a little lipstick on his teeth.

"So that's shame?" Nate gestured for Clay to wipe his mouth.

The photographer took a swipe across his mug, came up with a handful of color, and examined it. "No, I think that's strawberry lip gloss. A woman her age wearing flavored lip gloss. The shame is in my heart."

"You really had her worried, Clay. Me, too. If Amy hadn't kept her head… well —»

"I fucked up. I know it. I started living in the viewfinder and forgot where I was. It was an amateurish mistake. But you can't believe the footage I was getting using the rebreather. It's going to be amazing for singers. I'm finally going to be able to get underneath them, beside them, whatever you need. I just need to remember where I am."