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

"Yeah." He looked off toward Lahaina, the harbor he'd piloted into a thousand times. They'd have to anchor far outside the breakwater with a ship this size, but it still had the feeling of coming home. The wind was warm and sweet, the water the heartbreak blue of a newborn's eyes. A humpback fluked about eight hundred yards to the north of them, its tail glistening in the sun as if it were covered with sequins.

"There's still a month left of the season," Clay said. "We can still get some work done."

"Clay, I've been thinking. Maybe we can be a little more purposeful in what we're doing. Maybe a little more active, conservation-wise."

"I could go for that. I like whales."

"I mean, we have the resources now, and even if I could prove the meaning of the song — somehow decipher the vocabulary of it — I could never prove the purpose. You know, without compromising Gooville."

"Not a good idea." During the trip home Nate had explained it all.

"I mean, there's no reason we can't do good science and still, you know —»

"Kick some ass."

"Well, yeah."

Clay affected an exaggerated Greek accent. "Sometimes, boss, you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble."

"Zorba?"

"Yeah." Clay grinned.

"Great book," Nate said. "Is that the Always Confused?"

Clay pulled up a pair of binoculars and focused on a speedboat that was rounding the Lahaina breakwater, showing more wake than she should in the harbor. Kona was driving the Always Confused.

"My boat," Clay said, somewhat distressed.

"You need to get over that, Clay."

The speedboat came around to a parallel course with the Clair as the ship cut her engines in preparation to drop anchor. Kona was waving and screaming like a madman. "Irie, Bwana Nate! Irie! The lion come home! Praise Jah's mercy. Irie!"

Nate came down the steps from the flying bridge to the deck. Whatever resentment he might have had for the surfer at one time was gone. Whatever threat he might have felt from the boy had melted away. Whatever irrelevancy Kona's youth and strength might have underscored in his own character was irrelevant. Maybe it was time to be an example instead of a competitor. Besides, he was genuinely glad to see the kid. "Hey, kid, how you doing?"

"Jammin' now, don't you know."

"That's good. How'd you like to go be a pirate?"

Because the Navy didn't maintain permanent offices on Maui, Captain L. J. Tarwater had been given a small office that the navy sublet for him in the Coast Guard building, which meant that, unlike on a naval base, here the public could pretty much come and go as they wished. So Tarwater wasn't that surprised to see someone come strolling through his office door. What he was surprised by was that it was Nathan Quinn, whom he thought quite drowned, and who was carrying a four-gallon glass jar full of some clear liquid.

"Quinn, I thought you were lost at sea."

"I was. I'm found now. We need to have a chat." He set the jar on Tarwater's desk, leaving a wet ring on some papers there, then went back and shut the door to the outer offices.

"Look, Quinn, if this is some kind of stunt, like spray-painting fur, you're wasting your time. You guys act like the military is the great Satan. I'm here to study these animals. I grew up in the same generation you did, and so did most of the people in the navy who do what I do. We don't want to hurt these animals."

"Okay," Nate said. "We only have two things to talk about here. Then I'll show you something."

"What's in the jar? That better not be kerosene or anything."

"It's seawater. I got it at the beach about ten minutes ago. Don't worry about it. Look, first you're going to finish your study and you're going to strongly recommend that the navy's torpedo range not be moved into the sanctuary. You will not let that happen. The animals do dive to depths where they can be hurt by the explosions, and they will be hurt by the explosions, which you'll be setting off not to defend the country but just so you guys can practice."

"There's no evidence that they ever dive deeper than two hundred feet."

"There will be. I've got data tags coming in from the mainland, I'll have data in a month."

"Still…"

"Shut up," Nate said, then thought better of it and added, "Please." Then he continued. "Second, you need to do everything in your power to back off of testing low-frequency active sonar. We know that it kills deepwater hunters like beaked whales, and there's probably some chance that it also injures the humpbacks, and under no circumstances do you want to do that."

"And why would that be?"

"You know what my work has been for the last twenty-five years, right?"

"You've been studying the humpback song. What, trying to figure its purpose?"

"I found it, Tarwater. It's a prayer. The singers are praying."

"That's preposterous. There's no way you could know that."

"I'm positive of it. Absolutely positive. I know it's a prayer, and that the torpedo base and LFA will harm a God-fearing animal." Nate paused to let it sink in, but Tarwater just looked at him like he was an annoying rodent that had crawled in from the cane fields.

"How could you possibly know that, Quinn?"

"Because their prayers are answered." Nate took a portable tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and set it on the desk next to the seawater, into which he'd already mixed part of the Goo that Amy had given him. He pushed the «play» button, and the sound of humpback-whale song filled the office.

"This is ridiculous," Tarwater said.

"Watch," Nate said, pointing to the water, which began to swirl, a tiny pink vortex forming in the middle.

"Get out of here. I'm not impressed with your Mr. Wizard tricks, Quinn."

"Watch," Nate said again. As they watched, the pink vortex expanded while the whale song played, until half the jar was filled with a moving pink stain. Then Nate turned off the tape.

"So what?" Tarwater said.

"Look more closely." Nate opened the jar, reached in, strained out some of the pink, and threw it on Tarwater's desk. Tiny shrimp — each only an inch long — flipped about on the blotter. "Krill," Nate said.

Tarwater didn't say anything. He just looked at the krill, then scraped a couple into his hand and examined them more closely. "They are krill."

"Uh-huh."

"What, it's like Sea Monkees, right? You had brine-shrimp eggs in there."

"No, Captain Tarwater, I did not. The humpbacks are praying, and God is answering them, giving them food. We could run this little experiment a hundred times, and that water would be clear when we started and full of krill when we ended. Trust me, I've done it." And he had. The little bit of Goo in the water created the krill out of the other life in there, the ubiquitous SAR-11 bacteria that existed in every liter of seawater on the planet.

Tarwater held up the krill. "But I thought they didn't eat when they were here."

"You're thinking on too small a scale. They don't feed for four months, and then they do nothing but feed. They're thinking in advance — the way you might think about breakfast before you go to bed at night. Doesn't matter, really. What you need to do, Captain, is everything in your power and influence to stop the range and the LFA testing."

Tarwater looked stunned now. "I'm just a captain."

"But you're an ambitious captain. I can have a jar of seawater on the secretary of the navy's desk in ten hours. Do you really want to be the one to explain to this administration that you're hurting an animal that prays to God? Particularly this administration?"

"No, sir, I do not," said Tarwater, looking decidedly more frightened than he had been just a second before.