Clair, Clay's girlfriend of four years, a forty-year-old Japanese-Hawaiian schoolteacher who moved like she was doing the hula to a Sousa march (strange mix of regal order and island breeze), backhanded a hang-loose shaka at the cronettes and said, grinning, "She just along to pour buckets on his reels girls, keep him from burning up."

"Oh, you guys are so friggin' nautical," said Amy, who was wrestling with a huge Pelican case that held the rebreather. The case slipped out of her grip and barked her shin before she caught it. "Ouch. Damn it. Oh yeah, everyone loves your salty friggin' charm."

A chorus of cackles from the charter booths wheezed into coughing fits. Back to the cats, the cauldrons, the coconut oil, the sacred Jimmy Buffett songs sung at midnight into the ear of drunken, white-bearded Hemingway wannabes to make that rum-soaked member rise from the dead just this one last time. The leathery bar girls turned back to their business as Kona passed by.

"Irie, Sistah Amy. Give up ye burden," said Kona, bounding down the dock to sweep the heavy rebreather out of Amy's grip and up onto his shoulder.

Amy rubbed her arm. "Thanks. Where's Nate?"

"He go to the fuel dock to get coffee for the whole tribe. A lion, him."

"Yeah, he's a good guy. You'll be going out with him today. I have to go along with Clay and Clair as a safety diver."

"Slippers off in the boat," Clay said to Clair for the hundredth time. She rolled her eyes and kicked off her flip-flops before stepping down into the Always Confused. She offered Clay a hand, and he steadied her as if escorting a lady from the king's court to the ballroom floor.

Kona handed the rebreather down to Clay. "I can safety-dive."

"You'll never be able to clear your ears. You can't pinch your nostrils shut with those nose rings in."

"They come out. Look, out they come." He tossed the rings to Amy and she deftly sidestepped, letting them plop into the water.

"Oops."

"Amy's a certified diver, kid. Sorry. You're with Nate today."

"He know that?"

"Yeah, does he know that?" asked Clair.

"He will soon. Get those lines, would you, Amy."

"I can drive the boat." Kona was on the edge of pleading.

"No one but me drives the boat," said Clay.

"I'm driving the boat," corrected Clair.

"You have to sleep with Clay to drive the boat," said Amy.

"You just do what Nate tells you," Clay said. "You'll be fine."

"If I sleep with Amy can I drive the boat?"

"Nobody drives the boat," Clay said.

"I drive the boat," Clair said.

"Nobody sleeps with Amy," Amy said.

"I sleep with Amy," Clair said.

And everyone stopped and looked at Clair.

"Who wants cream?" asked Nate, arriving at that moment with a paper tray of coffee cups. "You can do your own sugar."

"That's what I'm saying," said Clair. "Sisters are doing it for themselves."

And Nate hung there in space, holding a cup and a sugar packet, a wooden stir stick, a baffled expression.

Clair grinned. "Kidding. Jeez, you guys."

Everyone breathed. Coffee was distributed, gear was loaded, Clay drove the Always Confused out of the harbor, pausing to wave to the Count and his crew, who were loading gear into a thirty-foot rigid-hull Zodiac normally used for parasailing. The Count pulled down the brim of his hat and stood in the bow of the Zodiac, his sun umbrella at port arms, looking like a skeletal statue of Washington crossing the Lethe. The crew waved, Gilbert Box scowled.

"I like him," Clay said. "He's predictable."

But Amy and Clair missed the comment. They were applying sunscreen and indulging in girl talk in the bow.

"You can talk like such a floozy sometimes," said Amy. "I wish I could be floozish."

Clair poked her in the leg with a long, red-lacquered fingernail. "Don't sell yourself short, pumpkin."

The ersatz Hawaiian stood on the bow rail like he was hanging ten off the twenty-two-foot Mako, waving to the Zodiac crew as they passed. "Irie, science dreadies! We be research jammin' now!" But when the Count ignored his greeting, Kona gave the traditional island response: "What, I owe you money?"

"Settle, Kona," Nate said. "And get down off of there."

Kona made his way back to the console. "Old white jacket givin' you the stink-eye. Why, he think you an agent of Babylon?"

"He does bad science. People come to me to ask me about him, I tell them he does bad science."

"And we do the good science?"

"We don't change our numbers to please the people who fund us. The Japanese want numbers that show recovery of the humpback population to levels where the IWC will let them start hunting them again. Gilbert tries to give them those numbers."

"Kill these humpies? No."

"Yes."

"No. Why?"

"To eat."

"No," said the blond Rastaman, shaking his head as if to clear the evil from his ears — his dreads fanning out into nappy spokes.

Quinn smiled to himself. The moratorium had been in effect since before Kona was born. As far as the kid knew, whales had been and always would be safe from hunters. Quinn knew better. "Eating whale is very traditional in Japan. It sort of has the ritual of our Thanksgiving. But it's dying out."

"Then it's all good."

"No. There are a lot of old men who want to bring back whale hunting as a tradition. The Japanese whaling industry is subsidized by the government. It's not even a viable business. They serve whale meat in the school-lunch program so kids will develop a taste for it."

"No. No one eats the whale."

"The IWC allows them to kill five hundred minke whales a year, but they kill more. And biologists have found whale meat from half a dozen endangered whale species in Japanese markets. They try to pass it off as minke whale, but the DNA doesn't lie."

"Minke? That devil in the white war paint killing our minke?"

"We don't have any minkes here in Hawaii."

"Course not, the Count killing them. We going to chant down this evil fuckery." Kona dug into his red, gold, and green fanny pack. Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed.

"Slow de boat, brah. I got to spark up for freedom. Chant down Babylon, go into battle for Jah's glory, mon. Slow de boat."

"Put that away."

Kona paused, his Bic lighter poised over the bowl. "Take de ship home to Zion, brah?"

"No, we have work to do." Nate slowed the boat and killed the motor. They were about a mile off Lahaina.

"Chant down Babylon?" Kona raised the lighter.

"No. Put that away. I'll show you how to drop the hydrophone." Quinn checked the tape in the recorder on the console.

"Save our minkes?" Kona waved the lighter, unlit, in circles over the bowl.

"Did Clay show you how to take an ID photo?" Nate pulled the hydrophone and the coil of cord out of its case.

"Ride Jah's herb into the mystic?"

"No! Put that away and get the camera out of that cabinet in the bow."

Kona broke down the bong with a series of whirs and clicks and put it back in his fanny pack. "All right, brah, but when they have eated all your minkes, will not be Jah's fault."

An hour later, after listening, and moving, and listening again, they had found their singer. Kona stood balanced on the gunwale of the boat staring down in wonder at the big male, who was parked under the boat making a sound approximating that of a kidnap victim trying to scream through duct tape.

Kona would look from the whale to Nate, grin, then look back to the whale again, the whole time perched and balanced on the gunwale like a gargoyle on the parapet of a building. Nate guessed that he would be able to hold that position for about two minutes before his knees locked permanently and he'd be forced to finish life in a toadish squat. Still, he envied Kona the enthusiasm of discovery, the fascination and excitement of being around these great animals for the first time. He envied him his youth and his strength. And, listening to the song in the headphones, the song that seemed so clearly to be a statement of mating and yet refused to give up any direct evidence that it was, Nate felt a profound irrelevance. Sexually, socially, intellectually, fiscally, scientifically irrelevant — a sack of borrowed atoms lumpily arranged in a Nate shape. No effect, purpose, or stability.