Nate put down his fork. "Cal, I did not have sex with anyone — I mean, anything."
"Right. And be careful around the males. Especially if you're in the water with them. They'll bung-hole you just to watch you twitch."
"Jeez."
"I'm just telling you for your own good."
"Thanks, but I'm not going to be around long enough to worry about it." Might as well throw it in their faces, Nate thought.
The older man laughed, almost shooting coffee out his nose. When he recovered, he said, "Well, I hope you mean you plan on dying soon, because no one ever leaves."
Nate leaned into Cal's face. "Doesn't it bother you, that you're a prisoner?"
"There's not one of us here who wouldn't be dead if the whaley boys hadn't picked us up."
"Not me."
"Especially you. You were always twelve hours from dead since we started watching you. Certainly it had to occur to you how much easier it would have been just to kill you?"
Nate just stared for a second. Actually, it had occurred to him, and he didn't see the logic in keeping him alive if all they wanted to do was stop his research. He wasn't going to make that argument verbally, but still…
"Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."
"Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."
"You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."
After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of Treasure Island to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate on the book at all. Funny what you learn about yourself in a short conversation. One, that he would rather have been accused of having sex with another species than with another male (even of another species). Interesting prejudice. Two, that he actually was grateful, not only to be alive, but grateful to be having completely new experiences every moment, even as a prisoner. Three, that learning was still a high, but he burned to share it with someone. And finally, that he was feeling a little jealous, a little less special, now that he knew that Emily 7 was having sex with all the male whaley boys on board. That fickle little slut.
He dozed off with Robert Louis Stevenson on his chest and the sound of killer whales calling in the distance.
Outside, the pod of twenty killer whales, most the sons or daughters of the matriarch female, were calling frantically to each other as they worried away at a huge bait ball of herring. Biologists had long speculated on the incredibly complex vocabulary of the killer whale, identifying specific linguistic groups that even «spoke» the same dialect, but they had never been able to put meaning to the calls other than to identify them as "feeding," "distress," or «social» noises. However, had they had the benefit of translation, this is what they would have heard:
"Hey, Kevin, fish!"
"Fish! I love fish!"
"Look, Kevin, fish!"
"Mmmm, fish."
"You, Kevin, take a run down that trench, fake left, go right, hit the bait ball, nothing but fish!"
"Did someone say 'fish'?"
"Yeah, fish. Over here, Kevin."
"Mmmmm, fish."
And it went on like that. Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Picking the Lock to
Davy Jones's Locker
" 'Bite me'?" Libby Quinn said, reading the tail.
The whale tail slowly twisted in space, pixel by pixel, as the computer extrapolated the new angle. Margaret Painborne sat at the computer. Clay and Libby stood behind her. Kona was working across the room on Quinn's reassembled machine.
" 'Bite me'?" Clay repeated. "That can't be right." He thought about what Nate had said about seeing a tail just like this and shivered.
Margaret hit a few keys on the keyboard, then swiveled in Clay's chair. "This some kind of joke, Clay?"
"Not mine. That was raw footage, Margaret." As attractive as Clay found Libby, he found Margaret equally scary. Maybe the latter because of the former. It was complex. "The tail image before you shifted it is exactly what I saw when I was down there."
"You've all been saying how sophisticated their communication ability was," said Kona, trying to sound scientific but essentially just pissing everyone off.
"How?" said Libby. "Even if you wanted to, how would you paint a whale's flukes like that?"
Margaret and Clay just shook their heads.
"Rust-Oleum," suggested Kona, and they all turned and glared at him. "Don't give me the stink-eye. You'd need the waterproof, huh?"
"Did you finish inputting those pages?" Clay said.
"Yah, mon."
"Well, save them and go rake something or mow something or something."
"Save as a binary," Margaret added quickly, but Kona had already saved the file, and the screen was clear.
Margaret wheeled her chair across the office, her gray hair trailing out behind her like the Flying Sorceress of Clerical Island. She pushed Kona aside. "Crap," she said.
"What?" asked Clay.
"What?" asked Libby.
"You said save it," Kona said.
"He saved it as an ASCII file, a text file, not a binary. Crap. I'll see if it's okay." She opened the file, and text appeared on the screen. Her hand went to her mouth, and she sat back slowly in Clay's chair. "Oh, my God."
"What?" came the chorus.
"Are you sure you put this in, just as it came off the graphs?" she asked Kona without looking at him.
"Truth," said Kona.
"What?" said Libby and Clay.
"This has got to be some sort of joke," said Margaret.
Clay and Libby ran across the room to look at the screen. "What!"
"It's English," Margaret said, pointing to the text. "How is that possible?"
"That's not possible," Libby said. "Kona, what did you do?"
"Not me, I just typed ones and ohs."
Margaret grabbed one of the legal pages with the ones and ohs and began typing the numbers into a new file. When she had three lines, she saved it, then reopened the file as text. It read, WILL SCUTTLE SECOND BOAT TO__
"It can't be."
"It is." Clay jumped into Margaret's lap and started scrolling through the text from Kona's transcription. "Look, it goes on for a while, then it's just gobbledygook, then it goes on some more."
Margaret looked back at Libby with Save me in her eyes. "There is no way that the song is carrying a message in English. Binary was a stretch, but I refuse to believe that humpbacks are using ASCII and English to communicate."
Libby looked over to Kona. "You guys took these off of Nate's tapes, exactly the way you showed me?"
Kona nodded.
"Kids, look at this," Clay said. "These are all progress reports. Longitude and latitude, times, dates. There are instructions here to sink my boat. These fuckers sank my boat?"
"What fuckers?" Margaret said. "A humpback with 'Bite me' on his flukes?" She was trying to look around Clay's broad back. "If this were possible, then the navy would have been using it a long time ago."
Now Clay jumped up to face Kona. "What tape is this last part from?"
"The last one Nate and Amy made, the day Nate drown. Why?"
Clay sat back on Margaret's lap, looking stunned. He pointed to a line of text on the screen. They all leaned in to read: QUINN ON BOARD__WILL RENDEZVOUS WITH BLUE-6__AGREED COORDINATES__1600 TUESDAY__NO PASTRAMI