Hail Mary (22 page)

Alexis went inside the lab and shut the door. At first, everything seemed as she had left it. The scanning machines were intact behind the lead-lined glass window, the computers were on, and the support vector machines were busy analyzing hundreds of brain images collected from student volunteers. Sabotage obviously wasn’t a motive, or the creeps could have caused millions of dollars in damages and wiped out months of work.

No, they were after something that was inside the lab, a tangible, portable item. Intellectual property could be stolen in a dozen ways. Her experience with the Monkey House trials had proven that crimes of the mind left no fingerprints. She wouldn’t go to the extremes of her deranged former mentor, Dr. Sebastian Briggs, who kept critical notes only on paper, but she’d also learned to run double sets of data, in much the same way a crooked business owner ran two sets of accounting books.

There was only one thing she could think of that anyone would want here. And she was smart enough to keep it off-site. Except the secrets stored in her mind, the ones she couldn’t trust even a computer or a piece of paper with, because that might make them real.

But the first goon in scrubs had definitely been carrying something in the canvas bag.. The array of thick technical manuals and books on the shelves appeared untouched. The vector machines that housed most of her records were bolted to the floor and too heavy to move without machinery. Although some of the imaging equipment was expensive, the specialized technology was pretty worthless to somebody looking for her secret research.

Whether or not one of the fake nurses was the man who’d called her, the incidents were clearly connected. It was too much of a coincidence. Her life had been relatively calm for the past year, and the Monkey House incident had been covered up just the way Mark had predicted, including the loss of his vice-presidency of CRO Pharmaceuticals.

After all, you couldn’t keep paying a man who’d just cost you billions in profits and lost you a critical ally in Washington, D.C.

But the caller had threatened to kill her, and the two thieves in scrubs hadn’t so much as barked at her.

Which meant they didn’t have what they wanted yet, so they needed her alive.

For now.

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Whalesong

The Whalesong Trilogy #1

by

Robert Siegel

(read on for a sample)

Chapter One

The first thing I remember is a dim green radiance, the deep lit by a single shaft of light, and the singing, always the singing. The dim green was wonderful, with my mother hovering over me like a cloud. Through a cluster of bubbles I would turn and swim in her milk, feeling the great warm pulse of her heart and the music growing louder and more various. The strains moved up my dorsal and wrapped themselves around my heart and told me things until my heart dissolved in light. Afterwards I would go to sleep on my mother’s back, her flipper stirring a little current over me as her song lowered me into darkness.

The green deep was the most wonderful place then. The mothers hung over us like rain clouds while the sun fell about them in shafts leading to air and the world above. At first the other calves and I would just stare at each other across the bands of sunlight between the islands of mothers. Growing bolder, we would edge into the sun, touch the tips of our flippers, and flash back to the great safe shadows. Soon we were rolling and tumbling together through sunlit spaces in play that went on forever until the black of night closed over us.

Much of our time was spent on the surface. I can still feel my mother’s firm back lifting me toward it. The higher we rose the lighter the water became, with the sun warping and flashing above us. An instant later we’d break into that beautiful and perilous world at the top, with its blue sky that runs forever like the sea and clouds like albatrosses beating their way before the wind. And the light upon the waves—the sparkle and roll of them and the indescribable colors! There we’d remain until a low whistle warned us to slip under again, and we’d sink down, down into the luminous green, letting ourselves go, feeling the pull of the deep.

Sometimes we’d rest a while at the bottom, listening to our mothers croon or tell stories of the world above. These stories enchanted us and seemed unbelievable then: stories of winds that raised the waves high as mountains, of a light that split the sky in half, and of the great roar of Ohobo that always followed it. We heard stories of a world above the world of water, where whales could not go, and of monsters with red and green eyes that came from the other world, skimming over the surface, belching black smoke and devouring whales. We heard tales of our fathers off hunting for the shrimp called krill and shivered a little, looking forward to their return. Later my mother would nudge me to the surface and croon me to sleep, singing the rhyme that begins,

Around and over and under the sea,

Come, oh come, White Whale to me.

We slept, my mother on her side and I nestled between her long white flippers, rocking in the tropical night air. The stars against so black a sky made great gashes of light, blazing yellow and blue and red and green. Sometimes we lay near a mountain that rose beyond the water, part of that world where whales cannot go. And the smells—if only I could describe the smells! A perfume blew over us that wakened yearnings in me for I know not what. It was sweet and forbidden, because we could never go there. It blew from things I later learned to name fruits and flowers. Mother called the yearning
Hunger for the Land
and only laughed when I asked her why we couldn’t go there. One day, she said, the Great Whale would explain.

All of us calves were by now skilled swimmers. I’d become good friends with Lewtë, a female a month older than I, but not much bigger. Lewtë had a rare albino streak along both sides and, when she did a barrel roll, was a flutter of white and black.

She and I used to leap over the backs of the mothers as they swam lazily along, scooping up plankton, heading toward a rendezvous with our fathers. We Humpbacks pride ourselves on breaching, or leaping entirely out of the water. Even adults—the cow and bull whales—will sometimes spend the whole day breaching, turning somersaults, and landing on their backs, sending the spray heavenward. But Lewtë and I made up a game that involved more than breaching. In our game we had to leap over every second back across the pod or herd of whales. If any adult was spouting a breath, we had to leap through the spout. All the calves playing this game at once made a sight pretty as a circus of dolphins. I was usually the leader.

First I’d swim to the edge of the pod and plunge into darkness under the moving white flippers of a cow; then I’d shoot upward through green sunlit water, breaching the surface at great speed. With a kick of my flukes and a dance of spray I’d fly over the barnacled back of another, coasting through her steamy spout, down with a crash into the green, through the cool shadow of a third, her flippers moving like ghostly wings. Up again and down I went until I was dizzy and lay floating to catch my breath.

I remember the day a school of flying fish joined us. They flashed all colors, thin and gleaming in the sun, and thought pretty well of themselves. They followed us under bellies and over and, no matter which way we turned, never bumped into us or each other. It was like flying inside a rainbow—red, green, yellow, and blue iridescence—while they laughed on all sides a high whistling laugh. “Catch us if you can!” they cried, “Catch us if you can!” But they were too fast for us. After a long afternoon they flew away, a rainbow mist against the setting sun, promising to come back the next day. Each of us settled down next to his mother, exhausted.

Lewtë and I could jump the farthest of all, and sometimes at night we swam out from the pod, underwater, beneath a milky moon that stretched and shrank on the surface. A distance out we’d rise up and turn around. Full speed ahead we charged the pod, leaping over and under them, bellowing and slapping the water: up and over and down together, shoulder to shoulder, the spray from our flippers flashing like herring, until everyone was fully awake. How Hrōta, the old bull leader, would roar! Our mothers would whistle shrilly, cuffing us with a flipper and lecturing us on manners until they fell asleep.

It was hard to sleep on those moonlit nights, the surface everywhere glittering blue and the points of waves showing their diamond teeth. One night we made the mistake of jumping over Hrōta. His high back, all mottled with barnacles, was a challenge. A jump too low and we’d scrape our bellies raw. Well, the old blowhard was only pretending to sleep and, too late, I caught a glimpse of his wicked little eye and his crusty white flipper reaching toward me. I dodged that but wasn’t prepared for the sea-quake that followed as his flukes fell like a mountain, lashing my tail. They shoved me down, down, knocking the air clean out of me. I lost sight of the surface and thought I was drowning. When finally I struggled back, I sped yelping for my mother, Hrōta’s enormous bellow ringing in my ears.

Other nights the water crawled with phosphorous life that shimmered and flashed in the spray. Often the singing kept us awake. At this time we were traveling slowly into cooler waters, hoping to rendezvous with those fathers who had left to hunt for the great krill wilderness. My father and Lewtë’s were among them. For weeks we followed a deep sea canyon toward the meeting place. All night the adults sang their songs, sending them echoing along the walls of the canyon far below, across vast reaches of sea to the end of the world.

Each whale had his own song, but none, I thought, equal to my mother’s. Hers lasted a long while, beginning with a soft croon to which I’d sometimes fall asleep. Soon, however, it changed into trilling whistles like birds skipping about on a barnacled back or water that leaps and dances down a cliff, then to a long shivery moan that probed every sea cavern between us and the ice at the end of the world. This moan stretched and bent in every direction, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and was the sweetest sound I’d ever listened to. Sometimes it reduced me to tears—I don’t know why. The big oily drops fuzzed my vision and I would hide from Lewtë behind my mother’s flipper. Last there followed a series of creaks and clicking noises, very sharp and fetching, which ended in one long whistle. At that my mother would pause and listen anxiously for my father’s answer. All the pod would listen as one, but we didn’t hear a thing.

Of course, I am describing only my mother’s song. All the other whales sang too. Listening to all of them at once it seemed I might float right above the waves on the sound. There were whoopings, moanings, bellowings, clickings, bubblings, creakings, gruntings, tootlings, keenings, groanings, hootings, hummings, and whistlings blent together in a symphony telling the whole story of whales and the sea.

Every whale would stick to his song and repeat it faultlessly. The longer he lived, the longer and more complex the song grew. Sometimes he would sing only a few notes from it, but later he would pick up exactly where he left off. As the years passed, the song grew with the singer until many lasted for hours. We calves made only short whistles and squeaks which grew longer with the months, but we waited impatiently for the day when each one would sing his unique song.

There were also sounds for ordinary talk. But Humpbacks love to sing, especially on a summer’s night. Many times we sang the same song, the most common called the Song of the Season. This song would change from year to year. We had other songs that had lasted for years beyond count. I would lie awake on my mother’s back near her blowhole, feeling the song well up within her, and watch the bubbles rise in a necklace to the surface.

I would press down next to her blowhole and close my eyes while her back resonated with song. I felt I was singing along with her as the croon rose from deep within and spooled out over the vast moonlit miles, moving with the lilt of a wave to reach, and echo in, the farthest sea-washed cavern. It was as if I were listening to some ancient song rise from the fiery center of the earth, as if the earth were singing to his bride the sea, of how her waves fell and clustered about his stony shoulders. And then, as the notes changed, the sea answered him, singing of the tang of salt air in the blowhole, of the smell that teased one to chase a flashing and vanishing form, but also of sleep soft and soothing that dissolved one in her cold arms forever.

One night after her performance I was almost asleep when a sudden vibration passed through my mother.

“
Wake up, Hrūna,” she said, nudging me. “Do you hear it?” I rolled over and noticed all the others were absolutely silent. I couldn’t hear a thing, so I gulped three or four breaths and plunged as deep as I dared. At last I heard it. It was far, far off, the way I always imagined mermaid music in the tales. First there was just a shiver of sound, something that passed over and disappeared like the crest of a wave. But soon I heard a high distant whistle followed by a cluster of faint moans. Scared, I shot to the surface.

“
What is it?” I asked. Lewtë was swimming round and round her mother, skipping over the waves.