Christopher Moore - Fluke.pdf - Christopher Moore - margozap

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

Christopher Moore - Fluke.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: