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

"Among other things. We conversed. And so she invited me to go see a manatee."

"He shoots! He scores!"

"But I thought it was an American way of saying matinee. I thought we were going to a movie. You know, you don't think about those things as being real."

"But it was."

"She did volunteer work for a rescue hospital for injured marine mammals, mostly manatees that had been hit by boats. They had a bottlenose dolphin, too. We stayed there for hours, caring for the animals, her teaching me about them. I was hooked. I hadn't even picked my undergrad major, but as soon as I got back to school, I went for biology, and I've been studying marine mammals ever since."

"Oh, my God, you didn't get laid, did you?"

"I found a passion for life. I found something that drives me."

"I can't believe I fell for such a pathetic loser."

"Hey, I'm pretty good at this whale stuff. I'm respected in my field."

"But you're dead."

"Yeah, before then, I mean. Hey, did you say that you fell for me?"

"I said I fell for a pathetic loser, if the shoe fits…"

He kissed her. She kissed him back. That went on for a while. They both found it excellent. Then they stopped.

"You said you wanted to talk about our age difference," Nate said, because he always picked women who broke his heart, and, figuring that his heart was now into this whole thing far enough to be broken, he wanted to get on with it.

"Yeah, we probably should. Maybe we should sit down."

"Couch?"

"No, at the table. You might want a drink."

"No, I'm okay." Yep, heartbreak, he thought. They sat.

"So," she said, curling her legs up under her, sitting like a little kid, making him feel ever more the creepy old guy leching on the young girl, "you know that the whaley boys have been pulling people in here from shipwrecks and plane crashes for years, right?"

"That's what Cielle said."

"She wants you, I can tell, but that's beside the point. Do you know that they pulled whole crews off sunken submarines, plus they've yanked sonar guys out of port for years?"

"I didn't know that."

"Doesn't matter, has nothing to do with what I'm telling you. So you realize that some people who have been lost at sea, like the crew of the American sub Scorpion that sank back in 67, actually ended up here?"

"Okay. That makes sense. More of the Goo looking out for itself. Gaining knowledge."

"Yeah, but that's not the point. I mean, those guys helped put together a lot of the technology you saw on the whale ship, the human technology, but that doesn't matter. The important part is that the world thinks that the crew of the Scorpion is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, even though they're not. Got it?"

"Okay," Nate said, really slowly, the way he had spoken to the Colonel when he was losing the point — much the way he was waving in the conversational wind right now.

"And you realize that when I applied with you and Clay, that I gave my real name, which is Amy Earhart, and that Amy is short for Amelia?"

"Oh, my God," Nate said.

"Ha!" Amy said.

The ship broker found Clay's ship in the Philippines, in Manila Harbor. Clay bought it based on faxed photographs, a spec sheet, and a recent hull certification for just under $2 million of the Old Broad's money. It was a 180-foot-long U.S. Coast Guard fisheries patrol vessel built in the late fifties. It had been refitted several times since then, once in the seventies for fishing, once in the eighties for ocean survey, and finally in the nineties as a live-aboard dive boat for the adventure tourist. It had plenty of comfortable cabins as well as compressors, dive platforms, and cranes to raise and lower support vessels onto the rear deck, although, except for the lifeboats, it came with no support craft. Clay thought they could use the rear deck as a helicopter-landing pad, even if there wasn't a budget for a helicopter, but — you know — someone with a helicopter might want to land there, and it helped no end to have a big H painted on the deck. There was a budget for painting a big H. The ship had efficient, if not quite state-of-the-art, navigation equipment, radar, autopilot, and some old but functioning sonar arrays left over from its days as a fishing ship. It had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower diesel engines and could distill up to twenty tons of freshwater a day for the crew and passengers. There were cabins and support for forty. It was also rated a class-three icebreaker, which was a feature that Clay hoped they wouldn't have to test. He really didn't like cold water.

Through another broker Clay hired the crew of ten men, sight unseen, right off the docks of Manila: a group of brothers, cousins, and uncles with the last name of Mangabay, among whom the broker guaranteed that there were no murderers, or at least no convicted murderers, and only petty thieves. The eldest uncle, Ray Mangabay, who would be Clay's first mate, would sail the ship to Honolulu, where Clay would meet them.

"He's going to be driving my ship," Clay said to Clair after he'd gotten the news that he had a crew and a first mate.

"You have to let your ship go, Clay," Clair said. "If he sinks it, it wasn't really yours."

"But it's my ship."

"What are you going to call it?"

He was thinking about the Intrepid or the Merciless or some other big-dick, blow-shit-up kind of name. He was thinking about Loyal or Relentless or the Never Surrender, because he was determined now to find his friend, and he didn't mind putting that right on the bow. "Well, I was thinking about —»

"You were thinking deeply about it, weren't you?" Clair interrupted.

"Yes, I thought I'd call her the Beautiful Clair."

"Just the Clair will be fine, baby. You don't want the bow to look busy."

"Right. The Clair." Strangely enough, on second thought, that pretty much encompassed Intrepid, Merciless, Relentless, and Loyal. Plus, it had the underlying meaning of keeper of the booty, which was sort of a bonus in a ship name, he thought. "Yeah, that's a good name for her."

"How long before she gets here?"

"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."

"Well, now that she's called the Clair, I hope they bring her in safe."

"My ship," Clay said anxiously.

"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"

"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.

Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.

"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger — and decidedly luscious, I might add — woman had chosen you, right?"

"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?

"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent —»

"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.

"So the age thing? It's a problem?"

"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."

"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."

"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."