Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

was the whale on the phone?" asked Clay.
    "Well, he told me that's who he was."
    "And it was a male voice?"
    "Well, it would be. He's a singer, isn't he?"
    She'd gone on like that, reassuring him, encouraging him to go back to work, dismissing any guilt or grief, until he was almost to the gates of the compound before he remembered.
    "She's a total loony!" he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nate's dead.
    Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Clay could not make himself go to sleep. Instead he went to the office, knowing that nothing in the world could eat up time like editing video. He attached a digital video camera to his computer and turned on the recently replaced giant monitor. Blue filled the screen, and then he could sense the motion of descent, but there was only a faint hiss of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. He'd completely forgotten about it. The breath-holder's tail came into frame.
    Clay's first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder – the best they'd ever recorded. As he passed the tail, the genital slit came into view, and he could tell that they were dealing with a male. There were black marks on the underside of the tail, but the view was still edge on, and he couldn't make out their shape. He heard a faint kazoo sound in the background and ran back the tape, with the sound turned up.
    This time his breath sounded like a bull snorting before a charge, the kazoo sound, louder now, like a voice through wax paper. He ran back the tape again and cranked the sound all the way up, bringing down the high frequency to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.
    "There's someone outside, Captain."
    "Does he have my sandwich with him?"
    "He's close, Captain, really close. Too close."
    Then the tail came down, and there was a deafening thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then settled as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clay's fin as he sank, and then it was just blue and the occasional shot of the lanyard that secured the camera to his wrist.
    Clay ran the tape back again, confirmed the voices, then set it to dub onto the computer hard drive so he could manipulate the audio in a waveform, the way they did with sound recordings. Even though he was sure what was on the tape, he couldn't figure out how it could possibly have gotten there. Only five minutes of watching little progress bars move across the monitor, and he could stand the suspense no longer. He smiled to himself, because now was the time he would have gone to Nate, as he had so many times before, to help him figure out exactly what it was they were hearing or looking at, but Nate was gone. He checked his watch, and, deciding that it wasn't too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    Jonathan Livingston Reaper
    Amy wore an oversized, tattered "I'M WITH STUPID" nightshirt and Local Motion flip-flops. Her hair was completely flat on one side and splayed out into an improbable sunburst of spikes on the other, making it appear that she was getting hit in the side of the head by a tiny hurricane, which she wasn't. She was, however, performing the longest sustained yawn Clay had ever seen.
    "Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a," she said in yawnspeak, a language – not unlike Hawaiian – known for its paucity of consonants. (You go ahead, I'm okay, she was saying.) She gestured for Clay to continue.
    Clay cued the tape and fiddled with the audio. A whale tail in a field of blue passed by on the monitor.
    "There's someone outside, Captain."
    "Does he have my sandwich with him?"
    Amy stopped yawning and scooted forward on the stool she was perched upon behind Clay. When the whale tail came down, Clay stopped the tape and looked back at her.
    "Well?"
    "Play it again."
    He did. "Can we get a feeling for direction?" Amy asked. "That housing has stereo microphones, right? What if we move the speakers far apart – can we get a sense where it's coming from?"
    Clay shook his head. "The mikes are right next to each other. You have to separate them by at least a meter to get any spatial information. All I can tell you is that it's in the water and it's not particularly loud. In fact, if I hadn't been using the rebreather, I'd never have heard it.