Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

huh?"
    "Yeah, but this? One living organism shaped itself into this complex… what? System? I'm boggled."
    "Imagine how the bacteria who live in your intestinal tract feel about you."
    "Well, right now I think they're pissed off at me."
    A group of whaley boys was gathering about ten yards away from them, pointing at Nate and snickering.
    "They're coming down to check out the newcomer. Don't be surprised if you get rubbed up against in the streets. They're just saying hi."
    "Streets?"
    "We call them streets. They're sort of streets."
    Now, out of the dim yellow light of the whale ships, Nate realized that there was a wide variety in the whaley boys' coloring. Some were actually mottled blue, like the skin of a blue whale, while others were black like a pilot whale, or light gray like a minke whale. Some even had the black-on-white coloring of killers and Pacific white-sided dolphins, while a few here and there were stark white like a beluga. The body shapes of all were very similar, differing only in size, with the killer whaley boys, who were taller by a foot and heavier by perhaps a hundred pounds, having jaws twice the width of the others'. He also noticed in the brighter light that he was the only human who had a tan. The people, even Cal and the crew, looked healthy; it just appeared that none of them had ever seen the sun. Like the British.
    Nuсez came over and helped Cal, and then Nate, to his feet.
    "How're the shoes?" she asked Nate.
    "They're strange after not wearing any for so long."
    "You'll be wobbly for a few hours, too. You'll feel the motion when you stand still for a day or so. No different from having been at sea in normal ship. I'll take you to your new quarters, show you around a little, get you settled in. The Colonel will probably send for you before too long. People will help you out, humans and whaley boys. They'll all know you're new."
    "How many, Cielle?"
    "Humans? Almost five thousand live here. Whaley boys, maybe half that many."
    "Where is here? Where are we?"
    "I told him about Gooville," said Cal.
    Nuсez looked up at Nate and then pulled her sunglasses down on her nose so he could see her eyes. "Don't freak out on me, huh?"
    Nate shook his head. What did she think, that whatever she was going to tell him was going to be weirder, grander, or scarier than what he'd seen already?
    "The roof above this ceiling – which is thick rock, although we're not exactly sure how thick – anyway, it's around six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. We're about two hundred miles off the coast of Chile, under the continental shelf. In fact, we came in through a cliff in the continental rise, a cliff face.
    "We're six hundred feet underwater right now. The pressure?"
    "We came in through a very long tunnel, a series of pressure locks that pass the ships along until we're at surface pressure. I would have shown you as we came through, but I didn't want to wake you."
    "Yeah, thanks for that."
    "Let's get you to your new house. We've got a long walk ahead of us." She headed away from the water, motioning for him to follow.
    Nate nearly stumbled trying to look back at the whale ships lining the harbor. Tim caught him by the arm. "It's a lot to take in. People really have freaked out. You just have to accept that the Goo won't let anything bad happen to you. The rest is simply a series of surprises. Like life."
    Nate looked into the younger man's dark eyes to see if there was any irony showing there, but he was as open and sincere as a bowl of milk. "The Goo will take care of me?"
    "That's right," said Tim, helping him along toward the grotto wall, toward the actual village of Gooville, with its organically shaped doorways and windows, its knobs and nodules, its lobster-shell pathways, its whaley-boy pods working together or playing in the water, where was housed an entire village of what Nate assumed were all happy human wackjobs.
    * * *
    After two days of looking for meaning in hash marks on waveforms and ones and ohs on legal pads that were hastily typed into the machine, Kona found a surfer/hacker on the North Shore named Lolo who agreed to write it all into a Linux routine in exchange for Kona's old long board and a half ounce of the dankest nugs.*
    *Marijuana buds of the finest quality.

    "Won't he just take cash?" asked Clay.
    "He's an artist," explained Kona. "Everyone has cash."
    "I don't know what I'm going to put that under for the accountant."
    "Nugs, dank?"
    Clay looked