Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Chapter 7~9

CHAPTER SEVENSanctuary, Sanctuary,Cried the hunch back upWhen a visitor first drives into the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary five baby inexorable shiplap buildings trimmed come forth in cobalt, crouching on the edge of the huge Maalaea Bay and eitherwhere intuitive tonicitying the ruins of an ancient sea wet fish pond his first re march is usually Hey, not much of a sanctuary. You could form possibly three giants in those buildings, tops. Soon, however, he literalizes that these buildings be simply the offices and visitor centers. The sanctuary itself c everyplaces the channels that run from Molokai to the commodious Island of Hawaii, between Maui, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, as well as the north shores of Oahu and Kauai, in which there is plenty of room for a whole bunch of titans, which is why they argon kept there.There were rough a hundred concourse milling nearly unwrap side the lecture hall when Nate and Amy pulled into the parking administer in th e pickup.Looks handle a good turn forth? Amy give tongue to. Shed at xded exclusively integrity of the sanctuarys weekly lectures, and that wholeness had been given by gibibyte boxwood, an ill-tempered biologist doing survey work low a grant for the International Whaling Commission, who droned through number and graphs until the cristal people in attendance would bind killed a hunt themselves just to shut him up.Its ab proscribed(a) average for us. Behavior incessantly draws much than survey. Were the sexy ones, Nate said with a grin.Amy snorted. Oh, yeah, you ribs ar the Mae Wests of the nerd realness.Were action nerds, Nate said. Adventure nerds. Nerds of ro human racece.Nerds, Amy said.Nate could see the skeletal gilbert Box standing off to the side of the crowd to a lower place a straw hat whose brim was so wide it could draw afforded shade for three special people and behind a pair of enormous wrap nearly sunglasses subjectable for welding or as a shield f rom nuclear flash. His gaunt face was still sme ared with residue of the white zinc oxide he used for sun protection when stunned on the water. He wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers and leaned on a white sun umbrella that he was never seen with come forward. It was a half hour sooner sunset, a warm breeze was coming off Maalaea Bay, and gilbert Box looked handle Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a a couple of(prenominal) million fortunate winners.Nate had given Box the nickname the Count, after the Se a handle Street vampire with the obsessive-compulsive need to bet issues. (Nate had been too old for Sesame Street as a preschooler, only if hed watched it through coursee ten era baby-sitting his preteener br early(a), Sam.) People agreed that the Count was the perfect name for a survey guy with an aversion to water and sunlight, and the name had caught on even outside Nate and carcasss immediate sphere of influence.Panic sound up Nates spine. Theyre going to k today were f uniformg it. The Count will call us on it the first m I say something that we dont arrive at the data to back up.Hows he going to k forthwith? You had the data a week ago. Besides, whats this we? Im just running the projector. conveys.Theres Tarwater, Amy said. Who are those wo custody hes sloping to?Probably just some whale huggers, Nate said, pretense that all of his mental faculties were required for him to squeeze the pickup into the iv adjacent empty parking spaces. The women Tarwater was talking to were Margaret Painborne, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Libby Quinn, Ph.D. They worked together with a couple of very simplych young women studying browbeat/ suraskin conduct and social vocalizations. They were doing good work, Nate belief, even if it appeared to call for a gender-based agenda. Margaret was in her late forties, short and round, with long olden hair that she kept perpetually tied back in a braid. Libby was al most(prenominal) a decennary younger, long-legged and lean, blond hair going gray, cut short, and she had at once, not too long ago, been Nathan Quinns third wife. A second and totally different wave of anxiety swept everyplace Quinn. This was the first clipping hed encountered Libby since Amy united the team.They dont look like whale huggers, Amy said. They look like tecs.How is that?They look like action nerds. Amy snorted again and crawled out of the truck.Thats not very professional, Nate said, that snorting-laugh thing you do. But Amy had already walked off toward the lecture hall, a carousel of slides on a lower floor her arm.Nate counted to a greater extent than thirty researchers in the crowd as he walked up. And those were just the ones he was acquainted with. reinvigorated people would be coming back and forth from the mainland all season potash alum students, film crews, re carriageers, interior(a) Fisheries people, patrons all hitchh iking on the very hardly a(prenominal) research permits that were issued for the sanctuary.For some reason Amy made a beeline for free fall Hyland and his navy watchdog, Tarwater, who was out of uniform in Dockers and a Tommy Bahama shirt, provided still out of place because his clothe were ironed to razor creases his Topsiders had been spit- beated, and he stood as if there were a cold length of rebar wired to his spine.Hey, Amy, decrease said. raunchy to hear close the break-in. Bad?Well be all chastise, Amy said.Nate st involute up behind Amy. Hey, Cliff. Captain. He nodded to each.Sorry to hear about the break-in, Nate, Cliff said again. Hope you guys didnt lose eachthing important.Were fucked, Nate said.And Tarwater smiled for the first time ever, Nate thought.Were fine. Amy grinned and brandished her carousel of slides like a talisman of power.Im thinking about getting a job at Starbucks, Nate said.Hey, Cliff, what are you guys working on? Amy asked, having som ehow moved close enough into Cliff Hylands personal space to piss to look up at him with big, girly-blue eyes and the aspect of a fascinated child.Nate cringed. It was well, it was just not through. You didnt ask, not forthwith like that.Just some stuff for the navy, Cliff said, obviously regarding to back away from Amy, merely knowing that if he did, somehow hed lose face.Nate watched while Amy grated his friends middle-aged irrelevance against his male ego hardly by stepping a alkali closer. There, too, was a reaction from Tarwater, as the younger man seemed to be peeved by the fact that Amy was paying attention to Cliff. Or maybe he was just irritated with Amy because she was irritating. sometimes Nate had to re hear himself not to think like a biologist.You know, Cliff, Amy said, I was looking at a role the other day and I want you to brace yourself, because this may come as a dismay but theres no coastline in Iowa. I mean, doesnt that get in the way of studying m arine mammals?Sure, now you bring that up, Cliff said. Where were you ten years ago when I accepted the couch?Middle school, Amy said. Whats in the big case on your gravy holder? Sonar array? You guys doing another LFA study?Tarwater coughed.Amy, Nate interrupted, wed better get set up.Right, Amy said. Nice seeing you guys.She moved on. Nate grinned, just for a second. Sorry, you know how it is?Yeah. Cliff Hyland smiled. Weve got devil grad students working with us this season.But we left our grommets at crustal plate, to analyze data, Tarwater added.Nate and Cliff looked at each other like two old stony-broken-toothed lions long driven from the pride tired, but secure in the experience that if they teamed up, they could eat the younger male alive. Cliff shrugged, almost imperceptibly, that small gesture communicating, Sorry, Nate, I know hes an asshole, but what am I going to do? Its funding.Id better go in, Nate said, patting the notes in his shirt pocket. He enlightene d a couple more acquaintances, apothegm hello as he went by, and so internal the door ran right into a minor nightmare Amy talking to his ex-wife, Libby, and her get aroundner, Margaret.It had been like this Theyd met ten years ago, summer in Alaska, a remote lodge on Baranof Island on the Chatham Strait, where scientists were given access to a couple of rigid-hulled Zodiacs and all the can beans, smoked salmon, and Russian vodka they could consume. Nate had come to observe the feeding carriage of his beloved humpbacks and record social sounds that ability help him to interpret the melody they sang when in Hawaii. Libby was doing biopsies on the population of resident (fish-eating) killer whales to demo that all the different pods were indeed part of one clan related by blood. He was two years divorced from his second wife. Libby, at thirty, was two months from finishing her doctoral dissertation in blower biology. Consequently, since high school she hadnt had time for wh atsoeverthing but research seasonal affairs with boat skippers, senior researchers, grad students, fishermen, and the occasional photographer or documentary filmmaker. She wasnt particularly promiscuous, but there was a sea of men you were set adrift in if you were going to study whales, and if you didnt want to spend your life alone, you pulled into a convenient, if scruffy, port from time to time. The transience of the work drove a lot of women out of the field. On the other hand, Nate assay to solve the male side of the equation by marrying other whale researchers, reasoning that only person who was equally obsessed, distracted, and spillle-minded would be able to tolerate those qualities in a mate. That ramify of reasoning, of course, was testament to the mastery of romanticism over reason, irony over rationality, and pure foolishness over common sense. The only thing that being married to another scientist had gotten Nate was a reprieve from being asked what he was thin king about while lying in bed in a postcoital cuddle. They knew what he was thinking about, because they were thinking about the same thing whales.They were both lean and blond and weather-beaten, and one evening, as they were portaging gear from their respective Zodiacs, Libby unzipped her survival suit and tied the sleeves around her waist so she could move more freely. Nate said, You look good in that. noone, absolutely no one, looks good in a survival suit (unless a Day-Glo orange marshmallow man is your idea of a hot date), but Libby didnt even make the effort to roll her eyes. I have vodka and a shower in my cabin, she said.I have a shower in my cabin, too, Nate said.Libby just move her head and trudged up the path to the lodge. Over her shoulder she called, In five proceedings theres going to be a naked woman in my shower. You got one of those?Oh, said Nate.They were both still lean, but no longer blond. Nate was tout ensemble gray, and Libby was getting there. She smiled when he approached. We heard about the break-in, Nate. I meant to call you.Thats okay, he said. non much you can do.Thats what you think, Amy said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet as if she were going to explode or Tigger off crossways the room any second.I think these faculty mitigate the loss a little, Libby said. She slung her day encampment off her shoulder, reached in, and came out with a handful of CDs in paper sleeves. You forgot about these, Ill bet? You loaned them to us start season so we could pull off any social noises in the background.Its all the singer recordings from the at long last ten years, Amy said. Isnt that greatNate felt as if he might faint. To lose ten years work, then determine the loss, only to have it handed back to him. He tell his hand on Libbys shoulder to becalm himself. I dont know what to say. I thought you gave those back.We made copies. Margaret stepped over to Quinn and in doing so got a foot between him and his ex-wife. You said it would be okay. We were only using them for comparison to our knowledge samples.No, its okay, Nate said. He almost patted her shoulder, but as he moved in that direction she flinched and he let his hand drop. Thank you, Margaret.Margaret had interposed herself completely between Nate and Libby, fashioning a barrier of her own body ( port shed obviously picked up from her cow/calf studies a humpback start out did the same thing when boats or amorous males approached her calf).Amy snatched the handful of CDs from Libby. Id better go through these. I can probably come up with a few relevant samples to shrink from along with the slides if I hurry.Ill go with you, Margaret said, eyeing Amy. My handwriting on the catalog numbers leaves something to be desired.And off they went toward the project station in the middle of the hall, leaving Nate standing with Libby, wondering but what had just transpired.She really does have an extraordinary ass, Nate, Libby said as she watch ed Amy walk away.Yep, Nate said, not wanting to have this conversation. Shes very bright, too.Sometime in the last week a tiny voice in his head had started asking, Could this get any weirder? In two minutes hed gone from anxiety to embarrassment to anxiety to relief to gratitude to scoping chicks with his ex-wife. Oh, yes, little voice, it can always get weirder.I think Margaret may be on a recruiting mission, Libby said. I hope she go over our budget before she left.Amys working for free, Nate said.Libby leaned up on tiptoes and whispered, I believe that a starting position on the all-girl team has just opened up. Then she kissed his cheek. You relegate em dead tonight, Nate. And she was off after Amy and Margaret. cadaver and Kona arrived just as Libby walked away, and, irritatingly, Kona was checking out Libby from behind.Irie, Boss Nate. Whos the biscuit auntie suckin face with ya? (Like many authentic Hawaiians, Kona called any woman a generation older auntie, even if he was horning after her.)You brought him here, Nate said to form without twist to face him.Hes got to learn, ashes said. Libby seemed friendly.Shes chasing Amy.Oh, she a blackheart thief that would take a mans Snowy Biscuit to have a punaani nosh. That Snowy Biscuit belong our tribe.Libby was Nates third wife, trunk volunteered, as if that would somehow immediately lighten up why the blackheart Libby was trying to steal the Snowy Biscuit from their tribe.Truth? Kona said, shaking his great gorgonation of dreadlocks in rag-doll confusion. You married a lesbian?Whale willies, said cadaver, adding neither insight nor illumination.I should go over my notes, Nate said.CHAPTER EIGHTA Rippin TalkBiology, said the pseudo Hawaiian, dat bitch make sex puppets of everyone. Clay had just told him the story. The story was thisFive years into her marriage to Nathan Quinn, Libby had gone for the summer to the Bering Sea to put satellite-tracking tags on young-bearing(prenominal) right whales. Sh e had already begun working with Margaret Painborne, who was at the time trying to honour out more about the mating and gestation behavior of right whales. The best way to do that was to postponement immutable tabs on the females. Now, sexing whales can be an incredibly difficult task, as their genitalia, for hydrodynamic reasons, are all internal. Without a biopsy or without being in the water with the fleshly (which means death in three minutes in the Bering Sea), about the only way to determine sex is to catch a female when she is with her calf or while the animals are mating. Libby and Margaret had decided to tag the animals while they were mating. Their base ship was an eighty-foot schooner loaned to the project by Scripps, but to do the rattling tagging they used a nimble twelve-foot Zodiac with a forty-horse engine.Theyd spotted a female trying to evade the advances of two giant males. The right whale is one of the few animals in the world that uses a washout strategy fo r mating. That is, the females mate with several males, but the one who can wash out the others seed most efficiently will pass his genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the guy with the largest tackle frequently wins, and male right whales have the biggest tackle in the world, with testes that weigh up to a ton and ten-foot penises that are not only long but prehensile, able to reach around a female from the side and introduce themselves on the sly.Libby took the take care of the boat, where she braced herself with a fifteen-foot fiberglass pole tipped with a nipping stainless point attached to the satellite unit. Margaret steered the outboard, maneuvering over frigid seven-foot seas, into the position where Libby could set the tag. Right whales are not particularly fast (whalers caught them in rowboats, for Christs sake), but they are big and broad, and in the frenzy of a mating chase, a small Zodiac provides about as much protection from their thrashing, sixty-ton bod ies as would wearing aluminum-foil armour to a joust. And noble Libby, action-girl nerd that she was, did look somewhat like a gallant knight in Day-Glo orange, her lance ready to strike as her trusty warhorse, Evinrude, powered her over the waves.And as they approached the big female, a male on either side of her, the two sandwiching her so she could not escape, she rolled over onto her back, pre directing her fork to the sky. At that she slowed, and Margaret steered between the two tails of the males so Libby could set the tag. The female stop then and floated up nether the Zodiac. Margaret powered worst the motor so as not to rake the animal with the prop. realise Libby send fored. Get us off Get us off A swipe from the flukes of any of the animals would put them in the water, minutes from hypothermia and death. Libby had rolled her survival suit toss off so she could maneuver the harpoon. Shed be pulled beneath in seconds.Suddenly, out of the water on either side of them c ame two huge penises, the males searching for their mark, pathetic closer to the female, producing waves that knocked the two women into the floor of the boat. Above them the two pink towers curved around looking for their steer, feeling the edges of the boat, running slime across the rubber, over the biologists, poking, beating about, and generally abusing the women. The female now had the Zodiac centered exactly over her genitals, using the rubber boat as an ad hoc diaphragm. Then the two giant whale willies encountered one another in the middle of the Zodiac, and each evidently thinking that the other had found his target and not wanting to be left out, they let loose with great gushing gouts of sticky whale semen, filling the boat, covering the equipment, the scientists, washing the gunwales, swamping the motor, generally leaving everything but the gal whale completely and distastefully jizzed. Mission accomplished, off they swam to strain a little postcoital krill out of the fray. Margaret suffered a concussion and a partially detached retina, Libby a dislocated shoulder and various scrapes and bruises, but the real trauma could not be assuaged with snaps, slings, and Betadine.Several weeks later Libby rejoined Nate, who was overthrow at the Chatham Strait with Clay filming feeding behavior. She walked into his cabin, hugged him, then stepped back and said, Nate, I dont think I want to be married anymore. But what she really meant was Im done with penises forever, Nate, and pleasurable as you are, I know that you are still attached to one. Ive had my fill, so to announce. Im despicable on.Okay, Nate said. He told Clay later that for hours he had been feeling hungry and kept telling himself that he should stop working and go eat, but after Libby showed up, then left, he realized that he hadnt been hungry at all. The emptiness inside was from feeling lonesome. And Nate had stayed relatively lonesome and mostly heartbroken since that day (although he didnt whine about it, he just wore it). Clay didnt tell Kona this part. Confessions made over whiskey and campfires were privileged communication. Loyalty.So, said Nate, Since the poetry appears, in most cases, to actually draw the attention of other males, who often join up with the singer, it would seem that the song cannot be directly connected to mating activity, other than it happens in the mating season. And since no one has actually observed humpbacks mating, even this assumption could be in error. If, indeed, the song is the male attempting to define his territory, it would seem ineffective, since other males tend to join singers, even those escorting cow/calf pairs. The study recommends that more studies be done to find out if there is, as previously thought, any direct correlation between humpback song and mating activity. Thank you. Ill take your questions.Hands went up. Here it came the crystal gazers, the whale buggers, the hippies, the hunters, the tourists, the devel opers, the wackos, the researchers (God help us, the researchers), and the idly curious. Nate didnt mind the curious. They were the only ones without an agenda. Everyone else was looking for confirmations, not answers. Should he go to a researcher first? Get it out of the way? Might as well go right to the off side.Yes, Gilbert. He pointed to the Count. The tall researcher had taken off his sunglasses but had pulled take the brim of his hat as if to conceal the yearning red coals of his eyes. Or maybe Nate was just imagining that.The Count said, So with these small samplings what was it, five instances of interactions among singers and others? theres no real conclusion that you can reach about the relation to breeding or the robustness of the population? coiffe?Nate sighed. Fuckwad, he thought. He spoke to the strange faces in the audience, the nonprofessionals. As you know, Dr. Box, samples for whale-behavior studies are usually very small. Its mute that we have to extra polate more from the data with whales than with other animals who are more easily observed. Small samples are an accepted limitation of the field.So what you are saying, Box continued, is that you are trying to extrapolate the behavior of an animal that spends less than three percent of its time on the surface from observing its behavior on the surface. Isnt that akin to trying to extrapolate all of human civilization from looking at peoples legs underwater at the b browse? I mean, I dont see how you could possibly do it.Nate looked around the room, hoping that one of the other behavior researchers might jump in, help him out, throw a bone to the podium, but apparently they were all finding the displays on the bulletin boards, the ceiling fans, or the wooden floor planks irresistibly interesting.Lately weve been spending more and more time observing the animals under the water. Clay Demodocus has over six hundred hours of videotape of humpback behavior underwater. But its only rece ntly, with digital videotape and rebreather technology, that underwater observation has become practical to do to any extent. And we still have the problem of propulsion. No diver can swim fast enough to keep up with the humpbacks when theyre traveling. I think all the researchers in this room understand the value of observing the animals in the water, and it goes without saying that any research without consideration of underwater behavior is incomplete. You understand that, Im sure, Dr. Box.There were a few stifled snickers around the room. Nathan Quinn smiled. The Count would not go into the water, under any circumstances. He was either affright of it or allergic to it, but it was obvious from watching him on his boat that he treasured no contact whatsoever with the water. Still, if he was going to get his funding from the International Whaling Commission, he had to get out there and count whales. On the water, never in it. Quinn believed that Box did big(p) science, and becau se of that he had gone into consulting, the dark side. He performed studies and provided data for the highest bidder, and Nate had no doubt that the data was skewed to the agenda of the funding. Some nations in the IWC wanted to lift the moratorium on hunting whales, but first they had to prove that the populations had recovered enough to sustain hunting. Gilbert Box was getting them their numbers. Nate was happy to have embarrassed Box. He waited for the gaunt scientist to nod before he took the next question.Yes, Margaret.Your study seems to focus on the perspective of the male animals, without consideration for the females role in the behavior. Could you speak to that?Jeez, what a surprise, thought Nate. Well, I think theres good work being done on the cow/calf behavior, as well as on surface-active groups, which we assume is mating-related activity, but since my work concerns singers and as far as we know, all singers are males, I tend to observe more male behavior. There, that should do it.So you cant say definitively that the females are not the ones controlling the behavior?Margaret, as my research assistant has repeatedly pointed out to me, the only thing I can say definitively about humpbacks is that they are big and wet.Everyone laughed. Quinn looked at Amy and she winked at him, then, when he looked back to Margaret, he saw Libby beside her, winking at him as well. But at least(prenominal) the tension among the researchers was broken, and Quinn noticed that Captain Tarwater and Jon Thomas Fuller and his entourage were no longer raise their hands to ask questions. Perhaps they realized that they werent going to learn anything, and they certainly didnt want to try to track their own agendas in front of a crowd and be slapped down the way Gilbert Box had. Quinn took the questions from the nonscientists.Could they just be saying hi?Yes.If they dont eat here, and its not for mating, then why do they sing?Thats a good question.Do you think they know th at weve been contacted by aliens and are trying to contact the mother ship?Ah, always good to hear from the wacko fringe, Nate thought. No, I dont think that. Maybe theyre using their sonar to find other whales.As far as we know, baleen whales, toothless whales like the humpbacks who strain their regimen from the sea through sheets of baleen, dont echolocate the way toothed whales do.Why do they jump all the time? different whales dont jump like that.Some think that they are sloughing skin or trying to knock off parasites, but after years of watching them, I think that they just like making a splash the sensation of air on their skin. The way you might like to dangle your feet in a fountain. I think theyre just goofing off.I heard that someone broke into your office and destroy all of your research. Who do you think would want to do that?Nate paused. The woman who had asked the question was holding a reporters steno pad. Maui Times, he guessed. She had stood to ask her questi on, as if she were attending a press conference rather than a casual lecture.What you have to ask yourself, said Nate, is who could possibly care about research on singers?And who would that be?Me, a few people in this room, and perhaps a dozen or so researchers around the world. At least for now. Perhaps as we find out more, more people will be interested.So youre saying that someone in this room broke into your offices and destroyed all your research?No. As a biologist, one of the things you have to guard against is applying motives where there are none and reading more into a behavior than the data actually support. Sort of like the answer to the why do they jump? question. You could say that its part of an incredibly complex system of communication, and you might be right, but the obvious answer, and probably the correct one, is that the whales are goofing off. I think the break-in was just a random act of vandalism that has the appearance of motive. Bullshit, Quinn thought.Than k you, Dr. Quinn, said the reporter. She sat down.Thank you all for coming, said Nate.Applause. Nate arranged his notes as people gathered around the podium.That was bullshit, Amy said.Complete bullshit, said Libby Quinn.What a load of crap, said Cliff Hyland.Rippin talk, Doc, Kona said, Marleys ghost was in ye.CHAPTER NINErelativityLeathery bar girls worked the charter booths at the harbor, smoking Basic 100s and talking in voices that sounded like 151 unique poured into hot grease a jigger of friendly to the liter of harsh. They were thirty-five or sixty-five, the color of mahogany, underweight and strong from living on boats, liquor, fish, and disappointment. Theyd come here from a dozen coastal towns, some sailing from the mainland in small craft but forgetting to save enough courage for the trip home. Marooned. Man to man, boat to boat, year to year salt and sun and drinking had left them dry enough to cough dust. If they lasted a hundred years and some would the n one moonless night a great hooded wraith would swoop into the harbor and take them off to their own craggy island uncharted and unseen more than once by any living man and there they would keep the enchantment of the sea alive crotchet lost sailors to the shore, suck out all of their fluids, and leave their desiccated husks crumbling on the rocks for the crabs and the black gulls. and so were the sea hags born but thats another story. Today they were just razzing Clay for leading two girls down the dock.Just like outboards, Clay, you gotta have two to make sure ones always running, called Margie, who had once, after ten mai-tais, tried to go down on the wooden sea captain who guarded the doorway of the open Inn.Debbie, who had a secret source for little-boy pee that she put in the ears of the black-coral divers when they got ear infections, said, You give that young one the first watch, Clay. Let her rest up a bit.Morning, ladies, Clay tossed over his shoulder. He was g rinning and blushing, his ears showing red even where they werent sunburned. Fifty years old, hed dived every sea, been attacked by sharks, survived malaria and Malaysian pirates, ridden in a titanium ball with a window five miles down into the Tonga Trench, and still he blushed.Clair, Clays girlfriend of four-spot years, a forty-year-old Japanese-Hawaiian schoolteacher who moved like she was doing the hula to a Sousa march (strange prance of regal order and island breeze), backhanded a hang-loose shaka at the cronettes and said, grinning, She just along to pour buckets on his reels girls, keep him from burning up.Oh, you guys are so friggin nautical, said Amy, who was wrestling with a huge Pelican case that held the rebreather. The case slipped out of her grip and barked her shin before she caught it. Ouch. Damn it. Oh yeah, everyone loves your salty friggin charm.A chorus of cackles from the charter booths wheezed into coughing fits. Back to the cats, the cauldrons, the coconut oil, the unspeakable Jimmy Buffett songs sung at midnight into the ear of drunken, white-bearded Hemingway wannabes to make that rum-soaked member rise from the dead just this one last time. The leathery bar girls turned back to their business as Kona passed by.Irie, Sistah Amy. Give up ye burden, said Kona, bounding down the dock to sweep the heavy rebreather out of Amys grip and up onto his shoulder.Amy rubbed her arm. Thanks. Wheres Nate?He go to the raise dock to get coffee for the whole tribe. A lion, him.Yeah, hes a good guy. Youll be going out with him today. I have to go along with Clay and Clair as a safety diver.Slippers off in the boat, Clay said to Clair for the hundredth time. She rolled her eyes and kicked off her flip-flops before stepping down into the Always involved. She offered Clay a hand, and he steadied her as if escorting a lady from the kings court to the ballroom floor.Kona handed the rebreather down to Clay. I can safety-dive.Youll never be able to clea r your ears. You cant pinch your nostrils shut with those nose sound in.They come out. Look, out they come. He tossed the rings to Amy and she deftly sidestepped, letting them plop into the water.Oops.Amys a certified diver, kid. Sorry. Youre with Nate today.He know that?Yeah, does he know that? asked Clair.He will soon. Get those lines, would you, Amy.I can drive the boat. Kona was on the edge of pleading.No one but me drives the boat, said Clay.Im driving the boat, corrected Clair.You have to sleep with Clay to drive the boat, said Amy.You just do what Nate tells you, Clay said. Youll be fine.If I sleep with Amy can I drive the boat?Nobody drives the boat, Clay said.I drive the boat, Clair said.Nobody sleeps with Amy, Amy said.I sleep with Amy, Clair said.And everyone stopped and looked at Clair.Who wants cream? asked Nate, arriving at that moment with a paper tray of coffee cups. You can do your own sugar.Thats what Im saying, said Clair. Sisters are doing it for themselves.And Nate hung there in space, holding a cup and a sugar packet, a wooden stir stick, a baffled expression.Clair grinned. Kidding. Jeez, you guys.Everyone breathed. Coffee was distributed, gear was loaded, Clay drove the Always Confused out of the harbor, pausing to wave to the Count and his crew, who were loading gear into a thirty-foot rigid-hull Zodiac normally used for parasailing. The Count pulled down the brim of his hat and stood in the bow of the Zodiac, his sun umbrella at port arms, looking like a skeletal statue of Washington crossing the Lethe. The crew waved, Gilbert Box scowled.I like him, Clay said. Hes predictable.But Amy and Clair missed the comment. They were applying sunscreen and indulging in girl talk in the bow.You can talk like such a floozy sometimes, said Amy. I wish I could be floozish.Clair poked her in the leg with a long, red-lacquered fingernail. Dont sell yourself short, pumpkin.The ersatz Hawaiian stood on the bow rail like he was hanging ten off the twent y-two-foot Mako, waving to the Zodiac crew as they passed. Irie, science dreadies We be research jammin now But when the Count ignored his greeting, Kona gave the traditional island response What, I owe you money?Settle, Kona, Nate said. And get down off of there.Kona made his way back to the console. Old white jacket givin you the stink-eye. Why, he think you an agent of Babylon?He does bad science. People come to me to ask me about him, I tell them he does bad science.And we do the good science?We dont change our numbers to please the people who fund us. The Japanese want numbers that show recovery of the humpback population to levels where the IWC will let them start hunting them again. Gilbert tries to give them those numbers.Kill these humpies? No.Yes.No. Why?To eat.No, said the blond Rastaman, shaking his head as if to clear the evil from his ears his dreads fanning out into nappy spokes.Quinn smiled to himself. The moratorium had been in effect since before Kona was born. As far as the kid knew, whales had been and always would be safe from hunters. Quinn knew better. Eating whale is very traditional in Japan. It sort of has the ritual of our Thanksgiving. But its dying out.Then its all good.No. There are a lot of old men who want to bring back whale hunting as a tradition. The Japanese whaling industry is subsidized by the government. Its not even a viable business. They serve whale nitty-gritty in the school-lunch program so kids will develop a taste for it.No. No one eats the whale.The IWC allows them to kill five hundred minke whales a year, but they kill more. And biologists have found whale meat from half a dozen endangered whale species in Japanese markets. They try to pass it off as minke whale, but the deoxyribonucleic acid doesnt lie.Minke? That devil in the white war paint putting to death our minke?We dont have any minkes here in Hawaii.Course not, the Count killing them. We going to chant down this evil fuckery. Kona dug into his red, gold, and green fanny pack. Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed.Slow de boat, brah. I got to spark up for freedom. Chant down Babylon, go into battle for Jahs glory, mon. Slow de boat.Put that away.Kona paused, his Bic lighter poised over the bowl. Take de ship home to Zion, brah?No, we have work to do. Nate slowed the boat and killed the motor. They were about a mile off Lahaina.Chant down Babylon? Kona raised the lighter.No. Put that away. Ill show you how to drop the hydrophone. Quinn checked the tape in the recorder on the console.Save our minkes? Kona waved the lighter, unlit, in circles over the bowl.Did Clay show you how to take an ID photo? Nate pulled the hydrophone and the coil of cord out of its case.Ride Jahs herbaceous plant into the myst ic?No Put that away and get the camera out of that cabinet in the bow.Kona broke down the bong with a series of whirs and clicks and put it back in his fanny pack. All right, brah, but when they have eated all your minkes, will not be Jahs fault.An hour later, after listening, and moving, and listening again, they had found their singer. Kona stood fit on the gunwale of the boat staring down in wonder at the big male, who was lay under the boat making a sound approximating that of a kidnap victim trying to scream through duct tape.Kona would look from the whale to Nate, grin, then look back to the whale again, the whole time perched and balanced on the gunwale like a gargoyle on the parapet of a building. Nate guessed that he would be able to hold that position for about two minutes before his knees locked permanently and hed be coerce to finish life in a toadish squat. Still, he envied Kona the enthusiasm of discovery, the fascination and excitement of being around these great a nimals for the first time. He envied him his youth and his strength. And, listening to the song in the headphones, the song that seemed so all the way to be a statement of mating and yet refused to give up any direct evidence that it was, Nate felt a profound irrelevance. Sexually, socially, intellectually, fiscally, scientifically irrelevant a sack of borrowed atoms lumpily arranged in a Nate shape. No effect, purpose, or stability.He tried to listen more closely to what the whale was doing, to lose himself in analyzing what exactly was going on below, but that merely seemed to underscore the suspicion that not only was he getting old, he might be going crazy. This was the first time hed been out since the bite me incident, and since then he had convinced himself that it must have been some sort of hallucination. Still, he cringed a bit every time the whale humped its tail to dive, expecting to see a message scrawled across the flukes.Hes making them up noises, boss.Nate nodde d. The kid was learning fast. Get your camera ready, Kona. Hell breathe three, maybe four times before he dives, so be ready.Abruptly the singing in the headphones stopped. Nate pulled up the hydrophone and started the engine. They waited.He went that way, boss, Kona said, pointing off to the starboard side. Nate turned the boat slowly in place and waited.They were looking in the direction in which Kona had seen the whale moving underwater when he surfaced behind them, not ten feet away from the boat, the blow making both of them jump, the disperse wafting across them in a rainbow cloud.Ho Dat buggah up, bossThank you, Captain Obvious, Nate said under his breath. He pulled down the throttle and came in behind the whale. On its next breath the whale rolled and slapped a long pectoral fin on the surface, soaking Kona and throwing heavy spray over the console. At least the kid had had the sense to use his body to shield the camera from the splash.I love this whale Kona said, his Rasta speak melting, leaving behind a middle-class Jersey accent. I want to take this whale home and put him in a box with grass and rocks. Buy him squeaky toys.Get ready for your ID shot, Nate instructed.When were done with him, can I keep him? PleeeeeeeeeeeezeHere he goes, Kona. Focus.The whale humped, then fluked, and Kona fired off four quick frames with the motor drive.You get it?Rippin pics. Rippin Kona put the camera down on the seat in front of the console and covered it with a towel.Nate pointed the boat toward the last fluke print, a twenty-foot lens of smooth water formed on the surface by the turbulence of the whales tail. These lenses would hold on the surface sometimes for as long as two minutes, serving as windows through which the researchers could watch the whales. In the old whaling old age the hunters believed that fluke prints had been caused by oil excreted by the whale. Nate cut the engine and let the boat coast over the fluke print. They could hear the whale song co ming up from below and could feel the boat vibrating under their feet.Nate dropped the hydrophones, hit the record button, and put on the headphones. Kona was recording the frame numbers and GPS coordinates in the notebook as Nate had taught him. A monkey can do my job, Nate thought. An hours experience and this stoner is already doing it. This kid is younger, stronger, and faster than I am, and Im not even sure that Im smarter, as if that matters. Im totally irrelevant.But maybe it did matter. Maybe it wasnt all about strength. Culture and language completely screwed up normal biological evolution. Why would we humans have positive such big brains if mating was always predicated on strength and size? Women must have elect their mates based on intelligence as well. Perhaps early smart guys would say something like There, right behind those rocks, theres a tasty sloth ripe for the spearing. Go get him, guys. Then, after hed sent the stronger, dumber guys running off a cliff after th e imaginary sloth, hed settle down with the best of the Cro-Magnon cuties to mix some genes. Thats right, bite my brow ridge. Bite it Nate smiled.Kona was looking over the side at the singer, whose tail was only twenty feet below the boat (although his head was forty feet deeper). He was only a couple of minutes into his song. Hed be down at least ten minutes more.Kona, we need to get a DNA sample.How we do that?Nate pulled a set of flippers out of the console and handed them and an empty coffee cup out to the surfer. Youre going to need to go get a semen sample.The surfer gulped. Looked at the whale, looked at the cup, looked over the side at the whale again. No lid?