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

"I thought you were an intelligent man. I trust you'll handle this, and this will be the last anyone will hear of my jar."

"Yes, sir," Tarwater said, more out of habit than respect.

Nate took his tape recorder and his jar and walked out, grinning to himself, thinking about the praying humpbacks. Of course, it's not your particular God, he thought, but they do pray, and their god does feed them.

He headed back to Papa Lani to make the calls and write the paper that would torpedo any hope of Jon Thomas Fuller's ever building a captive dolphin petting zoo on Maui.

A pirate's work is never done.

Three months later the Clair cruised into the cold coastal waters off Chile on her way to Antarctica to intercept, stop, harass, and generally make business difficult for the Japanese whaling ship Kyo Maru. Clay was at the helm, and when the ship reached a precise point on the GPS receiver, he ordered the engines cut. It was a sunny day, unusually calm for this part of the Pacific. The water was so dark blue it almost appeared black.

Clair was below in their cabin. She'd been seasick for most of the voyage, but she had insisted on coming along despite the nausea, using her saber-edged persuasive skills on the captain. ("Who's got the pirate booty? All right, then, help me pack.")

Nate stood on the deck at the bow, his arm around Elizabeth Robinson. Above them swung an eighteen-foot rigid-hull Zodiac on a crane, ready to drop into the water whenever it was needed. There was another one on the stern, where once the submarine had been stowed. Up on the flying bridge, Kona scanned the sea around them with a pair of «big-eye» binoculars on a heavy iron mount that was welded to the railing.

"There's one, a thousand yards."

Clay came out onto the walkway beside Kona. They all looked to starboard, where the residual cloud of a whale blow was hanging over the calm water.

"Another one!" Clay shouted, pointing to a second blow closer to the ship off the port bow.

Then they started firing into the air as if triggered by a chained fuse: whale blows of different shapes, heights, and angles — great explosions of spray erupting so close to the ship now that the decks started to glisten with the moisture. Then the backs of the great whales rolled in the water around them, gray and black and blue, hills of slick flesh on all sides, moving slowly, then lying in the water. Nate and Elizabeth moved up to the bow railing and watched a group of sperm whales lolling in the water like logs just a few feet off the bow. Next to them a wide right whale floated, bobbing gently in the swell, only a slow wave of the tail revealing that the creature was alive. It rolled to one side, and its eye bulged as it looked at them.

"You okay?" Nate asked Elizabeth, squeezing her shoulder. This was the first time she'd been out on the water in over forty years. In her hands she clutched a brown paper lunch bag.

"They're still amazing up close. I'd forgotten."

"Just wait."

There were probably a hundred animals of different species around the ship now, most rolled on their side, one eye bulged out to focus in the air. Their blows settled into a syncopated rhythm, like cylinders of some great engine firing in succession.

Kona jumped up and down next to Clay, praising Jah and laughing as each animal breathed or flicked a tail. "Irie, my whaley friends!" he shouted, waving to the animals close to the boat. Clay desperately resisted the urge to grab up cameras and start blasting film or digital video. It felt like he had to pee, really badly, from his eyes.

"Nate," Clay called, and he pointed to a bubble net forming just outside the ring of floating whales. They'd seen them dozens of times in Alaska and Canada, one humpback circling and releasing a stream of bubbles to corral a school of fish while others plunged up through the middle to catch them. The circle of bubbles became more pronounced on the surface, as if the water were boiling, and then a single humpback breached through the ring, cleared the water completely, and landed on its side in white crater of splash and spray.

"Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth said. Flustered, she pressed her face into Nate's jacket, then looked back quickly, lest she miss something.

"They're showing off," Clay said.

The lolling whales lazily paddled out of the way, opening a corridor to the ship. The humpback motorboated toward the bow, its knobby face riding on top of the water. When it was only ten yards from the bow, the animal rose up in the water and opened its mouth. Amy stood up, and next to her stood James Poynter Robinson.

"Hey, can we get a ladder down here?" Amy shouted.

"Praise Jah's mercy," Kona said, "the Snowy Biscuit has come home."

Nate threw a cargo net over the side, then climbed halfway down and pulled Amy up onto the net. He held her there as the ship moved in the swell, and she tried to kiss him and nearly chipped a tooth.

"Help me with Elizabeth," Nate said.

Together they got the Old Broad down the cargo net and handed her to her husband, who stood on the tongue of a whale and hugged his bride after not seeing her for four decades.

"You look so young," Elizabeth said.

"We can fix that," he said.

"You'll get old?"

"Nope." He looked back to Nate and saluted. Nate could hear whaley-boy pilots snickering inside the whale.

"I brought you a pastrami on rye," she said.

Poynter took the paper bag from her as if he were accepting the Holy Grail.

Nate and Amy scrambled up the cargo net and stood at the bow as the whale drifted away from the bow.

"Thank you, Nate," the Old Broad said, waving. "Thank you, Clay."

Nate smiled. "We'll see you soon, Elizabeth."

"We will, you know," Amy said as the whale ship closed and sank back into the waves.

"I know."

"I have to come back here every few months, you know."

"I know."

"Forever."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm the new colonel now. I'm sort of in charge down there, you know, since I'm sort of the daughter of their god. So we'll have to spend time down there."

"Do I have to call you 'Colonel'?"

"What, you have a problem with that?"

"No, I'm okay with that."

"You realize that the Goo really could decide to wipe out the human species at any minute."

"Yep. Same as it's always been."

"And you know if I live out here, I'm not always going to, you know, look like this?"

"I know."

"But I will always be luscious, and you — you will always be a hopeless nerd."

"Action nerd," Nate corrected.

"Ha!" Amy said.

"The science you don't know looks like magic," Kona says in Chapter 30. I have generally come down on the side of magic, simply because it involves less math, but with Fluke it was necessary to learn a little science. Because so much of Fluke does fall into the realm of magic, though, I thought it only fair to give you, gentle reader, some idea of what's fact and what's not.

The body of knowledge on cetacean biology, especially as it relates to behavior, is growing at such a staggering rate that it's hard to be sure of what you know from one day to the next. (This happens to be exactly the way I live my life, so that worked out nicely.) Scientists have been studying humpback song for fewer than forty years, and it's only in the last decade that studies have been undertaken to try to relate the song to social behavior and interaction. (And a challenging question there: What constitutes interaction in an animal whose voice can carry a thousand miles?) As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters. There is no reasonable explanation for this, but as of yet no tagged humpbacks have been tracked to the New Age section at Sam Goody's.)