Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

the boat. Clay desperately resisted the urge to grab up cameras and start blasting film or digital video. It felt like he had to pee, really badly, from his eyes.
    "Nate," Clay called, and he pointed to a bubble net forming just outside the ring of floating whales. They'd seen them dozens of times in Alaska and Canada, one humpback circling and releasing a stream of bubbles to corral a school of fish while others plunged up through the middle to catch them. The circle of bubbles became more pronounced on the surface, as if the water were boiling, and then a single humpback breached through the ring, cleared the water completely, and landed on its side in white crater of splash and spray.
    "Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth said. Flustered, she pressed her face into Nate's jacket, then looked back quickly, lest she miss something.
    "They're showing off," Clay said.
    The lolling whales lazily paddled out of the way, opening a corridor to the ship. The humpback motorboated toward the bow, its knobby face riding on top of the water. When it was only ten yards from the bow, the animal rose up in the water and opened its mouth. Amy stood up, and next to her stood James Poynter Robinson.
    "Hey, can we get a ladder down here?" Amy shouted.
    "Praise Jah's mercy," Kona said, "the Snowy Biscuit has come home."
    Nate threw a cargo net over the side, then climbed halfway down and pulled Amy up onto the net. He held her there as the ship moved in the swell, and she tried to kiss him and nearly chipped a tooth.
    "Help me with Elizabeth," Nate said.
    Together they got the Old Broad down the cargo net and handed her to her husband, who stood on the tongue of a whale and hugged his bride after not seeing her for four decades.
    "You look so young," Elizabeth said.
    "We can fix that," he said.
    "You'll get old?"
    "Nope." He looked back to Nate and saluted. Nate could hear whaley-boy pilots snickering inside the whale.
    "I brought you a pastrami on rye," she said.
    Poynter took the paper bag from her as if he were accepting the Holy Grail.
    Nate and Amy scrambled up the cargo net and stood at the bow as the whale drifted away from the bow.
    "Thank you, Nate," the Old Broad said, waving. "Thank you, Clay."
    Nate smiled. "We'll see you soon, Elizabeth."
    "We will, you know," Amy said as the whale ship closed and sank back into the waves.
    "I know."
    "I have to come back here every few months, you know."
    "I know."
    "Forever."
    "Yeah, I know."
    "I'm the new colonel now. I'm sort of in charge down there, you know, since I'm sort of the daughter of their god. So we'll have to spend time down there."
    "Do I have to call you 'Colonel'?"
    "What, you have a problem with that?"
    "No, I'm okay with that."
    "You realize that the Goo really could decide to wipe out the human species at any minute."
    "Yep. Same as it's always been."
    "And you know if I live out here, I'm not always going to, you know, look like this?"
    "I know."
    "But I will always be luscious, and you – you will always be a hopeless nerd."
    "Action nerd," Nate corrected.
    "Ha!" Amy said.

AUTHOR NOTES
    Science and Magic
    "The science you don't know looks like magic," Kona says in Chapter 30. I have generally come down on the side of magic, simply because it involves less math, but with Fluke it was necessary to learn a little science. Because so much of Fluke does fall into the realm of magic, though, I thought it only fair to give you, gentle reader, some idea of what's fact and what's not.
    The body of knowledge on cetacean biology, especially as it relates to behavior, is growing at such a staggering rate that it's hard to be sure of what you know from one day to the next. (This happens to be exactly the way I live my life, so that worked out nicely.) Scientists have been studying humpback song for fewer than forty years, and it's only in the last decade that studies have been undertaken to try to relate the song to social behavior and interaction. (And a challenging question there: What constitutes interaction in an animal whose voice can carry a thousand miles?) As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters. There is no reasonable explanation for this, but as of yet no tagged humpbacks have been tracked to the New Age section at Sam Goody's.)
    At this point no one has ever seen or filmed the mating of humpbacks, so while it would