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

"You're unbelievably lucky." Nate knew that any lecture he might come up with, Clay had already put himself through a dozen times. Still, he had to say it. Regardless of the outcome, he had endured the loss of his friend, even if was for only forty minutes or so. "Unconscious, that deep, for that long — you used up a lot of lives on that one, Clay. The fact that your mouthpiece stayed in is a miracle."

"Well, that part wasn't an accident. I have the hoses tight because the rebreather is so temperamental about getting water in it. Over the years I've had mouthpieces knocked out of my mouth a hundred times, kicked out by another diver, camera caught on it, hit by a dolphin. Since you have to keep your head back to film most of the time anyway, with the hoses short so the thing stays in your mouth, it's just a matter of keeping the seal. Man's only instinct is to suck."

"And you suck, is that what you're saying?"

"Look, Nate, I know you're mad, but I'm okay. Something was going on with that animal. It distracted me. It won't happen again. I owe it to the kid, though."

"We thought we'd lost her, too."

"She's good, Nate. Really good. She kept her head, she did what needed to be done, and damned if I know how she did it, but she brought my ancient ass up alive and without the bends. Situation was reversed, I would have never done the decompression stops, but it turns out she did the right thing. You can't teach that kind of judgment."

"You're just trying to change the subject."

Clay was indeed trying to change the subject. "How'd Toronto do against Edmonton tonight?"

Oh, sure, thought Nate, try to appeal to his inherent Canadian weakness for hockey. Like playing the hockey card would distract him from — "I don't know. Let's check the score."

From outside the screen door came Clair's voice. "Clay Demodocus, are you wearing my robe?"

"Why, yes, dear, I am," said Clay, shooting an embarrassed glance at Quinn, as if he'd only just noticed that he was wearing a woman's kimono.

"Well, that would mean that I'm wearing nothing, wouldn't it?" said Clair. She wasn't close enough to the door for him to actually see her through the screen, but Quinn had no doubt she was naked, had her hip cocked, and was tapping a foot in the sand.

"I guess," said Clay. "We were just going to check the hockey scores, sweetheart. Would you like to come in?"

"There's a skinny kid with a half order of dreadlocks and an erection out here staring at me, Clay, and it's making me feel a little self-conscious."

"I woke up with it, Bwana Clay," Kona said. "No disrespect."

"He's an employee, darling." Clay said reassuringly. Then to Quinn he whispered, "I had better go."

"You better had," said Quinn.

"See you in the morning."

"You should take the day off."

"Nah, I'll see you in the morning. What are you working on anyway?"

"Putting the subsonic part of the song in binary."

"Ah, interesting."

"Feeling vulnerable out here," Clair said. "Vulnerable and angry."

"I had better go," said Clay.

"Night, Clay."

An hour later, just when Nate was getting to the point where he felt he had enough samples marked out in binary to start looking for some sort of pattern, the third spirit in the night came through the door: Amy, in a man's T-shirt that hung to midthigh, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

"The hell you doing up at this hour? It's three in the morning."

"Working?"

Amy padded barefoot across the floor and looked at the monitor where Quinn was working, trying to blink the bleariness out of her eyes. "That the low end of the song?"

"Yeah, that and some blue-whale calls I had, for comparison."

Quinn could smell some kind of berry shampoo smell coming off of Amy, and he became hyperaware of the warmth of her pressing against his shoulder. "I don't understand. You're digitizing it manually? That seems a little primitive. The signal is already digitized by virtue of being on the disk, isn't it?"

"I'm looking at it a different way. It will probably wash out, but I'm looking at the waveform of just the low end. There's no behavior for context, so it's probably a waste of time anyway."

"But still you're up at three in the morning anyway, making ones and zeroes on a screen. Mind if I ask why?"

Quinn waited a second before answering, trying to figure out what to do. He wanted to turn to look at her, but she was so close that he'd be right in her face if he did. This wasn't the time. Instead he dropped his hands into his lap and sighed heavily as if this were all too tedious. He looked at the monitor as he spoke. "Okay, Amy, here's why. Here it is. The whole payoff, the whole jazz of what we do, okay?"

"Okay." She sensed the unease in his voice and stepped back.

Nate turned and looked her in the eye. "It might be out on the boat, as you're coming in for the day — or it might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be. That's the jazz, Amy. That's why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."

Amy stood with her hands clenched in front of her, arms straight down, like a little girl trying to ignore a lecture. She looked at the floor. "So you're saying that you're about to have one of these moments and I'm bugging you?"

"No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just telling you why I'm doing it. And that's why you're doing it, too. You just don't know it yet."

"And what if someone told you that you'd never have one of those moments of knowing something again — would you keep doing it?"

"That won't happen."

"So you're close to something here? With this binary thing?"

"Maybe."

"Didn't Ryder analyze the song as far as how much information it could carry and come up with something really anemic like point six bits per second? That's not really enough to make it meaningful, is it?" Growl Ryder had been Quinn's doctoral adviser at UC Santa Cruz. One of the first generation of greats in the field, along with Ken Norris and Roger Payne, a true kahuna. His first name was actually Gerard, but anyone who had known him called him Growl, because of his perpetually surly nature. Ten years ago, off the Aleutians, he'd gone out alone in a Zodiac to record blue-whale calls and had never come back. Quinn smiled at his memory. "True, but Ryder died before he finished that work, and he was looking at the musical notes and themes for information. I'm actually looking at waveform. Just from what I've done tonight, it looks like you can get up to fifty, sixty bits per second. That's a lot of information."

"That can't be right. That won't work," Amy said. She seemed to be taking this information a bit more emotionally than Nate would have expected. "If you could move that much information subsonically, the navy would be using it for submarines. Besides, how could the whales use waveform? They'd need oscilloscopes." She was up on her toes now, almost shouting.

"Calm down, I'm just looking into it. Dolphins and bats don't need oscilloscopes to image sonically. Maybe there's something there. Just because I'm using a computer to look at this data doesn't mean I think whales are digital. It's only a model, for Christ's sake." He was going to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but then remembered her attitude toward that at the jail.