Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

discovered over the last few hours, with Kona filling in the pertinent and personal details. Meanwhile, Clay sat down in the kitchen and pondered the facts. Pondering, he felt, was called for.
    Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feel pulled to. Margaret and Libby were scientists, used to jamming their facts into the appropriate slots as quickly as possible, and Kona… well, a thought rolling around in his mind was rather like a tennis ball in a coffee can – it was just a little too fuzzy to make any impact – and Clair was just catching up. No, the pondering fell to Clay, and he sipped a dark beer from a sweating bottle on a high stool in the kitchen and waited for the roulette ball to fall. Which it did, right about the time that Margaret Painborne was reaching a conclusion to her story.
    "This obviously has something to do with defense," Margaret said. "No one else would have a reason – hell, they can't even have a good reason. But I say we write our senators tonight and confront Captain Tarwater in the morning. He's got to know something about it."
    "And that's where you're completely wrong," Clay said. And they all turned. "I've been pondering this" – here he paused for impact – "and it occurs to me that two of our friends disappeared right about the time they found out about this stuff. And that everything from the break-in to the sinking of my boat" – and here he paused for a moment of silence – "has had something to do with someone not wanting us to know this stuff. So I think it would be reckless of us to run around trying to tell everybody what we know before we know what we know is."
    "That can't be right," said Libby.
    " 'Before we know what we know is'?" quoted Margaret. "No, that's not right."
    "Is making perfect sense to me," said Kona.
    "No, Clay," said Clair, "I'm fine with you and the girl-on-girl action, and I'm fine with a haole Rasta boy preaching sovereignty, but I'm telling you I won't stand for that kind of grammatical abuse. I am a schoolteacher, after all."
    "We can't tell anyone!" Clay screamed.
    "Better," said Clair.
    "No need to shout," Libby said. "Margaret was just being a radical hippie reactionist feminist lesbian communist cetacean biologist, weren't you, dear?" Libby Quinn grinned at her partner.
    "I'll have an acronym for that in a second," mumbled Clair, counting off words on her fingers. "Jeez, your business card must be the size of a throw rug."
    Margaret glared at Libby, then turned to Clay. "You really think we could be in danger?"
    "Seems that way. Look, I know we wouldn't know this without your help, but I just don't want anyone hurt. We may already be in trouble."
    "We can keep it quiet if you feel that's the way to go," said Libby, making the decision for the pair, "but I think in the meantime we need to look at a lot more audio files – see how far back this goes. Figure out why sometimes it's just noise and sometimes it's a message."
    Margaret was furiously braiding and unbraiding her hair and staring blankly into the air in front of her as she thought. "They must use the whale song as camouflage so enemy submarines don't detect the communication. We need more data. Recordings from other populations of humpbacks, out of American waters. Just to see how far they've gone with this thing."
    "And we need to look at blue-, fin-, and sei-whale calls," said Libby. "If they're using subsonic, then it only makes sense that they'll imitate the big whales. I'll call Chris Wolf at Oregon State tomorrow. He monitors the navy's old sonar matrix that they set up to catch Russian submarines. He'll have recordings of everything we need."
    "No," said Clay. "No one outside this room."
    "Come on, Clay. You're being paranoid."
    "Say that again, Libby. He monitors whose old sonar matrix? The military still keeps a hand in on that SOSUS array."
    "So you think it is military?"
    Clay shook his head. "I don't know. I'm damned if I can think of a reason the navy would paint 'Bite me' on the tail of a whale. I just know that people who find out about this stuff disappear, and someone sent a message saying that Nate was safe after we all thought he was dead."
    "So what are you going to do?"
    "Find him," Clay said.
    "Well, that's going to totally screw up the funeral," said Clair.
    PART THREE
    The Source
    We are built as