Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

they carried was goods from the real world: clothes, fabric, books, razor blades, shoes, and small electronics. But a few shops carried items that appeared to have been grown or made right there in Gooville: toothbrushes, soaps, lotions. All the packaging seemed to come out of the seventeenth century – the shopkeepers wrapped parcels in a ubiquitous oilcloth that Nate thought smelled vaguely of seaweed and indeed had the same olive color as giant kelp. Patrons brought their own jars to carry oils, pickles, and other soft goods. Nate had seen everything from a modern mayonnaise jar to hand-thrown crockery that had to have been made a hundred years ago.
    "How long, Cielle?" he asked as he watched a shopkeeper count sugared dates into a hand-blown glass jar and seal it with wax. "How long have people been down here?"
    She followed his gaze to the jar. "We get a lot of the surface goods from shipwrecks, so don't be impressed if you see antiques; the sea is a good preserver. We may have salvaged it only a week ago. A friend of mine keeps potatoes in a Grecian wine amphora that's two thousand years old."
    "Yeah, and I'm using the Holy Grail to catch my spare change. How long?"
    "You are so hostile today. I don't know how long, Nate. A long time."
    He had dozens, hundreds more questions, like where the hell did they get potatoes when they didn't have sunlight to grow anything? They weren't bringing potatoes up from a shipwreck. But Cielle was letting him get only so far before claiming ignorance.
    They had lunch at a four-stool lunch counter where the proprietor was a striking Irishwoman with stunning green eyes and a massive spill of red hair and who, like everyone, it seemed, knew Cielle and knew who Nate was.
    "Got you a Walkman then, Dr. Quinn? Whaley boys will drive you to drink with that sonar at night."
    "We're going to get him some earplugs today, Brennan," Cielle said.
    "Music, that's the way to wash the whaley-boy whistles," the woman said. Then she was off to her kitchen. The walls of the cafe were decorated with a collection of antique beer trays, glued in place, as Nate had learned, with an adhesive that was similar to what barnacles secreted to fasten themselves to ships. Nailing things up was frowned upon, as the walls would bleed for a while if injured.
    Nate took a bite of his sandwich, meatballs and mozzarella on good crusty French bread.
    "How?" he asked Cielle, blowing crumbs on the counter. "How does any of this stuff get made if there's no flame?"
    Cielle shrugged. "No idea. A bakery, I'd guess. They make all the prepared food outside the grotto. I've never been there."
    "You don't know how? How can that be?"
    Cielle Nuсez put down her own sandwich and leaned on one elbow, smiling at Nate. She had remarkably kind eyes, and Nate had to remind himself that she had been ordered to be his friend. Interesting, he thought, that they'd choose a woman. Was she bait?
    "You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Nate?"
    "Of course, everybody does."
    "And that guy goes back to Camelot from the late nineteenth century and dazzles everyone with his scientific knowledge, mainly because he can make gunpowder, right?"
    "Yes, so?"
    "You're a scientist, so you might do better than most, but take your average citizen, a guy who works at a discount store, say. Drop him in the twelfth century, you know what he'll achieve?"
    "Make your point?"
    "Death by bacterial infection, more than likely. And the last words on his lips will probably be, 'There's such a thing as an antibiotic, really.' My point is, I don't know how this stuff is made because I haven't needed to know. Nobody knows how to make the things they use. I suppose I could find out and get back to you, but I promise you I'm not holding out on you just to be mysterious. We do a lot of salvage on the whale ships, and we have a trade network into the real world that gets us a lot of our goods. When a freighter leaves pallets of goods for the people on remote islands in the Pacific, all they know is that they've been paid and they've delivered to shore. They don't stay to see who takes the goods away. The old-timers say that it used to be that the Goo provided everything. Nothing came in from the outside that wasn't on their backs when they got here."
    Nate took a bite of his sandwich and nodded as if considering what she'd just said. Since he'd arrived in Gooville, he had spent every waking moment thinking about two things: one, how this whole