“So,” he said, removing his hipster hat and flinging it down on a table piled with junk. “What’s taking you so long?”
“I just finished.”
Prothero pulled up a chair, swept some printouts onto the floor, and sat down. “What you got?”
“Two pretty close matches.”
“Let’s hear them.”
She played the Baobab sound first, as a control, and then the two similar sounds from Prothero’s whale database, all sped up ten times to put the pitch into the best range for human listening.
Prothero grunted. “Play those hits again, first the whale, then the Baobab.”
She ran through them again in reverse order.
“That’s close! So—did you look up the circumstances when the two whale calls were recorded?”
“I did. The first recording was made by a Greenpeace vessel a few years ago, about five hundred miles south of Tasmania. It had been shadowing a Japanese whaler. This was the sound the whale made as it was dying, after being hit by two penthrite grenade-armed harpoons by the Japanese.”
“Fucking barbarians. And the other one?”
“That was recorded by a Woods Hole oceanographic vessel from a blue whale stranded and dying on a sandbar on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Some kind of virus had interfered with its internal navigation, apparently, and it beached itself. It died not long after.”
“Both dying sounds…” Prothero was silent for a long time, his brow furrowed. Finally he stirred, picked his nose. “What do you think?”
“I still think the creature was merely repeating, parrot-like, a whale sound it had heard.”
Prothero made a face. “Just tell me what you think it means. I mean, to the whales that made the sound. We’ll deal with the Baobab later.”
“My first thoughts were that it might have been a cry for help, or maybe a growl of warning or fear. Or the equivalent of a whale death-scream.”
“Did you find any other matches?”
“Only partials. Some matched the first part of the Baobab’s sound, some matched the second.”
“Play those.”
She played a few of them.
“Hmmm. Notice how all these whale utterances tend to fall into one of two categories. Two words. Some sound like one word; some like the other.” Prothero scratched himself. “So tell me under what circumstances those partials were made, starting with the first. What was going on when it was recorded?”
“That sound was made by a pod of three blue whales, all together, when one was attacked by a gang of orcas. The blue whales managed to drive off the killer whales through ramming and blows of their tail flukes. They made those sounds as they were doing it.”
Another grunt from Prothero.
Wong reached toward her equipment. “Let me replay the other, similar sounds.”
Prothero waved his hand. “You don’t have to. I already know what they mean.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” said Prothero. “You hear it all the time in pods of whales as they’re traveling together. Lone whales never make the sound. It’s one of the first ‘words’ I was able to translate.”
Wong was surprised. “You’ve already translated some blue whale speech?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone.” Prothero made a face. “I intend to publish someday.”
“So what does it mean?”
“That sound is the whale referring to itself. It means ‘me’ or ‘I.’”
“Wow. So what do you think the initial sound means?”
“It’s a verb. That much I’m sure of.”
“Whales have verbs?”
“Sure they do. All they do is move. Everything to a whale is movement or activity. I think the entire blue whale language is made up of verb-like sounds.”
“Okay.” This did not sound very scientific to Wong, but she was in no mood to argue with Prothero.
“It’s a verb, and it’s used by whales that are dying, or whales that are trying to drive off attacking orcas. I think it’s pretty obvious what it means.” He gave her a superior smirk. “You don’t get it?”
“No.”
“It means kill.”
“Kill?”
“Exactly. Think about it. What’s a whale’s going to say that’s dying in agony from a Japanese harpoon? Kill me. What are whales saying as they chase a gang of orcas? Kill, kill! That’s what the Baobab was saying over and over to us, that’s the Baobab’s message to us. Kill is the first word and me is the second.”
“That’s crazy,” said Wong.
Prothero shrugged. “It may be crazy, but that’s the message it’s sending. It’s telling us something, urgently. And that something is: Kill me.”
33
BARRY FRAYNE WAS tired. It was ten o’clock at night and the exo lab had been going almost nonstop since noon, when the long, string-like tentacle had arrived and Glinn had ordered Dr. Sax to prepare it for study. Frayne reported directly to Sax, and his lab contained the front-line workers, the prep guys, the bio grunts. Each guy—and as it happened they were all guys—was a specialist in a particular area of biological lab preparation. Under Sax’s scrutiny, they had done sections for microscope, TEM, and SEM studies; they had set up biochemical assays; they had done pre-dissections and dissected out unusual inclusions and organelles for analysis. All of this had then gone out to specialized labs elsewhere on the ship. They were, you might say, the heavy lifters, the prep cooks who got everything ready for the PhDs to work on.
Frayne at least had an MA, but the other three guys just had college degrees. Didn’t matter: they were all good at what they did.
The gross and fine anatomy of the tentacle, or root, or spaghetti, or worm—a lot of crazy nicknames had been proposed—was stunningly different from any biological organism Frayne had seen before. It was hard to tell whether it was even a plant or animal, or perhaps it was neither. It had cells, or membrane-enclosed packages with interior cytoplasm—that, at least, looked normal. Beyond that, nothing was recognizable. Inside the “cells” there were no normal-looking organelles, no nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, or Golgi bodies. Nor did the thing have the types of organelles you’d expect to see in plant cells: chloroplasts, dermata, vacuoles, or rigid cell walls. There were things inside the cells, of course, but they looked like complex inorganic crystals. They glittered like diamonds in the light of the microscope, and seemed to come in different colors, although that appeared to be iridescence or light refraction. Frayne had isolated a bunch and sent them off to be analyzed. He was curious to know what they were.
The narrow tentacle had no blood vessels that he could see, nor phloem or xylem channels for the movement of fluid. Instead, it had an incredibly dense and complex tangle of fine microfibrils like nerves or wires, wrapped in bundles. They were very hard to cut and seemed to be stiffened with something equivalent to plant cellulose, though of a different material, more like inorganic mineral than woody fiber. But what was strangest of all was that, when you really got down to it, there was nothing in the tentacle that actually looked like living tissue. It looked instead like an incredibly finely built machine.