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

"I'm sorry, Clay. I didn't get the video, but I pulled the audio off before this happened. Want to see the spectrograph?"

Kona asked, "You think those voices in the water be navy divers?"

Clay looked at Amy, raised an eyebrow.

"He wanted to learn."

"Cliff says there're no divers in the water, that his operation is it, militarily, in the sanctuary anyway. But he might not even know."

Amy wadded up the videotape and chucked the resulting bird's nest into the wastebasket. "How can they do that, Clay? How can they put a torpedo range in the middle of the humpback sanctuary? It's not like people won't notice."

"Yeah, she's a big ocean. Why here?" Kona said.

"I have no idea. Maybe they don't want there to be any mistake about whose waters they're blowing up ordnance in. If they blow them up in between a bunch of American islands, maybe there can't be any misinterpretation about what they're doing."

"Lost now," Kona said. "Does not compute. Danger. Danger. Control room needs herb." The Rastafarian had affected an accent that seemed an excellent approximation of how a stoned robot might sound.

"Submarine warfare is all about hide and seek with other submarines," Clay said. "The crews are autonomous when they're underwater. They make decisions on whether they're being attacked and whether to defend. Maybe if the navy just shot torpedoes off in the middle of the open sea, someone might misinterpret the action as an attack. It's damn unlikely that a Russian sub is going to be cruising up to Wailea for brunch and misinterpret an attack."

"They can't do that," Amy said. "They can't let them set off high explosives around the mothers and calves. It's just insane."

"They'll go deep and say it doesn't bother them. The navy will guarantee they won't blow up anything shallower than, say, four hundred feet. The humpbacks don't dive that deep in this channel."

"Yes they do," Amy said.

"No they don't," Clay said.

"Yes they do."

"There's no data on that, Amy. That's specifically what Cliff Hyland asked me about. He wanted to know if we were doing any research on the depth of humpback dives. Said that it would be the only thing the navy would care about."

Amy stood up and shoved the wheeled desk chair away. It bounced off Kona's shins, causing him to wince. "Ease on up, sistah."

"Amy, this wasn't my idea," Clay said. "I'm just telling you what Hyland told me."

"Fine," Amy said. She pushed her way past Clay and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Somewhere else." She let the screen door slam behind her.

Clay turned to Kona, who appeared to be studying the ceiling with great concentration. "What?"

"You makin' up that submarine war story?"

"Kind of. I read a Tom Clancy book once. Look, Kona, I'm not supposed to know stuff. Nate knew stuff. I just take the pictures."

"You think the navy sink your boat? Maybe make something bad happen to Nate?"

"The boat, maybe. I don't think they could have had anything to do with Nate. That was just bad luck."

"The Snowy Biscuit — all this getting under her skin."

"Mine, too."

"I'll go put the calm on her."

"Thanks," Clay said. He walked to the other side of the office, slumped in his chair, and pulled his editing tools up on the giant monitor.

A half hour later he heard a tiny voice coming through the screen door. "Sorry," Amy said.

"It's okay."

She stepped into the room and stood there, not looking as glazed as he would have expected if Kona had put the calm on her in an herbal way. "Sorry about your tape, too. The camera was making crunching noises on playback, so I sort of rushed taking it out."

"Not a problem. It was your big rescue scene. It just made me look like an amateur. I got most of it on the hard drive, I think."

"You did?" She stepped over to the monitor. "That it?" Frame stopped, the whale tail from the edge, black marks barely visible.

"Just going through it to see if there's anything else the audio picked up. The camera was running the whole time you were saving my bacon."

"Why don't you let it rest and let me take you out to lunch."

"It's ten-thirty."

"What, you're Mr. Rigid Schedule all of a sudden? Come out to lunch with me. I feel bad."

"Don't feel bad, Amy. It's a huge loss. I… I'm not dealing well myself. You know, to keep this work going, we'll be needing some academic juice."

Amy just stared at the frozen image of the whale tail, and then she caught herself. "What? Oh, you'll get someone. You put the word out, you'll have Ph.D.'s knocking the door down to work with you."

"I was thinking about you."

"Me? I'm crap. I don't even have a bona fide hair color. Ink on my master's isn't even dry. You read my resume."

"Actually, I didn't."

"You didn't?"

"You seemed intelligent. You were willing to work for nothing."

"Nate read it, though, right?"

"I told him you were good. And if it's any consolation, he thought the world of you."

"That's how you hire? I'm smart and I'm cheap — that's it? What kind of standards do you guys have?"

"Have you met Kona?"

She looked back at the monitor, then at Clay again. "I feel so used. Honored, but used. Look, I'm thrilled you want to keep me on, but I'm not going to bring you funding or legitimacy."

"I'll worry about that."

"Worry about it after lunch. Come on, I'll buy."

"You're poor. Besides, I'm meeting Clair for lunch at one."

"Okay. Can I borrow Nate's — uh, the green truck?"

"Keys are on the counter." Clay waved over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

Amy took the keys, then started out the door, caught herself, then ran back, and threw her arms around the photographer. "I really appreciate your asking me to stay."

"Go. Take Kona with you. Feed him. Hose him off."

"Nope, if you're not coming, I'm going solo. Tell Clair hi for me."

"Go."

He looked back at the computer, looked past the window at the brilliant Maui sun, then shut the computer down, feeling very much as if nothing he did mattered or would ever matter again.

The whale tossed like a roller coaster moving through tomato soup — great gut-flopping waves of muscular motion. Quinn rolled to his hands and knees and urped his breakfast into a splatter pattern across the rubbery gray floor, then heaved in time with the rhythm of the whale's swimming until he was empty and exhausted.

"Hurl patrol," came a voice out of the dark.

"Flush and gush, boys, the doc blew ballast back here," came another voice.

Quinn rolled onto his bottom and scooted away from the voices until he came against a bulkhead, which was warm and moist and gave at his touch. He felt huge muscles moving behind the skin and nearly jumped. He scooted away, then sat balled up near where he'd been sick. Cold seawater rolled down from the front of the whale and over his feet, taking his recently vacated breakfast with it. His ears popped with a pressure increase, and in a second the water was gone.

The interior of the whale looked like a bad van conversion done by a latex freak: damp, rubbery skin over everything, lit by a light blue haze coming from the eyes up front, the rest dimly lit by bioluminescent strips of green that ran over the top of the teardrop-shaped chamber. At the front of the chamber, on either side by the eyes, two things sat in seats that wrapped around their bodies. Quinn didn't know what they were, and his mind felt as if it were ripping open trying to grasp the whole of the situation. Details like nonhuman humanoids decked out in gray skin couldn't register enough space in his consciousness to be examined or analyzed. In fact, he could keep his eyes open for only a few seconds before the nausea returned.