Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

like words. They're tapped directly in to the whale's nervous system. They steer it, control all the processes at any given time. We can't do much on the whales without them. Certainly could never drive one. The whales and the whaley boys are made for each other."
    Poe pushed against the back of Skippy's seat, and another seat formed out of the floor to cradle him as he leaned back into it. "I love that," Poe said.
    Poynter backed up to a rubbery bulkhead, and a seat formed out of the wall to catch him as well.
    "If they're paying attention, they'll never let you fall." Poe grinned. "Of course, almost everything in here is soft – child safe, don't you know – except the spine, which runs over the top, so you wouldn't be hurt if you did fall. But just the same, we're secured when they're doing maneuvers. You think you're sick now – wait until we go for a breach. Don't freak out." Poe turned to the whaley boys. "Secure the doc, boys." The arms of the seat shape wrapped over Quinn's lap. Parts came over his shoulders and fused across his chest, then around his hips and over his lap. Quinn freaked out.
    "Get it off me! Get it off me! I can't breathe!"
    "Prepare for breach," said Poynter.
    Scooter chirped. Skippy grinned. Similar restraints extruded from all their seats, securing them.
    The attitude of the whale changed, going up at a nearly sixty-degree angle – and then the angle went sharper as they moved. Quinn was looking backward at the tail section of the teardrop interior. The lurching movement of the luminescent strips was starting to nauseate him. He could feel his internal organs shifting with the acceleration, and then the whale ship went vertical and airborne. At the apex of the motion, Quinn's stomach tried to escape through his diaphragm, then shifted as they fell sideways. There was an enormous concussion as the ship hit the water. Slowly the whale came back around, and they were horizontal again.
    The whaley boys chirped and clicked gleefully, grinning back at Quinn, then at each other, then back at Quinn, nodding as if to say, Was that cool, or what? Their necks were nearly as wide as their shoulders, and Quinn could see heavy muscles moving under the skin. "They love that," said Poynter.
    "I kind of like it, too," said Poe. "Except when they go overboard and do twenty or thirty breaches in a row. Even I get sick when they do that. And the noise… well, you heard it."
    Quinn shook his head, closed his eyes, then opened them again. The only way to deal with this experience was to accept it at face value: He was in a whale, one that was somehow being used as a submarine by human and nonhuman sentient creatures. Everything he knew no longer applied, but then again, maybe it did. What put him on the less loopy side of sanity was noticing the whaley boys' thick necks.
    "They're amphibious, right?" Quinn asked Poynter. "Their necks are thick to take the stress of swimming at high speeds?" Quinn rose in his chair as far as the restraints would allow and saw that Scooter did indeed have a blowhole just behind his melon. He was a humanoid whale, or a dolphin creature. Scooter was impossible. All of this was impossible. The details, not the big picture, Quinn reminded himself. In the big picture there be madness. "They're like a whale/human hybrid, aren't they?"
    "Which would be why we call them the whaley boys," said Poynter.
    "Wait, are you accusing us of something?" asked Poe. "Because these guys are not the love children of us and some whales. We don't do that kind of thing."
    "Well, there was that one time," said Poynter.
    "Okay, yeah, just that one time," said Poe.
    But Quinn was studying Scooter, and Scooter was eyeing him right back. "Although they appear to be able to turn their heads, like beluga whales. Their neck vertebrae probably aren't fused like most whales'." The scientist rising, Quinn was comfortable now, his fear taken away by curiosity. He was focused on finding out things, which was his home turf, even in this completely unreal situation. If he focused on the details, the big picture wouldn't throw him over the edge into drooling lunacy.
    "Let's ask them," said Poe. "Scooter, are your vertebrae fused together, or are you just a big, no-necked gray thug?"
    Scooter turned his head to Poe and made a loud raspberry sound, spraying whaley spit all down the front of Poe's khakis and increasing the odor of decaying fish in the cabin by a factor of ten.
    "We don't know what they are, Dr.