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

"And how did you know it was the whale on the phone?" asked Clay.

"Well, he told me that's who he was."

"And it was a male voice?"

"Well, it would be. He's a singer, isn't he?"

She'd gone on like that, reassuring him, encouraging him to go back to work, dismissing any guilt or grief, until he was almost to the gates of the compound before he remembered.

"She's a total loony!" he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nate's dead.

Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Clay could not make himself go to sleep. Instead he went to the office, knowing that nothing in the world could eat up time like editing video. He attached a digital video camera to his computer and turned on the recently replaced giant monitor. Blue filled the screen, and then he could sense the motion of descent, but there was only a faint hiss of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. He'd completely forgotten about it. The breath-holder's tail came into frame.

Clay's first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder — the best they'd ever recorded. As he passed the tail, the genital slit came into view, and he could tell that they were dealing with a male. There were black marks on the underside of the tail, but the view was still edge on, and he couldn't make out their shape. He heard a faint kazoo sound in the background and ran back the tape, with the sound turned up.

This time his breath sounded like a bull snorting before a charge, the kazoo sound, louder now, like a voice through wax paper. He ran back the tape again and cranked the sound all the way up, bringing down the high frequency to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

"He's close, Captain, really close. Too close."

Then the tail came down, and there was a deafening thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then settled as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clay's fin as he sank, and then it was just blue and the occasional shot of the lanyard that secured the camera to his wrist.

Clay ran the tape back again, confirmed the voices, then set it to dub onto the computer hard drive so he could manipulate the audio in a waveform, the way they did with sound recordings. Even though he was sure what was on the tape, he couldn't figure out how it could possibly have gotten there. Only five minutes of watching little progress bars move across the monitor, and he could stand the suspense no longer. He smiled to himself, because now was the time he would have gone to Nate, as he had so many times before, to help him figure out exactly what it was they were hearing or looking at, but Nate was gone. He checked his watch, and, deciding that it wasn't too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.

Amy wore an oversized, tattered "I'M WITH STUPID" nightshirt and Local Motion flip-flops. Her hair was completely flat on one side and splayed out into an improbable sunburst of spikes on the other, making it appear that she was getting hit in the side of the head by a tiny hurricane, which she wasn't. She was, however, performing the longest sustained yawn Clay had ever seen.

"Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a," she said in yawnspeak, a language — not unlike Hawaiian — known for its paucity of consonants. (You go ahead, I'm okay, she was saying.) She gestured for Clay to continue.

Clay cued the tape and fiddled with the audio. A whale tail in a field of blue passed by on the monitor.

"There's someone outside, Captain."

"Does he have my sandwich with him?"

Amy stopped yawning and scooted forward on the stool she was perched upon behind Clay. When the whale tail came down, Clay stopped the tape and looked back at her.

"Well?"

"Play it again."

He did. "Can we get a feeling for direction?" Amy asked. "That housing has stereo microphones, right? What if we move the speakers far apart — can we get a sense where it's coming from?"

Clay shook his head. "The mikes are right next to each other. You have to separate them by at least a meter to get any spatial information. All I can tell you is that it's in the water and it's not particularly loud. In fact, if I hadn't been using the rebreather, I'd never have heard it. You're the audio person. What can you tell me?" He ran it back and played it again.

"It's human speech."

Clay looked at her as if to say, Uh-huh, I woke you up because I needed the obvious pointed out.

"And it's military."

"Why do you think it's military?"

Now Amy gave Clay the same look that he had just finished giving her." 'Captain'?"

"Oh, right," said Clay. "Speaker in the water? Divers with underwater communications? What do you think?"

"Didn't sound like it. Did it sound like it was coming from small speakers to you?"

"Nope." Clay played it again. "Sandwich?" he said.

"Sandwich?"

"The Old Broad said that someone called her claiming to be a whale and asked her to tell Nate to bring him a sandwich."

Amy squeezed Clay's shoulder. "He's gone, Clay. I know you don't believe what I saw happened, but it certainly wasn't about a sandwich conspiracy."

"I'm not saying that, Amy. Damn it. I'm not saying this had anything to do with Nate's" — he was going to say drowning and stopped himself — "accident. But it might have to do with the lab getting wrecked, the tapes getting stolen, and someone trying to mess with the Old Broad. Someone is fucking with us, Amy, and it might be whoever is recorded on this tape."

"And there's no way the camera could have pulled a signal out of the air, something on the same frequency or something? A mobile phone or something?"

"Through a half-inch of powder-coated aluminum housing and a hundred feet of water? No, that signal came in through the mike. That I'm sure of."

Amy nodded and looked at the paused picture on the screen. "So you're looking for two things: someone military and someone who has an interest in Nate's work."

"No one — " Clay stopped himself again, remembering what he'd said to Nate when the lab had been wrecked. That no one cared about their work. But obviously someone did. "Tarwater?"

Amy shrugged. "He's military. Maybe. Leave the tape out. I'll run a spectrograph on the audio in the morning, see if I can tell if it's coming through some kind of amplifier. I've got nothing left tonight — I'm beat."

"Thanks," Clay said. "You get some rest, kiddo. I'm going to hit it, too. I'll be heading down to the harbor first thing."

" 'Kay."

"Oh, and hey, the 'kiddo' thing, I didn't mean —»

Amy threw her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. "You big mook. Don't worry, we'll get through this." She turned and started out the door.

"Amy?"

She paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Can I ask you a… personal question, kinda?"

"Shoot."

"The shirt — who's stupid?"

She looked down at her shirt, then back at him and grinned. "Always seems to apply, Clay. No matter where I am or who I'm with, the smoke clears and the shirt is true. You gotta hang on to truth when you find it."

"I like truth," Clay said.

"Night, Clay."

"Night, kiddo."

The next day the weather was blown out, with whitecaps frosting the entire channel across to Lanai and the coconut palms whipping overhead like epileptic dust mops. Clay drove by the harbor in his truck, noting that the cabin cruiser that Cliff Hyland's group had been using was parked in its slip. Then he turned around and caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye as he drove past the hundred-year-old Pioneer Inn — Captain Tarwater's navy whites standing out against the green shiplap. He parked his truck by the giant banyan tree next door and humped it over to the restaurant.