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

"That guy is a scientist?"

"He has a Ph.D. in biology, but I wouldn't call him a scientist. Those women he was with are his naturalists. I guess today was even too windy for them to go out. He's got shops all over the island — sells whale crap, nonprofit. Hawaii Whale was the only research group to oppose the Jet Ski ban during whale season."

"Because Fuller had money in the Jet Ski business," Nate added.

"I made six bucks an hour," Kona said.

"Nate's work was instrumental in getting the Jet Ski parasail ban done," Clay said. "Fuller doesn't like us."

"The sanctuary may take his research permit next," said Nate. "What science they do is bad science."

"And he blames you for that?" Amy asked.

"I — we have done the most behavioral stuff as it relates to sound in these waters. The sanctuary gave us some money to find out if the high-frequency noise from Jet Skis and parasail boats affected the behavior of the whales. We concluded that it did. Fuller didn't like it. It cost him."

"He's going to build a dolphin swim park, up La Perouse Bay way," Kona said.

"What?" Nate said.

"What?" said Clay.

"A swim-with-the-dolphins park?" said Amy.

"Ya, mon. Let you come from Ohio and get in the water with them bottlenose fellahs for two hundred dollar."

"You guys didn't know about this?" Amy was looking at Clay. He always seemed to know everything that was going on in the whale world.

"First I've heard of it, but they're not going to let him do it without some studies." He looked to Nate. "Are they?"

"It'll never happen if he loses his research permit," Nate said. "There'll be a review."

"And you'll be on the review board?" asked Amy.

"Nate's name would solidify it," Clay said. "They'll ask him."

"Not you?" Kona asked.

"I'm just the photographer." Clay looked out at the whitecaps in the channel. "Doesn't look like we'll be getting out today. Finish your breakfast, and then we'll go pay your rent."

Nate looked at Clay quizzically.

"I can't give him money," Clay said. "He'll just smoke it. I'm going to go pay his rent."

"Truth." Kona nodded.

"You don't still work for Fuller, do you, Kona?" Nate asked.

"Nate!" Amy admonished.

"Well, he was there when I found the office ransacked."

"Leave him alone," Amy said. "He's too cute to be bad."

"Truth," said Kona. "Sistah Biscuit speak nothin' but the truth. I be massive cute."

Clay set a stack of bills on the table. "By the way, Nate, you have a lecture at the sanctuary on Tuesday. Four days. You and Amy might want to use the downtime to put something together."

Nate felt as if he'd been smacked. "Four days? There's nothing there. It was all on those hard drives."

"Like I said, you might want to use the downtime."

As a biologist, Nate had a tendency to draw analogies between human behavior and animal behavior — probably a little more often than was strictly healthy. For instance, as he considered his attraction to Amy, he wondered why it had to be so complex. Why there had to be so many subtleties to the human mating ritual. Why can't we be more like common squid? he thought. The male squid simply swims up to the female squid, hands her a neat package of sperm, she tucks it under her mantle at her leisure, and they go on their separate ways, their duty to the species done. Simple, elegant, no nuance…

Nate held the paper cup out to Amy. "I poured some coffee for you."

"I'm all coffeed out, thanks," said Amy.

Nate set the cup down on the desk next to his own. He sat in front of the computer. Amy was perched on a high stool to his left going through the hardbound field journals covering the last four years. "Are you going to be able to put together a lecture out of this?" she asked.

Nate rubbed his temples. Despite a handful of aspirin and six cups of coffee, his head was still throbbing. "A lecture? About what?"

"Well, what were you planning to do a talk on before the office was ransacked? Maybe we can reconstruct it from the field notes and memory."

"I don't have that good a memory."

"Yes you do, you just need some mnemonics, which we have here in the field notes."

Her expression was as open and hopeful as a child's. She waited for something from him, just a word to set her searching for what he needed. The problem was, what he needed right now was not going to be found in biology field notes. He needed answers of another kind. It bothered him that Fuller had known about the break-in at the compound. It was too soon for him to have found out. It also bothered him that anyone could hold him in the sort of disdain that Fuller obviously did. Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually — coincidentally — in French.) Nate was neither French-Canadian nor much of a hockey player, so the idea of having invoked enmity enough in someone to have that person ruin his research… He was mortified by it.

"Amy," he said, having spaced out and returned to the room in a matter of seconds, he hoped, "is there something that I'm missing about our work? Is there something in the data that I'm not seeing?"

Amy assumed the pose of Rodin's The Thinker on her stool, her chin teed up on her hand, her brow furrowed into moguls of earnest contemplation. "Well, Dr. Quinn, I would be able to answer that if you had shared the data with me, but since I only know what I've collected or what I've analyzed personally, I'd have to say, scientifically speaking, beats me."

"Thanks," Nate said. He smiled in spite of himself.

"You said there was something there that you were close to finding. In the song, I mean. What is it?"

"Well, if I knew that, it would be found, wouldn't it?"

"You must suspect. You have to have a theory. Tell me, and let's apply the data to the theory. I'm willing to do the work, reconstruct the data, but you've got to trust me."

"No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while."

"So you don't really have a theory?"

"Clueless."

"You lying bag of fish heads."

"I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?"

"I'm not getting paid."

"See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact."

"So fire me." No longer The Thinker, Amy had taken on the aspect of a dark and evil elf.

"I think they're communicating," Nate said.

"Of course they're communicating, you maroon. You think they're singing because they like the sound of their own voices?"

"There's more to it than that."

"Well, tell me!"

"Who calls someone a maroon? What the hell is maroon?"

"It's a mook with a Ph.D. Don't change the subject."

"It doesn't matter. Without the acoustic data I can't even show you what I was thinking. Besides, I'm not sure that my cognitive powers aren't breaking down."