"Just tell us where to start," Kona said.
"And tell me if you see anything in this." Clay went to his computer and hit a key. A still of the edge view of the whale tail from his rebreather dive was on the screen. "Nate said that he had seen some markings on a whale tail, Libby. Some writing. Well, I thought there was something on this whale, too, before it knocked me out. But this is the best shot of the tail we have. It could mean something."
"Like what?" Her voice was kind.
"I don't know what, Libby. If I knew what, I wouldn't have called you. But there's too much weird stuff going on that almost fits together, and we don't know what to do."
Libby studied the tail still. "There is something there. You don't have a better shot?"
"No, this is something I do know about. This is the best I have."
"You know, Margaret and I were helping a guy from Texas A&.M who was designing a software program that would shift perspective of tail shots, so edge and bad-angle views could be shifted and extrapolated into usable ID photos. You know how many get tossed because of bad angles?"
"You have this program?"
"Yes, it's still in beta tests, but it works. I think we can shift this shot, and if there's something meaningful there, we'll see it."
"Cool runnings," Kona said.
"As far as this binary thing, I think it's a shot in the dark, but if it's going to mean anything, you're going to have to get your ones and ohs in the computer. Kona, can you type?"
"Well, on ones and ohs? I shred most masterful, mon."
"Right. I'll set you up with a simple text file — just ones and ohs — and we'll figure out if we can do anything with it later. No mistakes, okay?"
Kona nodded.
Clay finally looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Libby."
"I'm not saying it's anything, Clay, but I wasn't exactly fair to Nate when he was around. Maybe I owe him one now that he's gone. Besides, it's windy. Fieldwork would have sucked today. I'm going to call Margaret, have her bring the program over. I'll help you if you promise that you'll put all your weight into stopping this torpedo range and you'll sign Maui Whale on to the petition against low-frequency active sonar. You guys have a problem with that?"
She was giving them the "spoon of death" look, and it occurred to both of them that this might be something that was innate to all women, not just Clair, and that they should be very, very afraid.
"Nope," said Kona.
"Sounds good to me. I'll put on a pot of coffee," said Clay.
"Margaret is absolutely going to shit when she hears about the torpedo range," said Libby Quinn as she reached for Clay's phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Orientation to the Blues
A small explosion went off over his head, and Nate dove under the table. When he looked up, Emily 7 was bent over staring at him with her watery whale eyes and a mild expression of distress, and Nuñez was crouched at the other end of the table smiling.
"That was the blow, Nate," Nuñez said. "A little more intense than the humpback's, huh? These ships act like real whales, remember. The blowhole is right above our heads. Vented to the rest of the ship, but, you know, every twenty minutes or so it's going to go. You get used to it."
"Sure, I knew that," said Nate, crawling out from under the table. He'd been out off of Santa Cruz searching for the blues. You usually found them by the sound of their blows, which you could hear up to a mile and a half away. He looked up, expecting to see sky through the blowhole, but instead he saw just more smooth whaleskin.
"They behave like whales, but the physiology is completely different to allow for the living quarters. I don't really understand it, but for instance the blowhole is vented down the sides somewhere to some axillary lungs that do the oxygen exchange with the blood. I don't know how they got us electricity at all. I mean, I said I wanted a coffeepot, and they put in an outlet. There are circuits all over the bridge for our machinery. The other bodily functions seem to be handled by smaller versions of liver, kidneys, and so forth around the outside of the cabins. The main spine runs over the top of the ship. There's no digestive system. The ship's digestive system is at the base; it hooks up and pumps nutrient-rich blood into the ship, which stores enough energy in blubber to run it for six months at sea, or around the world at least once. We can cruise at twenty knots as long as no one is watching."
"What do you mean, 'no one is watching'?"
"I mean you guys. Biologists. If one of you guys is watching us, we have to slow it down after a couple of hours. Especially if we're tagged."
"This ship has been satellite-tagged? What do you do?"
"We go to silent running for a while. Then we dive, and one of the whaley boys goes outside and pulls the tag off. We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can. If they'd asked me, he'd be the one riding with us now."
"You know who he is?" Nate was aghast. As a scientist, you were always fighting being overwhelmed by what you don't know, but the magnitude of this whole operation — it was too much.
"Of course. Since commercial whaling backed off, cetacean biologists have been the main focus of our intelligence program. Why do you think you're here?"
"Okay, why am I here?"
"I don't know the whole story, but it's something to do with the song. Evidently you were a little too close to finding our signal in the song, so they yanked you."
"The aliens were that interested in what I was doing?"
"What aliens?"
"These aliens," Nate said, nodding toward the pilots and Bernard and Emily 7, who had moved to another table on the other side of the corridor.
"The whaley boys aren't aliens. Who told you that?"
"Well, Poynter and Poe implied that they were."
"Those jerks. No, they're not aliens. They're a little weird, but not from-another-planet weird."
Bernard looked up from what appeared to be a chart of some sort and gave a half-assed signature raspberry.
"They do that a lot," Nate said.
"If you had a tongue four inches wide, you'd do that a lot, too. It's sort of a display move with them, like the penis waving that Bernard was doing."
"Like male killer whales do."
"Bingo. See, a guy with your background, this is easy to explain. I didn't understand squat at first."
"I'm sorry, but I can't believe that this ship, the whaley boys, the whole perfection of the way they work, could possibly be products of natural selection. There had to be a design. Someone made all this."
Cielle nodded, smiling. "I've known a number of scientists in my lifetime, Nate, but I'm sure this is the first time I've heard one arguing in favor of a grand designer. What's that called, the 'watchmaker argument'?"
She was right, of course. It was an accepted premise that intelligent design in nature was not necessarily a product of intelligence, but merely the mechanism of natural selection of traits for survival and really, really long periods of time for the selections to assert themselves. Nate's life's work had been built on that assumption, but now he was giving Darwin the old heave-ho simply because his — Nate's — mind was too small to adapt to the idea of this craft. Well, yes, damn it. Screw Darwin. This was too strange.
"I'm sorry, I'm just having a little trouble getting my head around this. I don't know how you take to being a prisoner, but I don't care for it. On top of that, I could barely sleep on the humpback with the blow going off every few minutes, and I haven't eaten anything but raw fish and water for about five days. I'd be addled even if this didn't seem impossible."