She followed his gaze to the jar. "We get a lot of the surface goods from shipwrecks, so don't be impressed if you see antiques; the sea is a good preserver. We may have salvaged it only a week ago. A friend of mine keeps potatoes in a Grecian wine amphora that's two thousand years old."
"Yeah, and I'm using the Holy Grail to catch my spare change. How long?"
"You are so hostile today. I don't know how long, Nate. A long time."
He had dozens, hundreds more questions, like where the hell did they get potatoes when they didn't have sunlight to grow anything? They weren't bringing potatoes up from a shipwreck. But Cielle was letting him get only so far before claiming ignorance.
They had lunch at a four-stool lunch counter where the proprietor was a striking Irishwoman with stunning green eyes and a massive spill of red hair and who, like everyone, it seemed, knew Cielle and knew who Nate was.
"Got you a Walkman then, Dr. Quinn? Whaley boys will drive you to drink with that sonar at night."
"We're going to get him some earplugs today, Brennan," Cielle said.
"Music, that's the way to wash the whaley-boy whistles," the woman said. Then she was off to her kitchen. The walls of the cafe were decorated with a collection of antique beer trays, glued in place, as Nate had learned, with an adhesive that was similar to what barnacles secreted to fasten themselves to ships. Nailing things up was frowned upon, as the walls would bleed for a while if injured.
Nate took a bite of his sandwich, meatballs and mozzarella on good crusty French bread.
"How?" he asked Cielle, blowing crumbs on the counter. "How does any of this stuff get made if there's no flame?"
Cielle shrugged. "No idea. A bakery, I'd guess. They make all the prepared food outside the grotto. I've never been there."
"You don't know how? How can that be?"
Cielle Nuñez put down her own sandwich and leaned on one elbow, smiling at Nate. She had remarkably kind eyes, and Nate had to remind himself that she had been ordered to be his friend. Interesting, he thought, that they'd choose a woman. Was she bait?
"You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Nate?"
"Of course, everybody does."
"And that guy goes back to Camelot from the late nineteenth century and dazzles everyone with his scientific knowledge, mainly because he can make gunpowder, right?"
"Yes, so?"
"You're a scientist, so you might do better than most, but take your average citizen, a guy who works at a discount store, say. Drop him in the twelfth century, you know what he'll achieve?"
"Make your point?"
"Death by bacterial infection, more than likely. And the last words on his lips will probably be, 'There's such a thing as an antibiotic, really. My point is, I don't know how this stuff is made because I haven't needed to know. Nobody knows how to make the things they use. I suppose I could find out and get back to you, but I promise you I'm not holding out on you just to be mysterious. We do a lot of salvage on the whale ships, and we have a trade network into the real world that gets us a lot of our goods. When a freighter leaves pallets of goods for the people on remote islands in the Pacific, all they know is that they've been paid and they've delivered to shore. They don't stay to see who takes the goods away. The old-timers say that it used to be that the Goo provided everything. Nothing came in from the outside that wasn't on their backs when they got here."
Nate took a bite of his sandwich and nodded as if considering what she'd just said. Since he'd arrived in Gooville, he had spent every waking moment thinking about two things: one, how this whole place could possibly function; and two, how to get out of it. The Goo had to get energy from somewhere. The energy to light the huge grotto alone would require tens of millions of calories. If it got energy from outside, maybe you could use that same pathway to get out.
"So do you guys feed it? The Goo?"
"No."
"Well, then-"
"Don't know, Nate. I just don't know. How does dry-cleaning work?"
"Well, I assume that they use solvents, that, uh — Look, biologists don't have a lot of stuff that needs to be dry-cleaned. I'm sure it's not that complicated a process."
"Yeah, well, right back at you on all of your questions about the Goo."
Cielle stood and gathered up her parcels. "Let's go, Nate. I'm taking you back to your apartment. Then I'm going right to the whaley-boy den and find out if they can get the Colonel to see you. Today."
Nate still had a couple bites of his sandwich left. "Hey, I've still got a couple of bites of my sandwich left," he said.
"Really? Well, did you ask yourself where in Gooville we got meatballs? What sort of meat might be in them?"
Nate dropped his sandwich.
"Bit of the whining wussy boy, aren't we?" said Brennan as she came out of the kitchen to take away their plates.
Nate was reading a cheesy lawyer novel that he'd found in the small library in his apartment when the whaley boys came for him. There were three of them, two large males with killer-whale coloring and a smaller female blue. Only when the blue squeaked "Hi Nate" in a mashed-elf voice did he recognize it as Emily 7.
"Wow, hi, Emily. Is just Emily okay, or should I always say the Seven?" Nate always felt awkward with someone afterward, even if there wasn't anything for the ward to be after.
She crossed her arms over her chest and bugged out her left eye at him.
"Okay," Nate said, moving on, "I guess we'll be going, then. Did you see my new doorknob? Brand-new. Stainless steel. I realize it doesn't go with everything else, but, you know, it feels a little like freedom." Right, Nate. It's a doorknob, he thought.
They led him around the perimeter of the grotto, beyond the village, and into one of the huge passageways that led away from the grotto.
They walked for half an hour, tracing a labyrinth of passageways that got narrower and narrower the farther off they went, the bright red lobster-shell surface fading into something that looked like mother-of-pearl the deeper in they went. It glowed faintly, just enough so they could see where they were going.
Finally the passageway started to broaden again and open into a large room that looked like some sort of oval amphitheater, all of it pearlescent and providing its own light. Benches lined the walls around the room, all in view of a wide ramp that led to a round portal the size of a garage door, closed now with an iris of black shell.
"Ooooh, the great and powerful Oz will see you now," Nate said.
The whaley boys, who normally found practically anything funny, just looked away. One of the black-and-whites started whistling a soft tune from his blowhole. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" or a Streisand tune — something creepy, Nate thought.
Emily 7 backhanded the whistler in the chest, and he stopped abruptly. Then she put her hand on Nate's shoulder and gestured for him to go up the steps to the round portal.
"Okay, I guess this is it." Nate started backing up the ramp as the whaley boys started backing away from him. "You guys better not leave me, because I'll never find my way back."
Emily 7 grinned, that lovely hack-a-salmon-in-half smile of hers, and waved him on.
"Thanks, Em. You look good, you know. Did I mention? Shiny." He hoped shiny was good.
The iris opened behind him, and the whaley boys fell to their knees and touched their lower jaws to the floor. Nate turned to see that the pearlescent ramp led into a vibrant red chamber that was pulsing with light and glistening with moisture as the walls appeared to breathe. Now, this looked like a living thing — the inside of a living thing. Really much more what he'd expected to see when the whale had eaten him. He made his way forward. A few steps in, the ramp melded into the reddish flesh, which Nate could now see was shot through with blood vessels and what might be nerves. He couldn't get the size of the space he was in. It just seemed to expand to receive him and contract behind him, as if a bubble were moving along with him inside it. When the iris disappeared into the pink Goo, Nate felt a wave of panic go through him. He took a deep breath — damp, fecund air — and strangely enough he remembered what Poynter and Poe had told him back on the humpback ship: It's easier if you just accept that you're already dead. He took another deep breath and ventured forward a few more feet, then stopped.