Nuñez saw Nate come in, smiled, and motioned for him to come forward. These people were completely incompetent as captors, Nate thought. Not a measure of terror among them, the humans anyway. If not for the subsonic heebie-jeebies, he would have felt right at home.
"Where did this come from?"
The electronics looked incredibly crude next to the elegant organic design of the whale ship, the whaley boys, and, for that matter, the human crew. The idea of comparing designs between human-built devices and biological systems hadn't really occurred to Nate before because he'd been conditioned never to think of animals as designed. The whale ship was putting a deep dent in his Darwin.
"These are our toys," Nuñez said. "The console stays below the floor unless we need to see it. Totally unnecessary for the whaley boys, since they have direct interface with the ship, but it makes us feel like we know what's going on."
"And they can't type for shit," said Tim, tucking his thumbs under and making a slamming-the-keys gesture. "Tiny thumbs."
The whaley boy next to him trumpeted a raspberry all over Tim's monitor, leaving large dots of color magnified in the whaley spit. He chirped twice, and Tim nodded and typed into the computer.
"Can they read?" Nate asked.
"Read, kind of write, and most of them understand at least two human languages, although, as you probably noticed, they're not big talkers."
"No vocal cords," said Nuñez. "They have air chambers in their heads that produce the sounds they make, but they have a hard time forming the words."
"But they can talk. I've heard Em — I mean, them."
"Best that you just learn whaleyspeak. It's basically what they use to talk to each other, except they keep it in the range of our hearing. It's easier to learn if you've learned other tonal-sensitive languages like Navajo or Chinese."
"I'm afraid not," Nate said. "So the ship is calling?"
Tim pulled off his headphones and handed them to Nate. "The pitch is raised into our range. You'll be able to hear it through there."
Nate held a headphone to one ear. Now that he could hear the signal, he could also feel it start and stop more acutely in his chest. If anything, it relieved the discomfort, because he could hear it coming. "Is this a message?"
"Yep," said Jane, pulling up a headphone. "Just as you suspected. We type it in, the computer puts the message into peaks and troughs on the waveform, we play the waveform for the whaley boys, and they make the whale sing that waveform. We've calibrated it over the years."
Nate noticed that the whaley boy at the metal console had one hand in an organic socket fitted into the front of the console — like a flesh cable that ran to the whale ship through the console's base, similar to the ones on the flesh consoles the pilots used.
"Why the computers and stuff at all if the whaley boys do it all by… what? Instinct?"
The whaley boy at the console grinned up at Nate, squeaked, then performed the international signal for a hand job.
"It's the only way we can be in the loop," Jane said. "Believe me, for a long time we were just along for the ride. The whaley boys have the same navigational sense that the whales themselves do. We don't understand it at all. It's some sort of magnetic vocabulary. It wasn't until the Dirts — that's you — developed computers and we got some people who could run them that we became part of the process. Now we can surface and pull a GPS coordinate, transmit it, communicate with the other crews. We have some idea of what we're doing."
"You said for a long time? How long?"
Jane looked nervously at Nuñez, who looked nervously back. Nate thought for a moment that they might have to dash off to the bathroom together, which in his experience was what women did right before they made any major decisions, like about which shoes to buy or whether or not they were ever going to sleep with him again.
"A long time, Nate. We're not sure how long. Before computers, okay?"
By which she meant she wasn't going to tell him and if he pressed it, she'd just lie to him. Nate suddenly felt more like a prisoner, and, as a prisoner, he felt as though his first obligation was to escape. He was sure that was your first obligation as a prisoner. He'd seen it in a movie. Although his earlier plan of leaping out the back orifice into the deep ocean now seemed a tad hasty, with some perspective.
He said, "So how deep are we?"
"We usually send at about two thousand feet. That puts us pretty squarely in the SOFAR channel, no matter where we are geographically."
The SOFAR channel (sound fixing and ranging) was a natural combination of pressure and temperature at certain depths that cause a path of least resistance in which sound could travel many thousands of miles. The theory had been that blues and humpbacks used it to communicate with each other over long distances for navigational purposes. Evidently whaley boys and the people who worked their ships did, too.
"So does this signal replicate a natural blue-whale call?"
"Yes," said Tim. "That's one of the advantages of communicating in English within the waveform. When the whaley boys were doing the direct communication, there was a lot more variation in the call, but our signal is hidden, more or less. Except for a few busybodies who may run across it."
"Like me?"
"Yes, like you. We're a little worried about some of the acoustic people at Woods Hole and Hatfield Marine Center in Oregon. People who spend way too much time looking at spectrograms of underwater sound."
"You realize," said Nate, "that I might never have found out about your ships. I didn't make any sort of intuitive leap to look at a binary signal in the call. It was a stoned kid who came up with that."
"Yeah," said Jane. "If it makes you feel any better, you can blame him for your being here. We were on hold until you started to look in the signal for binary. That's when they called you in, so to speak."
Nate sincerely wished he could blame Kona, but since it appeared that he might never see civilization again, having someone to blame didn't seem particularly pertinent right now. Besides, the kid had been right. "How'd you know? I didn't exactly put out a press release."
"We have ways," said Nuñez, trying not to sound spooky but failing. This evidently amused the whaley boy at the console and the two pilots no end, and they nearly wheezed themselves out of their seats.
"Oh, fuck you guys," said Nuñez. "It's not like you guys are a bunch of geniuses."
"And you guys were the nightwalkers that Tako Man was talking about," Nate said to the pilots. "You guys sank Clay's boat."
The pilots raised their arms over their heads in a menacing scary-monster pose, then bared their teeth and made some fake growling noises, then collapsed into what Nate was starting to think of as whale giggles. The whaley boy at the console started clapping and laughing as well.
"Franklin! We're not done here. Can we get the interface back?"
Franklin, obviously the whaley boy who had been working the console, slumped and put his hand back in the socket. "Sorry," came a tiny voice from his blowhole.
"Bitch," came another tiny voice from one of the pilots, followed by whaley snickering.
"Let's send one more time. I want base to know we'll be there in the morning," Nuñez said.
"Morale's not a problem, then?" asked Nate, grinning at Nuñez's loss of temper.
"Oh, they're like fucking children," Nuñez said. "They're like dolphins: You dump them in the middle of the ocean with a red ball and they'll just play all day long, stopping only long enough to eat and screw. I'm telling you, it's like baby-sitting a bunch of horny toddlers."