Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

seemed to be at the controls. "Don't they ever sleep?"
    "Sure," said Jane. "We're pretty sure they sleep with half their brain at a time, like whales, so between two of them the ship always has a full pilot. Without one of them at the controls, it's basically a big lump of meat."
    "You said that you're pretty sure. You don't know?"
    "Well, they don't know for sure," said Jane, "and they're not very excited about our doing experiments on them. Now that you've joined us, though, maybe you'll be able to figure out what's going on with them. We sort of play it all by ear. The whaley boys and the Colonel run things. Cielle, you didn't tell him all this?"
    "He was pretty beat," Nuсez said. "I tried to get him settled in as soon as I could."
    Nate wanted to protest the "settled in" comment. After all, he was a prisoner here, but these people didn't behave at all like captors. They immediately impressed him as having the same dynamic that he'd seen in research teams, a "we're all in this together, let's make the best of it" attitude. He didn't want to yell at these people. Still, it made him a little uncomfortable that she was so forthcoming with information. When your kidnappers showed you their faces, they were giving you the message that you weren't going home.
    Nuсez set a plate down in front of him. It had a salad of mixed seaweeds, carrots, and mushrooms, a piece of cooked fish, which looked like halibut, and what appeared to be rice.
    "Eat up," she said. "A couple of nutrition drinks aren't going to get you back up to speed. We do eat a lot of raw fish, even on the blue, but you need some carbs until you adjust to this diet. There's plenty of rice when you finish that."
    "Thanks." Nate dug in while the others, all but Cal, excused themselves to work in other parts of the ship. The older man had obviously been charged with Nate's second orientation lecture.
    Cal scratched his beard, looked around at the pilots, then leaned over to Nate and spoke in a lowered voice. "They're very promiscuous. You know how dolphin females will mate with all the males in the pod so no one can be assured of who the father of her calf is? They think it keeps the males from murdering her calf when it's born."
    "That's the theory," Nate said.
    "They're sort of like that, and back at base you have a big pod to deal with. You start down that path… well, you've got a lot of whaley boys to sex up."
    "I didn't sex her up," Nate hissed, spraying rice out over the table. "I'm not sexing up any whaley boys… er, girls -"
    "Whatever. Look, they're very close. Here on the ship they don't have separate quarters – they share one big cabin. Sex is very casual with them, but they understand that we're a little more hung up about it. Some of them seem to affect human shyness. We generally don't mix sexually with them. It's not forbidden, but it's… you know, frowned upon. It's only natural for a guy to be curious -"
    Nate put down his fork. "Cal, I did not have sex with anyone – I mean, anything ."
    "Right. And be careful around the males. Especially if you're in the water with them. They'll bung-hole you just to watch you twitch."
    "Jeez."
    "I'm just telling you for your own good."
    "Thanks, but I'm not going to be around long enough to worry about it." Might as well throw it in their faces, Nate thought.
    The older man laughed, almost shooting coffee out his nose. When he recovered, he said, "Well, I hope you mean you plan on dying soon, because no one ever leaves."
    Nate leaned into Cal's face. "Doesn't it bother you, that you're a prisoner?"
    "There's not one of us here who wouldn't be dead if the whaley boys hadn't picked us up."
    "Not me."
    "Especially you. You were always twelve hours from dead since we started watching you. Certainly it had to occur to you how much easier it would have been just to kill you?"
    Nate just stared for a second. Actually, it had occurred to him, and he didn't see the logic in keeping him alive if all they wanted to do was stop his research. He wasn't going to make that argument verbally, but still…
    "Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."
    "Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."
    "You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."
    After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of Treasure Island to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate