Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

come up with the question. Nate wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd walked in on a team of squirrels building a toaster oven. Maybe the kid had run out of pot, and this spike in intelligence was just a withdrawal symptom.
    "That's not a bad guess, Kona, but the only way the whales would know about this would be if they had oscilloscopes."
    "And they don't?"
    "No, they don't."
    "Oh, and that acoustic brain? That couldn't see this?"
    "No," said Nate, not entirely sure that he hadn't just lied. He'd never thought of it before.
    "Okay. I go for to sleep now. You need more grinds?"
    "No. Thanks for the banana."
    "Jah's blessing, mon. Thanks for getting me out for jail this day. We going go out next morning?"
    "Maybe not everyone. We'll have to see how Clay feels tomorrow. He went right to his cabin when Clair brought him home from the hospital."
    "Oh, Boss Clay got cool runnings, brah. He having sweet agonies with Sistah Clair. I hear them love jams as I'm coming over."
    "Well, good," Nate said, thinking from Kona's tone and his smile that whatever he said must have been good. "Good night, Kona."
    "Good night, boss."
    Before the surfer was out the door, Nate had turned to the monitor and started mapping out peaks in the wave pattern of the low end of the whale song. He'd need to look up some articles on blue-whale calls – the lowest, loudest, longest-traveling calls on the planet – and he'd have to see if anyone had done any numerical analysis on dolphin sonar clicks, and that was all he could think of right at the moment. In the meantime he had to have enough of a sample to see if there was any meaning there. It was ridiculous, of course. It would never be so simple, nor could it be so complex. Of course you could assign values of one or zero to parts of the song – that was easy. It didn't mean there would be any meaning to it. It wouldn't necessarily answer any of their questions, but it was a different way of looking at things. Whale-call binary, no.
    Two hours later he was still assigning ones and zeroes to different microoscillations in wave patterns of different songs and felt as if he might actually, strangely, amazingly, be learning something, when Clay came through the door wearing a knee-length pink kimono emblazoned with huge white chrysanthemums. There was a small bandage on his forehead and what appeared to be a lipstick smear that ran from his mouth to his right ear.
    "Any beer in there?" Clay nodded to the kitchen. The office cabin, like all the others at Papa Lani, had once been living quarters for a whole family, so it had a full kitchen in addition to the great room they used for a main office, two smaller rooms they used for storage, and a bathroom. Clay padded past and threw open the refrigerator. "Nope. Water, I guess. I'm really dehydrated."
    "You okay," Nate said. "How was the CAT scan?"
    "I'm cat free." Clay came back to the office and fell into the chair in front of his broken monitor. "Thirteen stitches in my scalp, maybe a mild concussion. I'll be okay. Clair may kill me yet tonight, though – heart attack, stroke, affection. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring out the passion in a woman. You can't believe the stuff that woman is doing to me. And she's a schoolteacher. It's shameful." Clay grinned, and Nate noticed a little lipstick on his teeth.
    "So that's shame?" Nate gestured for Clay to wipe his mouth.
    The photographer took a swipe across his mug, came up with a handful of color, and examined it. "No, I think that's strawberry lip gloss. A woman her age wearing flavored lip gloss. The shame is in my heart."
    "You really had her worried, Clay. Me, too. If Amy hadn't kept her head… well -"
    "I fucked up. I know it. I started living in the viewfinder and forgot where I was. It was an amateurish mistake. But you can't believe the footage I was getting using the rebreather. It's going to be amazing for singers. I'm finally going to be able to get underneath them, beside them, whatever you need. I just need to remember where I am."
    "You're unbelievably lucky." Nate knew that any lecture he might come up with, Clay had already put himself through a dozen times. Still, he had to say it. Regardless of the outcome, he had endured the loss of his friend, even if was for only forty minutes or so. "Unconscious, that deep, for that long – you used up a lot of lives on that one, Clay. The fact that your mouthpiece stayed in is a miracle."
    "Well, that part wasn't an accident.