"No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just telling you why I'm doing it. And that's why you're doing it, too. You just don't know it yet."

"And what if someone told you that you'd never have one of those moments of knowing something again — would you keep doing it?"

"That won't happen."

"So you're close to something here? With this binary thing?"

"Maybe."

"Didn't Ryder analyze the song as far as how much information it could carry and come up with something really anemic like point six bits per second? That's not really enough to make it meaningful, is it?" Growl Ryder had been Quinn's doctoral adviser at UC Santa Cruz. One of the first generation of greats in the field, along with Ken Norris and Roger Payne, a true kahuna. His first name was actually Gerard, but anyone who had known him called him Growl, because of his perpetually surly nature. Ten years ago, off the Aleutians, he'd gone out alone in a Zodiac to record blue-whale calls and had never come back. Quinn smiled at his memory. "True, but Ryder died before he finished that work, and he was looking at the musical notes and themes for information. I'm actually looking at waveform. Just from what I've done tonight, it looks like you can get up to fifty, sixty bits per second. That's a lot of information."

"That can't be right. That won't work," Amy said. She seemed to be taking this information a bit more emotionally than Nate would have expected. "If you could move that much information subsonically, the navy would be using it for submarines. Besides, how could the whales use waveform? They'd need oscilloscopes." She was up on her toes now, almost shouting.

"Calm down, I'm just looking into it. Dolphins and bats don't need oscilloscopes to image sonically. Maybe there's something there. Just because I'm using a computer to look at this data doesn't mean I think whales are digital. It's only a model, for Christ's sake." He was going to pat her shoulder to comfort her, but then remembered her attitude toward that at the jail.

"You're not looking at data, Nate, you're making it up. You're wasting your time, and I'm not sure you're not wasting my time. This whole job might have been a big mistake."

"Amy, I don't understand why —»

But she wouldn't give him a chance to defend himself. "Go to bed, Nate. You're delirious. We have real work to do tomorrow, and you'll be worthless if you don't get some sleep." She turned and stormed out into the night. Even as she moved across the courtyard to her cabin, Nate could hear her ranting to herself. The words "doofus," "deluded," and "pathetic loser" rang out above the tirade to settle on Nate's ego.

Strangely enough, a feeling of relief washed over him as he realized that the delusions of romantic grandeur that he'd been indulging — nay, fighting — about his research assistant had been just that: delusions. She thought he was a complete joke. At peace with himself for the first time since Amy had come on board, he saved his work, powered down the machine, and went off to bed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Down to the Harbor

Down to the harbor they went — past the condos, the cane fields, the golf course, the Burger King, the Buddhist cemetery with its great green Buddha blissed out by the sea, past the steak houses, the tourist traps, the old guy riding down Front Street on a girl's bike with a macaw perched on his head — down to the harbor they went. They waved to the researchers at the fuel dock, nodded to the haglets at the charter booths, shakaed the divemasters and the captains, and schlepped science stuff down the dock to start their day.

Tako Man stood in the back of his boat eating a breakfast of rice and octopus as the Maui Whale crew — Clay, Quinn, Kona, and Amy — passed by. He was a strong, compact Malaysian with long hair and a stringy soul-patch beard that, along with the bone fishhooks he wore in his ears, gave him the distinct aspect of a pirate. He was one of the black-coral divers who lived in the harbor, and this morning, as always, he wore his wet suit.

"Hey, Tako," Clay said. The diver glanced up from his bowl. His eyes looked as if someone had poured shots of blood into them. Kona noticed that the small octopus in the diver's bowl was still moving, and he scampered down the dock feeling a case of the creeps fluttering to life in his spinal cord.

"Nightwalkers, gray ones, on your boat last night. I seen them," said Tako Man. "Not the first time."

"Good to know," said Clay, patronizing the diver and moving down the dock. You had to keep peace with anyone who lived in the harbor, especially the black-coral divers, who lived far over the edge of what most people would consider normal life. They shot heroin, drank heavily, spent all day doing bounce dives to two hundred feet looking for the gemstone-valuable black coral, then spent their money on weeklong parties that had, more than once, ended with one of them dead on the dock. They lived on their boats and ate rice and whatever they could pull out of the sea. Tako Man had gotten his name because on any given afternoon, after the divers came in for the day, you'd see the grizzled Malaysian carrying a net bag full of tako (octopus) that he had speared on the reef for their supper.

"Hi," Amy said sheepishly to Tako Man as they passed. He glared at her through his bloody haze, and his head bobbed as he almost nodded out into his breakfast. Amy quickened her pace and ran a Pelican case she was carrying into the back of Quinn's thigh.

"Jeez, Amy," Quinn said, having almost lost his footing.

"Do those guys dive in that condition?" Amy whispered, still sticking to Quinn like a shadow.

"Worse than that. Would you back up a little?"

"He's scary. You're supposed to protect me, ya mook. How do they keep from getting into trouble?"

"They lose one or two a year. Ironically, it's usually an overdose that gets them."

"Tough job."

"They're tough guys."

Tako Man shouted, "Fuck you, whale people! You'll see. Fucking nightwalker fuckers. Fucking fuck you, haole motherfuckers!" He tossed the remains of his breakfast at them. It landed overboard, and tiny fish broke the water fighting for the scraps.

"Rum," said Kona. "Too much hostility in dat buzz. Rum come from da cane, and cane come from slavin' the people, and dat oppression all distilled in de bottle and come out a man mean as cat shit on a day."

"Yeah," said Clay to Quinn. "Didn't you know that about rum?"

"Where's your boat?" asked Quinn.

"My boat?"

"Your boat, Clay," said Amy.

"No," said Clay. He stopped and dropped two cases of camera equipment on the dock. The Always Confused, the spiny and powerful twenty-two-foot Grady White center-console fisherman, Clay's pride and joy, was gone. A life jacket, a water bottle, and various other familiar flotsam bobbed gently in a rainbow slick of gasoline where the boat had once been.

Everyone thought someone else should say something, but for a full minute no one did. They just stood there, staring at what should have been Clay's boat but instead was a big, boatless gob of tropical air.

"Poop," Amy finally said, saying it for all of them.

"We should check with the harbormaster," said Nate.

"My boat," said Clay, who stood over the empty slip as if it were his recently run-over boyhood dog. He would have nuzzled it and stroked its little dead doggy ears if he could have, but instead he fished the oily life jacket out of the water and sat on the dock rocking it.

"He really liked that boat," Amy said.

"Can I get a duh for the sistah?" exclaimed the dreaded blond kid.

"I paid the insurance," Nate said as he moved away, headed for the harbormaster.

Tako Man had come down the dock from his own boat to stare at the empty water. Somber now. Amy backed up into Kona for protection, but Kona had backed up into the next person behind him, which turned out to be Captain Tarwater, resplendent in his navy whites and newly Kona-scuffed shoes.