She led him to a small white table around which four bone chairs protruded from the floor. They looked like old-style Greek saddle chairs — no backs, organic curves, and the high gloss of living bone — but more Gaudi than Flintstone. Quinn sat while Nuñez touched a node on the wall that opened a meter-wide portal that had concealed a sink, several canisters, and what looked like a percolator. Nate wondered about the electricity but forced himself to wait before asking.

While Nuñez prepared the coffee, Quinn looked around. The bridge was easily four times the size of the entire cabin in the humpback. Instead of riding in a minivan, it was like being in a good-size motor home — a very curvy, dimly lit motor home, but about that size. Blue light filtered in through the eyes, illuminating the pilots' faces, which shone like patent leather. Nate was starting to realize that even though everything was organic, living, the whale ship had the same sort of efficiency found on any nautical vessel: every spaced used, everything stowed against movement, everything functional.

"If you need to use the head, it's back down the corridor, fourth hatch on the right."

Emily 7 clicked and squealed, and Nuñez laughed. She had a warm laugh, not forced; it just rolled out of her smooth and easy. "Emily says it seems as if it would be more logical for the head to be in the head, but there goes logic."

"I gave up logic a few days ago."

"You don't have to give it up, just adjust. Anyway, facilities in the head are like everything on the ship — living — but I think you'll figure out the analogs pretty quickly. It's less complicated than an airliner bathroom."

Scooter chirped, and the great ship started to move, first in a fairly radical wave of motion, then smoothing out to a gentle roll. It was like being on a large sailing ship in medium seas.

"Hey, a little more warning, Scooter, huh?" said Nuñez. "I nearly dumped Nathan's coffee. Okay if I call you Nathan?"

"Nate's good."

Moving with the roll of the ship, she made it back to the table and put down the two steaming mugs of coffee, then went back for a sugar bowl, spoons, and a can of condensed milk. Nate picked up the can and studied it.

"This is the first thing from the outside that I've seen."

"Yeah, well, that's special request. You don't want to try whale milk in your coffee. It's like krill-flavored spray cheese."

"Yuck."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Cielle, if you don't mind my saying, you don't seem very military."

"Me? No, I wasn't. My husband and I had a sixty-foot sailboat. We got caught in a hurricane off of Costa Rica and sank. That's when they took me. My husband didn't make it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It was a long time ago. But, no, I've never been in the military."

"But the way you order the whaley boys around —»

"First, we need to clear up a misconception that you are obviously forming, Nate. I — we, the human beings on these ships — are not in charge. We're just — I don't know, like ambassadors or something. We sound like commanders because these guys would just goof off all day without someone telling them what to do, but we have no real authority. The Colonel gives the orders, and the whaley boys run the show."

Scooter and Skippy snickered like their counterparts on the humpback ship, Bernard and Emily 7 joined them — Bernard extending his prehensile willy like a party horn.

"And whaley girls?" Nate nodded toward Emily 7, who grinned — it was a very big, very toothy grin, but a little coquettish in the way one might expect from, say, an ingenue with a bite that could sever an arm.

"Just whaley boys. It's like the term 'mankind, you know — alienate the female part of the race at all costs. It's the same here. Old-timers gave them the name."

"Who's the Colonel?"

"He's in charge. We don't see him."

"Human, though?"

"I'm told."

"You said you'd been here a long time. How long?"

"Let me get you another cup, and I'll tell you what I can." She turned. "Bernard, get that thing out of the coffeepot!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Clair Stirs a Brainstorm

For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.

Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of thirteen knocking the edge off his mental acuity by the concerted application of the most epic smokage that Jah could provide (thanks be unto Him), he was now being called upon to think and remember with a sharpness that was clearly painful.

"Think," said Clair, rapping the surfer in the forehead with the spoon she had only seconds earlier used to stir honey into a cup of calming herbal tea.

"Ouch," said Kona.

"Hey, that's uncalled for," said Clay, coming to Kona's aid. Loyalty being important to him.

"Shut up. You're next."

"Okay."

They were gathered around Clay's giant monitor, which, for all the good it was doing them, could have been a giant monitor lizard. A spectrogram of whale song from Quinn's computer was splashed across the screen, and for the information they were getting from it, it might have been the aftermath of a paint-ball war, which is what it looked like.

"What were they doing, Kona?" Clair asked, spoon — steaming with herbal calmness — poised to strike. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishment was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education. "Nate and Amy both went through this with you. Now you have to remember what they said."

"It's not these things, it's the oscilloscope," Kona said. "Nate pulled out just the submarine stuff and put it on the spectrum."

"It's all submarine," Clay said. "You mean subsonic."

"Yeah. He said there was something in there. I said like computer language. Ones and ohs."

"That doesn't help."

"He was marking them out by hand," Kona said. "By freezing the green line, then measuring the peaks and troughs. He said that the signal could carry a lot more information that way, but the whales would have to have oscilloscopes and computers to do it."

Clay and Clair both turned to the surfer in amazement.

"And they don't," Kona said. "Duh."

It was as if a storm of coherence had come over him. They just stared.

Kona shrugged. "Just don't hit me with the spoon again."

Clay pushed his chair back to let the surfer at the keyboard. "Show me." Late into the night the three of them worked, making little marks on printouts of the oscilloscope and recording them on yellow legal pads. Ones and ohs. Clair went to bed at 2:00 A.M. At 3:00 A.M. they had fifty handwritten legal-pad pages of ones and ohs. In another time this might have felt to Clay like a job well done. He'd helped analyze data on shipboard before. It killed some time and ingratiated him to whatever scientist was leading the project he was there to photograph, but he'd always been able to hand off the work for someone else to finish. It was slowly dawning on him: Being a scientist sucked.