Christopher Moore - Fluke

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FLUKE
OR, I KNOW WHY THE WINGED WHALE SINGS
by CHRISTOPHER MOORE (2003)
[VERSION 1.1 (Aug 02 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number
by 0.1 and redistribute.]
For Jim Darling, Flip Nicklin,
and Meagan Jones:
extraordinary people who do
extraordinary work
Fluke (flook) 1. A stroke of good luck
2. A chance occurrence; an accident
3. A barb or barbed head, as on a harpoon
4. Either of the two horizontally flattened divisions of the tail of a whale
PART ONE
The Song
An ocean without its
unnamed monsters would be like a
completely dreamless sleep.
-- JOHN STEINBECK
The scientific method is nothing
more than a system of rules to keep us
from lying to each other.
-- KEN NORRIS
CHAPTER ONE
Big and Wet
Next Question?
Amy called the whale punkin.
He was fifty feet long, wider than a city bus, and weighed eighty thousand pounds. One well-placed
slap of his great tail would reduce the boat to fiberglass splinters and its occupants to red stains drifting in
the blue Hawaiian waters. Amy leaned over the side of the boat and lowered the hydrophone down on
the whale. "Good morning, punkin," she said.
Nathan Quinn shook his head and tried not to upchuck from the cuteness of it, of her, while
surreptitiously sneaking a look at her bottom and feeling a little sleazy about it. Science can be complex.
Nate was a scientist. Amy was a scientist, too, but she looked fantastic in a pair of khaki hiking shorts,
scientifically speaking.
Below, the whale sang on, the boat vibrated with each note. The stainless rail at the bow began to
buzz. Nate could feel the deeper notes resonate in his rib cage. The whale was into a section of the song
they called the "green" themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through
pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting
howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate
was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was
saying -- Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he? That's why they were out
there floating in that sapphire channel off Maui in a small speedboat, sloshing their breakfasts around at
seven in the morning: No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing
them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea
why, exactly, they sang.
"He's into his ribbits," Amy said, identifying a section of the whale's song that usually came right before
the animal was about to surface. The scientific term for this noise was "ribbits" because that's what they
sounded like. Science can be simple.
Nate peeked over the side and looked at the whale that was suspended head down in the water
about fifty feet below them. His flukes and pectoral fins were white and described a crystal-blue chevron
in the deep blue water. So still was the great beast that he might have been floating in space, the last
beacon of some long-dead space-traveling race -- except that he was making croaky noises that would
have sounded more appropriate coming out of a two-inch tree frog than the archaic remnant of a
superrace. Nate smiled. He liked ribbits. The whale flicked his tail once and shot out of Nate's field of
vision. "He's coming up," Nate said.
Amy tore off her headphones and picked up the motorized Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter
lens. Nate quickly pulled up the hydrophone, allowing the wet cord to spool into a coil at his feet, then
turned to the console and started the engine. Then they waited.
There was a blast of air from behind them and they both spun around to see the column of water
vapor hanging in the air, but it was far, perhaps three hundred meters behind them -- too far away to be
their whale. That was the problem with the channel between Maui and Lanai where they worked: There
were so many whales that you often had a hard time distinguishing the one you were studying from the
hundreds of others. The abundance of animals was a both a blessing and a curse. "That our guy?" Amy
asked. All the singers were guys. As far as they knew anyway. The DNA tests had proven that.
"Nope."
There was another blow to their left, this one much closer. Nate could see the white flukes or blades
of his tail under the water, even from a hundred meters away. Amy hit the stop button on her watch.
Nate pushed the throttle forward and they were off. Amy braced a knee against the console to steady
herself, keeping the camera pointed toward the whale as the boat bounced along. He would blow three,
maybe four times, then fluke and dive. Amy had to be ready when the whale dove to get a clear shot of
his flukes so he could be identified and cataloged. When they were within thirty yards of the whale, Nate
backed the throttle down and held them in position. The whale blew again, and they were close enough
to catch some of the mist. There was none of the dead fish and massive morning-mouth smell that they
would have encountered in Alaska. Humpbacks didn't feed while they were in Hawaii.
The whale fluked and Amy fired off two quick frames with the Nikon.
"Good boy," Amy said to the whale. She hit the lap timer button on her watch.
Nate cut the engine and the speedboat settled into the gentle swell. He threw the hydrophone
overboard, then hit the record button on the recorder that was bungee-corded to the console. Amy set
the camera on the seat in front of the console, then snatched their notebook out of a waterproof pouch.
"He's right on sixteen minutes," Amy said, checking the time and recording it in the notebook. She
wrote the time and the frame numbers of the film she had just shot. Nate read her the footage number off
the recorder, then the longitude and latitude from the portable GPS (global positioning system) device.
She put down the notebook, and they listened. They weren't right on top of the whale as they had been
before, but they could hear him singing through the recorder's speaker. Nate put on the headphones and
sat back to listen.
That's how field research was. Moments of frantic activity followed by long periods of waiting.
(Nate's first ex-wife had once commented that their sex life could be described in exactly the same way,
but that was after they had separated, and she was just being snotty.) Actually, the wait here in Maui
wasn't bad -- ten, fifteen minutes at a throw. When he'd been studying right whales in the North Atlantic,
Nate had sometimes waited weeks before he found a whale to study. Usually he liked to use the
downtime (literally, the time the whale was down) to think about how he should've gotten a real job, one
where you made real money and had weekends off, or at least gotten into a branch of the field where the
results of his work were more palpable, like sinking whaling ships -- a pirate. You know, security.
Today Nate was actively trying not to watch Amy put on sunscreen. Amy was a snowflake in the land
of the tanned. Most whale researchers spent a great deal of time outdoors, at sea. They were, for the
most part, an intrepid, outdoorsy bunch who wore wind- and sunburn like battle scars, and there were
few who didn't sport a semipermanent sunglasses raccoon tan and sun-bleached hair or a scaly bald
spot. Amy, on the other hand, had milk-white skin and straight, short black hair so dark that the highlights
appeared blue in the Hawaiian sun. She was wearing maroon lipstick, which was so wildly inappropriate
and out of character for this setting that it approached the comical and made her seem like the goth geek
of the Pacific, which was, in fact, one of the reasons her presence so disturbed Nate. (He reasoned: A
well-formed bottom hanging in space is just a well-formed bottom, but you hook up a well-formed
bottom to a whip-smart woman and apply a dash of the awkward and what you've got yourself is... well,
trouble.)
Nate did not watch her rub the SPF50 on her legs, over her ankles and feet. He did not watch her
strip to her bikini top and apply the sunscreen over her chest and shoulders. (Tropical sun can fry you
even through a shirt.) Nate especially did not notice when she grabbed his hand, squirted lotion into it,
then turned, indicating that he should apply it to her back, which he did -- not noticing anything about her
in the process. Professional courtesy. He was working. He was a scientist. He was listening to the song
of Megaptera novaeangliae ("big wings of New England," a scientist had named the whale, thus proving
that scientists drink), and he was not intrigued by her intriguing bottom because he had encountered and
analyzed similar data in the past. According to Nate's analysis, research assistants with intriguing bottoms
turned into wives 66.666 percent of the time, and wives turned into ex-wives exactly 100 percent of the
time -- plus or minus 5 percent factored for post-divorce comfort sex.)
"Want me to do you?" Amy asked, holding out her preferred sunscreen-slathering hand.
You just don't go there, thought Nate, not even in a joke. One incorrect response to a line like that
and you could lose your university position, if you had one, which Nate didn't, but still... You don't even
think about it.
"No thanks, this shirt has UV protection woven in," he said, thinking about what it would be like to
have Amy do him.
Amy looked suspiciously at his faded WE LIKE WHALES CONFERENCE '89 T-shirt and wiped
the remaining sunscreen on her leg. "'Kay," she said.
"You know, I sure wish I could figure out why these guys sing," Nate said, the hummingbird of his
mind having tasted all the flowers in the garden to return to that one plastic daisy that would just not give
up the nectar.
"No kidding?" Amy said, deadpan, smiling. "But if you figure it out, what would we do tomorrow?"
"Show off," Nate said, grinning.
"I'd be typing all day, analyzing research, matching photographs, filing song tapes--"
"Bringing us doughnuts," Nate added, trying to help.
Amy continued, counting down the list on her fingers, "--picking up blank tapes, washing down the
trucks and the boats, running to the photo lab--"
"Not so fast," Nate interrupted.
"What, you're going to deprive me the joy of running to the photo lab while you bask in scientific
glory?"
"No, you can still go to the photo lab, but Clay hired a guy to wash the trucks and boats."
A delicate hand went to her forehead as she swooned, the southern belle in hiking shorts, taken with
the vapors. "If I faint and fall overboard, don't let me drown."
"You know, Amy," Nate said as he undressed the crossbow, "I don't know how it was at Boston
doing survey, but in behavior, research assistants are only supposed to bitch about the humiliating grunt
work and lowly status to other research assistants. It was that way when I was doing it, it was that way
going back centuries, it has always been that way. Darwin himself had someone on the Beagle to file
dead birds and sort index cards."
"He did not. I've never read anything about that."
"Of course you didn't. Nobody writes about research assistants." Nate grinned again, celebration for
a small victory. He realized he wasn't working up to standards on managing this research assistant. His
partner, Clay, had hired her almost two weeks ago, and by now he should have had her terrorized.
Instead she was working him like a Starbucks froth slave.
"Ten minutes," Amy said, checking the timer on her watch. "You going to shoot him?"
"Unless you want to?" Nate notched the arrow into the crossbow. He tucked the windbreaker they
used to "dress" the crossbow under the console. It was very politically incorrect to carry a weapon for
shooting whales through the crowded Lahaina harbor, so they carried it inside the windbreaker, making it
appear that they had a jacket on a hanger.
Amy shook her head violently. "I'll drive the boat."
"You should learn to do it."
"I'll drive the boat," Amy said.
"No one drives the boat." No one but Nate drove the boat. Granted, the Constantly Baffled was
only a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat, and an agile four-year-old could pilot it on a calm day like
today. Still, no one else drove the boat. It was a man thing, being inherently uncomfortable with the
thought of a woman operating a boat or a television remote control.
"Up sounds," Nate said. They had a recording of the full sixteen-minute cycle of the song now -- all
the way through twice, in fact. He stopped the recorder and pulled up the hydrophone, then started the
engine.
"There," Amy said, pointing to the white fins and flukes moving under the water. The whale blew only
twenty yards off the bow. Nate buried the throttle. Amy was wrenched off her feet and just caught
herself on the railing next to the wheel console as the boat shot forward. Nate pulled up on the right side
of the whale, no more than ten yards away as the whale came up for the second time. He steadied the
wheel with his hip, pulled up the crossbow, and fired. The bolt bounced off the whale's rubbery back, the
hollow surgical steel arrowhead taking out a cookie-cutter plug of skin and blubber the size of a pencil
eraser before the wide plastic tip stopped the penetration.
The whale lifted his tail out of the water and snapped it in the air, making a sound like a giant knuckle
cracking as the massive tail muscles contracted.
"He's pissed," Nate said. "Let's go for a measurement."
"Now?" Amy questioned. Normally they would wait for another dive cycle. Obviously Nate thought
that because of their taking the skin sample the whale might start traveling. They could lose him before
getting a measurement.
"Now. I'll shoot, you work the rangefinder."
Nate backed off the throttle a bit, so he would be able to catch the entire tail fluke in the camera
frame when the whale dove. Amy grabbed the laser rangefinder, which looked very much like a pair of
binoculars made for a cyclops. By taking a distance measurement from the animal's tail with the
rangefinder and comparing the size of the tail in the frame of the picture, they could measure the relative
size of the entire animal. Nate had come up with an algorithm that, so far, gave them the length of a whale
with 98 percent accuracy. Just a few years ago they would've had to have been in an aircraft to measure
the length of a whale.
"Ready," Amy said.
The whale blew and arched its back into a high hump as he readied for the dive (the reason whalers
had named them humpbacks in the first place). Amy fixed the rangefinder on the whale's back; Nate
trained the camera's telephoto on the same spot, and the autofocus motors made tiny adjustments with
the movement of the boat.
The whale fluked, raising its tail high in the air, and there, instead of the distinct pattern of
black-and-white markings by which all humpbacks were identified, were -- spelled out in foot-high black
letters across the white -- the words BITE ME!
Nate hit the shutter button. Shocked, he fell into the captain's chair, pulling back the throttle as he
slumped. He let the Nikon sag in his lap.
"Holy shit!" Nate said. "Did you see that?"
* * *
"See what? I got seventy-three feet," Amy said, pulling down the rangefinder. "Probably seventy-six
from where you are. What were your frame numbers?" She was reaching for the notebook as she looked
back at Nate. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. Frame twenty-six, but I missed it," he lied. His mind was shuffling though a huge stack of index
cards, searching a million article abstracts he had read to find some explanation for what he'd just seen. It
couldn't possibly have been real. The film would show it. "You didn't see any unusual markings when you
did the ID photo?"
"No, did you?"
"No, never mind."
"Don't sweat it, Nate. We'll get it next time he comes up," Amy said.
"Let's go in."
"You don't want to try again for a measurement?" To make the data sample complete, they needed an
ID photo, a recording of at least a full cycle of the song, a skin sample for DNA and toxin figures, and a
measurement. The morning was wasted without the measurement.
"Let's go back to Lahaina," Nate said, staring down at the camera in his lap. "You drive."
CHAPTER TWO
Maui No Ka Oi (Maui Is the Best)
At first it was that old trickster Maui who cast his fishing line from his canoe and pulled the islands up
from the bottom of the sea. When he was done fishing, he looked at those islands he had pulled up, and
smack in the middle of the chain was one that was made up of two big volcanoes, sitting there together
like the friendly, lopsided bosoms of the sea. Between them was a deep valley that Maui thought looked
very much like cleavage, which he very much liked. And so, to that bumpy-bits island Maui gave his
name, and its nickname became "The Cleavage Island," which it stayed until some missionaries came
along and renamed it "The Valley Island" (because if there's anything missionaries do well, it's seek out
and destroy fun). Then Maui landed his canoe at a calm little beach on the west coast of his new island
and said to himself, "I could do with a few cocktails and some nookie. I shall go into Lahaina and get
some."
Well, time passed and some whalers came to the island, bringing steel tools and syphilis and other
wonders from the West, and before anyone knew what was happening, they, too, were thinking that they
wouldn't mind a few cocktails and a measure of nookie. So rather than sail back around the Horn to
Nantucket to hoist noggins of grog and the skirts of the odd Hester, Millicent, or Prudence (so fast the
dear woman would think she'd fallen down a chimney and landed on a zucchini), they pulled into Lahaina,
drawn by the drunken sex magic of old Maui. They didn't come to Maui for the whales, they came for
the party.
And so Lahaina became a whaling town. The irony of it was that even though the humpbacks had
starting coming to birth their calves and sing their songs only a few years earlier, and in those days the
Hawaiian channels were teeming with the big-winged singers, it was not for the humpbacks that the
whalers came. Humpbacks, like their other rorqual brothers -- the streamlined blue, fin, sei, minke, and
Bryde's whales -- were just too fast to catch in sailing ships and man-powered whaling boats. No, the
whalers came to Lahaina to rest and recreate along their way to Japanese waters where they hunted the
great sperm whale, who would literally float there like a big, dumb log while you rowed up to it and stuck
a harpoon in its head. It would take the advent of steamships and the decimation of the big, floaty-fat
right whales (so named because they did float when dead and therefore were the "right" whales to kill)
before the hunters would turn their harpoons on the humpbacks.
Following the whalers came the missionaries, the sugar farmers, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and
Portuguese who all worked the sugar plantations, and Mark Twain. Mark Twain went home. Everyone
else stayed. In the meantime, King Kamehameha I united the islands through the clever application of
firearms against wooden spears and moved Hawaii's capital to Lahaina. Sometime after that Amy came
cruising into the Lahaina harbor at the wheel of a twenty-three-foot Mako speedboat with a tall,
stunned-looking Ph.D. sprawled across the bow seat.
The radio chirped. Amy picked it up and keyed the mike. "Go ahead, Clay."
"Something wrong?" Clay Demodocus was obviously in the harbor and could see them coming in. It
wasn't even eight in the morning. He was probably still preparing his boat to go out.
"I'm not sure. Nate just decided to call it a day. I'll ask him why." To Nate she said, "Clay wants to
know why."
"Anomalous data," Nate said.
"Anomalous data," Amy repeated into the radio.
There was a pause. Then Clay said, "Uh, right, understood. That stuff gets into everything."
The harbor at Lahaina is not large. Only a hundred or so vessels can dock behind her breakwater.
Most are sizable, fifty- to seventy-foot cruisers and catamarans, boats full of sunscreen-basted tourists
out on the water for anything from dinner cruises to sport fishing to snorkeling at the half-sunken crater of
Molokini to, of course, whale watching. Jet-skiing, parasailing, and waterskiing were all banned from
December until April, while the humpbacks were in these waters, so many of the smaller boats that
would normally be used to terrorize marine life in the name of recreation were leased by whale
researchers for the season. On any given winter morning down at the harbor at Lahaina, you couldn't
throw a coconut without conking a Ph.D. in cetacean biology (and you stood a good chance of winging
two Masters of Science working on dissertations with the rebound).
Clay Demodocus was engaged in a bit of research liars poker with a Ph.D. and a naval officer when
Amy backed the Mako into the slip they shared with three tender zodiacs from sailing yachts anchored
outside the breakwater, a thirty-two-foot motor-sailor, and the Maui Whale Research Foundation's other
boat (Clay's boat), the Always Confused, a brand-new twenty-two-foot Grady White Fisherman, center
console. (Slips were hard to come by in Lahaina, and circumstances this season had dictated that the
Maui Whale Research Foundation -- Nate and Clay -- perform a nautical dog pile with six other small
craft every day. You do what you have to do if you want to poke whales.)
"Shame," Clay said as Amy threw him the stern line. "Nice calm day, too."
"We got everything but a measurement on one singer," Amy said.
The scientist and the naval officer on the dock behind Clay nodded as if they understood completely.
Clifford Hyland, a grizzled, gray-haired whale researcher from Iowa stood next to the young,
razor-creased, snowy-white-uniformed Captain L. J. Tarwater, who was there to see that Hyland spent
the navy's money appropriately. Hyland looked a little embarrassed at the whole thing and wouldn't make
eye contact with Amy or Nate. Money was money, and a researcher took it where he could get it, but
navy money, it was so... so nasty.
"Morning Amy," said Tarwater, dazzling a perfectly even, perfectly white smile. He was lean and dark
and frighteningly efficient-looking. Next to him, Clay and the scientists looked as if they'd been run
through the dryer with a bag of lava rock.
"Good morning, Captain. Morning Cliff."
"Hey, Amy," Cliff Hyland said. "Hey, Nate."
Nathan Quinn shook off his confusion like a retriever who had just heard his name uttered in context
with food. "What? What? Oh, hi, Cliff. What?"
Hyland and Quinn had both been part of a group of thirteen scientists who had first come to Lahaina
in the seventies ("The Killer Elite," Clay still called them, as they had all gone on to distinguish themselves
as leaders in their fields). Actually, the original intention hadn't been for them to be a group, but they
nevertheless became one early on when they all realized that the only way they could afford to stay on the
island was if they pooled their resources and lived together. So for years thirteen of them -- and
sometimes more if they could afford assistants, wives, or girlfriends -- lived every season in a
two-bedroom house they rented in Lahaina. Hyland understood Quinn's tendency to submerge himself in
his research to the point of oblivion, so he wasn't surprised that once again the rangy researcher had
spaced out.
"Anomalous data, huh?" Cliff asked, figuring that was what had sent Nate into the ozone.
"Uh, nothing I can be sure of. I mean, actually, the recorder isn't working right. Something dragging.
Probably just needs to be cleaned."
And everyone, including Amy, looked at Quinn for a moment as if to say, Well, you lying satchel of
walrus spit, that is the weakest story I've ever heard, and you're not fooling anyone.
"Shame," Clay said. "Nice day to miss out on the water. Maybe you can get back with the other
recorder and get out again before the wind comes up." Clay knew something was up with Nate, but he
also trusted his judgment enough not to press it. Nate would tell him when he thought he should know.
"Speaking of that," Hyland said, "we'd better get going." He headed down the dock toward his own
boat. Tarwater stared at Nate just long enough to convey disgust before turning on his heel and marching
after Hyland.
When they were gone, Amy said, "Tarwater is a creep."
"He's all right. He's got a job to do is all," Clay said. "What's with the recorder?"
"The recorder is fine," Nate said.
"Then what gives? It's a perfect day." Clay liked to state the obvious when it was positive. It was
sunny, calm, with no wind, and the underwater visibility was two hundred feet. It was a perfect day to
research whales.
Nate started handing waterproof cases of equipment to Clay. "I don't know. I may have seen
something out there, Clay. I have to think about it and see the pictures. I'm going to drop some film off at
the lab, then go back to Papa Lani and write up some research until the film's ready."
Clay flinched, just a tad. It was Amy's job to drop off film and write up research. "Okay. How 'bout
you, kiddo?" Clay said to Amy. "My new guy doesn't look like he's going to show, and I need someone
topside while I'm under."
Amy looked to Nate for some kind of approval, but when he simply kept unloading cases without a
reaction, she just shrugged. "Sure, I'd love to."
Clay suddenly became self-conscious and shuffled in his flip-flops, looking for a second more like a
five-year-old kid than a barrel-chested, fifty-year-old man. "By calling you 'kiddo' I didn't mean to
dimmish you by age or anything, you know."
"I know," Amy said.
"And I wasn't making any sort of comment on your competency either."
"I understand, Clay."
Clay cleared his throat unnecessarily. "Okay," he said.
"Okay," Amy said. She grabbed two Pelican cases full of equipment, stepped up onto the dock, and
started schlepping the stuff to the parking area so it could be loaded into Nate's pickup. Over her
shoulder she said, "You guys both so need to get laid."
"I think that's reverse harassment," Clay said to Nate.
"I may be having hallucinations," said Nate.
"No, she really said that," Clay said.
* * *
After Quinn had left, Amy climbed into the Always Confused and began untying the stern line. She
glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot cabin cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the
bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent -- Bumstick Go-Be-Bright,
perhaps.
"Clay, you ever heard of a uniformed naval officer accompanying a researcher into the field before?"
Clay looked up from doing a battery check on the GPS. "Not unless the researcher was working
from a navy vessel. Once I was along on a destroyer for a study on the effects of high explosives on
resident populations of southern sea lions in the Falkland Islands. They wanted to see what would
happen if you set off a ten-thousand-pound charge in proximity to a sea lion colony. There was a
uniformed officer in charge of that."
Amy cast the line back to the dock and turned to face Clay. "What was the effect?"
"Well, it blew them the fuck up, didn't it? I mean, that's a lot of explosives."
"They let you film that for National Science?"
"Just stills," Clay said. "I don't think they anticipated it going the way it did. I got some great shots of it
raining seal meat." Clay started the engine.
"Yuck." Amy untied the bumpers and pulled them into the boat. "But you've never seen a uniformed
officer working here? Before now, I mean."
"Nowhere else," Clay said. He pulled down the gear lever. There was a thump, and the boat began to
creep forward.
Amy pushed them away from the surrounding boats with a padded boat hook. "What do you think
they're doing?"
"I was trying to find out this morning when you guys came in. They loaded an awfully big case before
you got here. I asked what it was, and Tarwater got all sketchy. Cliff said it was some acoustics stuff."
"Directional array?" Amy asked. Researchers sometimes towed large arrays of hydrophones that
could, unlike a single hydrophone, detect the direction from which sound was traveling.
"Could be," Clay said. "Except they don't have a winch on their boat.
"A wench? What are you trying to say, Clay?" Amy feigned being offended. "Are you calling me a
wench?"
Clay grinned at her. "Amy, I am old and have a girlfriend, and therefore I am immune to your hotness.
Please cease your useless attempts to make me uncomfortable."
"Let's follow them."
"They've been working on the lee side of Lanai. I don't want to take the Confused past the wind line."
"So you were trying to find out what they're up to?"
"I fished. No bites. Cliff's not going to say anything with Tarwater standing there."
"So let's follow them."
"We actually may get some work done today. It's a good day, after all, and we might not get a dozen
windless days all season here. We can't afford to lose a day, Amy. Which reminds me, what's up with
Nate? Not like him to blow off a good field day."
"You know, he's nuts," Amy said, as if it were understood. "Too much time thinking about whales."
"Oh, right. I forgot." As they motored out of the harbor, Clay waved to a group of researchers who
had gathered at the fuel station to buy coffee. Twenty universities and a dozen foundations were
represented in that group. Clay was single-handedly responsible for making the scientists who worked
out of Lahaina into a social community. He knew them all, and he couldn't help it -- he liked people who
worked with whales -- and he just liked it when people got along.
He'd started weekly meetings and presentations of papers at the Pacific Whale Sanctuary building in
Kihei, which brought all the scientists together to socialize, trade information, and, for some, to try to
weasel some useful data out of someone without the burden of field research.
Amy waved to the group, too, as she dug into one of the orange Pelican waterproof cases. "Come
on, Clay, let's follow Tarwater and see what he's up to." She pulled a huge pair of twenty-power
binoculars out of the case and showed them to Clay. "We can watch from a distance."
"You might want to go up in the bow and look for whales, Amy."
"Whales? They're big and wet. What else do you need to know?"
"You scientists never cease to amaze me," Clay said. "Come hold the wheel while I get a pencil to
write that down."
"Let's follow Tarwater."
CHAPTER THREE
A Little Razor Wire Around Heaven
The gate to the Papa Lani compound was hanging open when Nate drove up. Not good. Clay was
adamant about their always replacing the big Masterlock on the gate when they left the compound.
Papa Lani was a group of wood-frame buildings on two acres northeast of Lahaina in the middle of a
half dozen sugarcane fields that had been donated to Maui Whale by a wealthy woman Clay and Nate
affectionately referred to as the "Old Broad." The property consisted of six small bungalows that had
once been used to board plantation workers but had long since been converted to housing, laboratory,
and office space for Clay, Nate, and any assistants, researchers, or film crews who might be working
with them for the season. Getting the compound had been a godsend for Maui Whale, given the cost of
housing and storage in Lahaina. Clay had named the compound Papa Lani (Hawaiian for "heaven") in
honor of their good fortune, but someone had left the gate to heaven open, and from what Nate could tell
as he drove in, the angel shit had hit the fan.
Before he even got out of the truck, Nate saw a beat-up green BMW parked in the compound and a
trail of papers leading out of the building they used for an office. He snatched a few of them up as he ran
across the sand driveway and up the steps into the little bungalow. Inside was chaos: drawers torn out of
filing cabinets, toppled racks of cassette tape -- the tapes strewn across the room in great streamers --
computers overturned, the sides of their cases open, trailing wires. Nate stood among the mess, not really
knowing what to do or even what to look at, feeling violated and on the verge of throwing up. Even if
nothing was missing, a lifetime of research had been typhooned around the room.
"Oh, Jah's sweet mercy," came a voice from behind him. "This a bit of fuckery most heinous for sure,
mon."
Nate spun and dropped into a martial-arts stance, notwithstanding the fact that he didn't know any
martial arts and that he had loosed a little-girl shriek in the process. The serpent-haired figure of a gorgon
was silhouetted in the doorway, and Nate would have screamed again if the figure hadn't stepped into the
light, revealing a lean, bare-chested teenager in surfer shorts and flip-flops, sporting a giant tangle of
blond dreadlocks and about six hundred nose rings.
"Cool head main ting, brah, cool head," the kid almost sang. There was pot and steel drums in his
voice, bemusement and youth and two joints' worth of separation from the rest of reality.
Nate went from fear to confusion in an instant. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Relax, brah, no make li'dat. Kona and I come help out."
Nate thought he might feel better if he strangled this kid -- just a little frustration strangle to vent some
of the shock of the wrecked lab, not a full choke -- but instead he said, "Who are you, and what are you
doing here?"
"Kona," the kid said. "Dat boss name Clay hire me for the boats dat day before."
"You're the kid Clay hired to work with us on the boats?"
"Shoots, mon, I just said that? What, you a ninja, brah?"
The kid nodded, his dreads sweeping around his shoulders, and Nate was about to scream at him
again when he realized that he was still crouched into his pseudo combat stance and probably looked like
a total loon.
He stood up, shrugged, then pretended to stretch his neck and roll his head in a cocky way he'd seen
boxers do, as if he had just disarmed a very dangerous enemy or something. "You were supposed to
meet Clay down at the dock an hour ago."
"Some rippin' sets North Shore, they be callin' to me this morning." The kid shrugged. What could he
do? Rippin' sets had called to him.
Nate squinted at the surfer, realizing that the kid was speaking some mix of Rasta talk, pidgin,
surfspeak and... well, bullshit. "Stop talking that way, or you're fired right now."
"So you ichiban big whale kahuna, like Clay say, hey?"
"Yeah," Nate said. "I'm the number-one whale kahuna. You're fired."
"Bummah, mon," The kid said. He shrugged again, turned, and started out the door. "Jah's love to ye,
brah. Cool runnings," he sang over his shoulder.
"Wait," Nate said.
The kid spun around, his dreads enveloping his face like a furry octopus attacking a crab. He
sputtered a dreadlock out of his mouth and was about to speak.
Quinn held up a finger to signal silence. "Not a word of pidgin, Hawaiian, or Rasta talk, or you're
done."
"Okay." The kid waited.
Quinn composed himself and looked around at the mess, then at the kid. "There are papers strewn
around all over outside, hanging in the fences, in the bushes. I need you to gather them up and stack them
as neatly as you can. Bring them here. Can you do that?"
The kid nodded.
"Excellent. I'm Nathan Quinn." Nate extended his hand to shake.
The kid moved across the room and caught Nate's hand in a powerful grip. The scientist almost
winced but instead returned the pressure and tried to smile.
"Pelekekona," said the kid. "Call me Kona."
"Welcome aboard, Kona."
The kid looked around now, looking as if by giving his name he had relinquished some of his power
and was suddenly weak, despite the muscles that rippled across his chest and abdomen. "Who did this?"
"No idea." Nate picked up a cassette tape that had been pulled out of the spools and wadded into a
bird's nest of brown plastic. "You go get those papers. I'm going to call the police. That a problem?"
Kona shook his head. "Why would it be?"
"No reason. Grab those papers now. Nothing is trash until I look at it, eh?"
"Overstood, brah," Kona said, grinning back at Nate as he headed out into sun. Once outside, he
turned and called, "Hey, Kahuna Quinn."
"What?"
"How come them humpies sing like dat?"
"What do you think?" Nate asked, and in the asking there was hope. Despite the fact that the kid was
young and irritating and probably stoned, the biologist truly hoped that Kona -- unburdened by too much
knowledge -- would give him the answer. He didn't care where it came from or how it came (and it
would still have to be proved); he just wanted to know, which is what set him apart from the hacks, the
wannabes, the backstabbers, and the ego jockeys in the field. Nate just wanted to know.
"I think they trying to shout down Babylon, maybe."
"You'll have to explain to me what that means."
"We fix this fuckery, then we fire up a spliff and think over it, brah."
* * *
Five hours later Clay came through the door talking. "We got some amazing stuff today, Nate. Some
of the best cow/calf stuff I've ever shot." Clay was still so excited he almost skipped into the room.
"Okay," Nate said with a zombielike lack of enthusiasm. He sat in front of his patched-together
computer at one of the desks. The office was mostly put back in order, but the open computer case
sitting on the desk with wires spread out to a diaspora of refugee drive units told a tale of data gone wild.
"Someone broke in. Tore apart the office."
Clay didn't want to be concerned. He had great videotape to edit. Suddenly, looking at the fans and
wires, it occurred to him that someone might have broken his editing setup. He whirled around to see his
forty-two-inch flat-panel monitor leaning against the wall, a long diagonal crack bisected the glass. "Oh,"
he said. "Oh, jeez."
Amy walked in smiling, "Nate you won't believe the--" She pulled up, saw Clay staring at his broken
monitor, the computer scattered over Nate's desk, files stacked here and there where they shouldn't be.
摘要：

FLUKEOR,IKNOWWHYTHEWINGEDWHALESINGSbyCHRISTOPHERMOORE(2003)[VERSION1.1(Aug0203).Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.]ForJimDarling,FlipNicklin,andMeaganJones:extraordinarypeoplewhodoextraordinaryworkFluke(flook)1.Astrokeofgoodluck2.Achanceoccurrence;an...

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