Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

the whale humped its tail to dive, expecting to see a message scrawled across the flukes.
    "He's making them up noises, boss."
    Nate nodded. The kid was learning fast. "Get your camera ready, Kona. He'll breathe three, maybe four times before he dives, so be ready."
    Abruptly the singing in the headphones stopped. Nate pulled up the hydrophone and started the engine. They waited.
    "He went that way, boss," Kona said, pointing off to the starboard side. Nate turned the boat slowly in place and waited.
    They were looking in the direction in which Kona had seen the whale moving underwater when he surfaced behind them, not ten feet away from the boat, the blow making both of them jump, the spray wafting across them in a rainbow cloud.
    "Ho! Dat buggah up, boss!"
    "Thank you, Captain Obvious," Nate said under his breath. He pulled down the throttle and came in behind the whale. On its next breath the whale rolled and slapped a long pectoral fin on the surface, soaking Kona and throwing heavy spray over the console. At least the kid had had the sense to use his body to shield the camera from the splash.
    "I love this whale!" Kona said, his Rastaspeak melting, leaving behind a middle-class Jersey accent. "I want to take this whale home and put him in a box with grass and rocks. Buy him squeaky toys."
    "Get ready for your ID shot," Nate instructed.
    "When we're done with him, can I keep him? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeze!"
    "Here he goes, Kona. Focus."
    The whale humped, then fluked, and Kona fired off four quick frames with the motor drive.
    "You get it?"
    "Rippin' pics. Rippin'!" Kona put the camera down on the seat in front of the console and covered it with a towel.
    Nate pointed the boat toward the last fluke print, a twenty-foot lens of smooth water formed on the surface by the turbulence of the whale's tail. These lenses would hold on the surface sometimes for as long as two minutes, serving as windows through which the researchers could watch the whales. In the old whaling days the hunters believed that fluke prints had been caused by oil excreted by the whale. Nate cut the engine and let the boat coast over the fluke print. They could hear the whale song coming up from below and could feel the boat vibrating under their feet.
    Nate dropped the hydrophones, hit the "record" button, and put on the headphones. Kona was recording the frame numbers and GPS coordinates in the notebook as Nate had taught him. A monkey can do my job, Nate thought. An hour's experience and this stoner is already doing it. This kid is younger, stronger, and faster than I am, and I'm not even sure that I'm smarter, as if that matters. I'm totally irrelevant.
    But maybe it did matter. Maybe it wasn't all about strength. Culture and language completely screwed up normal biological evolution. Why would we humans have developed such big brains if mating was always predicated on strength and size? Women must have chosen their mates based on intelligence as well. Perhaps early smart guys would say something like "There, right behind those rocks, there's a tasty sloth ripe for the spearing. Go get him, guys." Then, after he'd sent the stronger, dumber guys running off a cliff after the imaginary sloth, he'd settle down with the best of the Cro-Magnon cuties to mix some genes. "That's right, bite my brow ridge. Bite it!" Nate smiled.
    Kona was looking over the side at the singer, whose tail was only twenty feet below the boat (although his head was forty feet deeper). He was only a couple of minutes into his song. He'd be down at least ten minutes more.
    "Kona, we need to get a DNA sample."
    "How we do that?"
    Nate pulled a set of flippers out of the console and handed them and an empty coffee cup out to the surfer. "You're going to need to go get a semen sample."
    The surfer gulped. Looked at the whale, looked at the cup, looked over the side at the whale again. "No lid?"

CHAPTER TEN
    Safety
    Clay Demodocus drifted silently down past the tail of the breath-holder, only the quiet hissing of his own breath in his ears. Breath-holders were called such because they hung there in the water for up to forty minutes, heads down like a singer, just holding their breath. Not swimming or singing or doing much of anything else. Just hanging there, sometimes three or four of them, tails spread out like the points of a compass. As if someone had just dropped a handful of sleeping whales and forgotten to pick them up. Except they weren't sleeping. Whales didn't really sleep,