"What do you mean, 'no one is watching'?"

"I mean you guys. Biologists. If one of you guys is watching us, we have to slow it down after a couple of hours. Especially if we're tagged."

"This ship has been satellite-tagged? What do you do?"

"We go to silent running for a while. Then we dive, and one of the whaley boys goes outside and pulls the tag off. We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can. If they'd asked me, he'd be the one riding with us now."

"You know who he is?" Nate was aghast. As a scientist, you were always fighting being overwhelmed by what you don't know, but the magnitude of this whole operation — it was too much.

"Of course. Since commercial whaling backed off, cetacean biologists have been the main focus of our intelligence program. Why do you think you're here?"

"Okay, why am I here?"

"I don't know the whole story, but it's something to do with the song. Evidently you were a little too close to finding our signal in the song, so they yanked you."

"The aliens were that interested in what I was doing?"

"What aliens?"

"These aliens," Nate said, nodding toward the pilots and Bernard and Emily 7, who had moved to another table on the other side of the corridor.

"The whaley boys aren't aliens. Who told you that?"

"Well, Poynter and Poe implied that they were."

"Those jerks. No, they're not aliens. They're a little weird, but not from-another-planet weird."

Bernard looked up from what appeared to be a chart of some sort and gave a half-assed signature raspberry.

"They do that a lot," Nate said.

"If you had a tongue four inches wide, you'd do that a lot, too. It's sort of a display move with them, like the penis waving that Bernard was doing."

"Like male killer whales do."

"Bingo. See, a guy with your background, this is easy to explain. I didn't understand squat at first."

"I'm sorry, but I can't believe that this ship, the whaley boys, the whole perfection of the way they work, could possibly be products of natural selection. There had to be a design. Someone made all this."

Cielle nodded, smiling. "I've known a number of scientists in my lifetime, Nate, but I'm sure this is the first time I've heard one arguing in favor of a grand designer. What's that called, the 'watchmaker argument'?"

She was right, of course. It was an accepted premise that intelligent design in nature was not necessarily a product of intelligence, but merely the mechanism of natural selection of traits for survival and really, really long periods of time for the selections to assert themselves. Nate's life's work had been built on that assumption, but now he was giving Darwin the old heave-ho simply because his — Nate's — mind was too small to adapt to the idea of this craft. Well, yes, damn it. Screw Darwin. This was too strange.

"I'm sorry, I'm just having a little trouble getting my head around this. I don't know how you take to being a prisoner, but I don't care for it. On top of that, I could barely sleep on the humpback with the blow going off every few minutes, and I haven't eaten anything but raw fish and water for about five days. I'd be addled even if this didn't seem impossible."

Bernard made a whimpering noise, and Skippy and Scooter followed along in a moment until they sounded like a basketful of hungry puppies, and then they all broke out into wheezing snickers. Emily 7 frowned at them.

"Of course, I understand, Nate," Nuñez said. "Maybe you should finish up your coffee and go to your quarters. I have a few sports shakes in my cabin that will get some carbohydrates to your brain, and I can get you something to help you sleep — the ship's doctor has a full stock of Pharmaceuticals." She patted his hand maternally. Nate felt a little ashamed for having complained.

"You're not the only human on this ship, then?"

"No, there are four humans and six whaley boys on board. The others are in their quarters. But they're all excited to meet you. Everyone's been talking about it for weeks."

"You've known for weeks you were going to take me?"

"Well, sort of. We were on standby. We just got the go-ahead the day before we took you."

"And you, and the rest of the crew, you're prisoners, too?"

"Nate, every person on this ship, on any whale ship, has been pulled out of a sinking or sunken ship, a plane crash at sea, or some other disaster that would have killed them. This is a gift of time, and frankly, once you accept where you are and what you're doing, I'm going to ask you where you'd rather be. Okay?"

Nate searched her face for any sign of sarcasm or malice. All he found was a gentle smile. "Okay."

"You go to your quarters now. I'll send around your supplies in a bit. Bernard, would you show Dr. Quinn to his quarters?"

"I'm not really a doctor," Nate whispered.

"Take whatever respect you can get from them, Nate."

Bernard waited at the entry to the corridor, rubbing his shiny-smooth stomach and grinning. A white coffee mug stood out in contrast against Bernard's abdomen, suspended as it was in the grasp of his penis.

"I've always wanted to do that," said Nate, deciding that he wasn't going to let the whaley boy get the satisfaction of intimidating him. "Would be really handy for driving." Nate bowed toward the corridor. "Lead on, Bernard."

Bernard skulked down the hall in what would have been a full pout posture, had he any lips to do the actual pouting. He spilled a trail of coffee along the way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Inner Secrets

of Cetacean Sluts

Nate was just settling into the idea of the organic bunk he was going to be sleeping on before actually settling into the bed. He was not a God kind of guy, but he found himself thanking one nonetheless for the crisp cotton sheets and pillowcase on a feather pillow. He didn't think he really wanted to sleep with his face against whaleskin. There was a soft whistle outside the portal, and the great flap of skin retracted to open to the corridor. Emily 7 stood there with a tray that held two cans of protein shake, a glass of water, and a single small pill. She grinned but did not try to step into the cabin. The small portal required a bit of a crouching and climbing action for Nate to enter, so he guessed she'd dump the tray trying to get through. Then again, she might just be trying to be polite. She waited while Nate took the cans from the tray and set them on the low table, then swung around to take the pill and water from her.

Emily 7 whistled and gave him a sidelong glance, causing her right eye to bulge out at him, as he'd actually seen humpbacks do when checking out a boat at the surface. She gestured for him to take the pill.

"You're not leaving until you see me take my medicine?"

Emily 7 nodded.

"Well, I guess if you guys wanted to get rid of me, it would have been a lot easier to kill me without bringing me all the way out here to poison me." Nate took the pill, downed the water, and opened his mouth to show that the pill was gone. "That okay, nurse?"

Emily whistled and nodded, then gently took the empty glass from Nate's hand. She reached up to hit the node, and the portal closed between them. Nate heard her whistle the first few bars of a lullaby.

She's sweet, Nate thought, in a tall, malevolent rubber-puppet sort of way.

For almost a week the only sleep Nate had been able to get was while he was restrained in the chair in the humpback, and even then it was restless — with the ship blowing every few minutes and the whaley boys whistling communications — so, despite the blow of the blue-whale ship, he fell into a deep sleep filled with vivid dreams. He dreamed of himself and Amy, their naked bodies entwined, slick with sweat under soft candlelight. Strangely, even as he dreamed, he had the semilucid thought that before, whenever he'd taken a sleeping pill, he didn't remember ever dreaming. But that thought was pushed away by the feel of Amy's smooth skin, his fingers softly caressing her muscular legs, her four long, webbed fingers wrapped lovingly around his —