Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

in a minivan, it was like being in a good-size motor home – a very curvy, dimly lit motor home, but about that size. Blue light filtered in through the eyes, illuminating the pilots' faces, which shone like patent leather. Nate was starting to realize that even though everything was organic, living, the whale ship had the same sort of efficiency found on any nautical vessel: every spaced used, everything stowed against movement, everything functional.
    "If you need to use the head, it's back down the corridor, fourth hatch on the right."
    Emily 7 clicked and squealed, and Nuсez laughed. She had a warm laugh, not forced; it just rolled out of her smooth and easy. "Emily says it seems as if it would be more logical for the head to be in the head, but there goes logic."
    "I gave up logic a few days ago."
    "You don't have to give it up, just adjust. Anyway, facilities in the head are like everything on the ship – living – but I think you'll figure out the analogs pretty quickly. It's less complicated than an airliner bathroom."
    Scooter chirped, and the great ship started to move, first in a fairly radical wave of motion, then smoothing out to a gentle roll. It was like being on a large sailing ship in medium seas.
    "Hey, a little more warning, Scooter, huh?" said Nuсez. "I nearly dumped Nathan's coffee. Okay if I call you Nathan?"
    "Nate's good."
    Moving with the roll of the ship, she made it back to the table and put down the two steaming mugs of coffee, then went back for a sugar bowl, spoons, and a can of condensed milk. Nate picked up the can and studied it.
    "This is the first thing from the outside that I've seen."
    "Yeah, well, that's special request. You don't want to try whale milk in your coffee. It's like krill-flavored spray cheese."
    "Yuck."
    "That's what I'm saying."
    "Cielle, if you don't mind my saying, you don't seem very military."
    "Me? No, I wasn't. My husband and I had a sixty-foot sailboat. We got caught in a hurricane off of Costa Rica and sank. That's when they took me. My husband didn't make it."
    "I'm sorry."
    "It's okay. It was a long time ago. But, no, I've never been in the military."
    "But the way you order the whaley boys around – "
    "First, we need to clear up a misconception that you are obviously forming, Nate. I – we, the human beings on these ships – are not in charge. We're just – I don't know, like ambassadors or something. We sound like commanders because these guys would just goof off all day without someone telling them what to do, but we have no real authority. The Colonel gives the orders, and the whaley boys run the show."
    Scooter and Skippy snickered like their counterparts on the humpback ship, Bernard and Emily 7 joined them – Bernard extending his prehensile willy like a party horn.
    "And whaley girls?" Nate nodded toward Emily 7, who grinned – it was a very big, very toothy grin, but a little coquettish in the way one might expect from, say, an ingenue with a bite that could sever an arm.
    "Just whaley boys. It's like the term 'mankind,' you know – alienate the female part of the race at all costs. It's the same here. Old-timers gave them the name."
    "Who's the Colonel?"
    "He's in charge. We don't see him."
    "Human, though?"
    "I'm told."
    "You said you'd been here a long time. How long?"
    "Let me get you another cup, and I'll tell you what I can." She turned. "Bernard, get that thing out of the coffeepot!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    Clair Stirs a Brainstorm
    For all his admiration for the field biologists he'd worked with over the years, secretly Clay harbored one tiny bit of ego-preserving superiority over them: At the end of the day, they were going to have only nicked the surface of the knowledge they were trying to attain, but if Clay got the pictures, he went home a satisfied man. Even around Nathan Quinn he'd exercised an attitude of rascally smugness, teasing about his friend's ongoing frustration. For Clay it was get the pictures and what's for dinner? Until now. Now he had his own mysteries to contend with, and he couldn't help but think that the powers of irony were flexing their muscles to get back at him for his having lived carefree for so long.
    Kona, on the other hand, had long paid homage to his fear of irony by, like many surfers, never eating shark meat. "I don't eat them, they don't eat me. That's just how it work." But now he, too, was feeling the sawtoothed edge of irony's bite, for, having spent most of his time from the age of