The Sensory Deception (22 page)

Noticing the presence of a 170-pound being in his space, the whale whipped his head above the surface. Chopper climbed the fleshy gray hill. The skin was smooth, but so riddled with scars that he could pull himself up to the precipice.

Suspended above the water at the tip of the whale-mountain, Chopper reached into his pocket for a dart; the one he’d held in his hand was long gone. To Farley, it seemed to take forever. Farley thought of a trick he’d seen seals perform: the trainer would set a fish on a seal’s snout; the seal would balance it until the trainer gave a command; and then the seal would toss the fish into the air, seize it in its mouth, and swallow it. Chopper looked like just such a treat.

Chopper broke the needle from the dart and, maddeningly slowly, poured the drug down the whale’s blowhole. Neither Chopper nor the whale moved. Chopper covered the blowhole with both hands. But the muscles that control a sperm whale’s blowhole are hardened by the demands of water pressure two miles below the surface, more than four thousand pounds per square inch.

The instant the great whale overcame the shock of this small creature’s audacity, he jerked his head to the side, tossing Chopper the way a seal throws a ball to its trainer.

Chopper flew forty feet in the air and collided with the ship ten feet above the waterline, making a great metallic clang. The sound brought Farley to his senses. He opened up the throttle and closed the distance in seconds. Chopper hadn’t taken time to put on a life preserver, and Farley didn’t see him on the water’s surface. Someone on deck shouted and pointed. There he was, treading water with his left arm, his right shoulder bent at an impossible angle. Farley could still hear his thoughts. A smile wrapped around Farley’s face as he realized that his friend had never been happier in his life.

Farley pulled Chopper onto the Zodiac. Once in the boat, Chopper crawled to the outboard and called to Farley, “I don’t know how much got in before he closed his blowhole. You’d better be ready, bud. He’s going to be either righteously pissed off or seeing pink elephants!”

Blood oozed from Chopper’s shoulder. It was bent and torn, separated and broken. The way Chopper hunched over, it was obvious that a few ribs were cracked, too. Farley turned the small craft back to the ship. He had to get Chopper to a medic.

Chopper said, “Don’t fuck this up, Farley. We’ve got one chance.”

“Come on Chop, we have to get you to—”

“It hurts, but it’s not going to get worse in the next hour. Or better. Get to work. Don’t waste this moment.”

Farley looked ahead at the whale, slowing down, now listing on the surface, and back at Chopper. Farley had never seen him looking so happy.

He tightened the straps on his backpack. He hadn’t planned on using a flotation device because the bulk would slow him down, but that instant of fear before pulling Chopper from the drink gave him second thoughts. He gathered the six life jackets from under the Zodiac’s central bench and then maneuvered in front of the whale.

“Looks like it’s taking,” Chopper said. “That or we’re about to die.”

They circled the animal, ready for quick flight.

Farley could see Chopper recalculating the whale’s weight. “I should have dyed the drug so I could distinguish it from seawater. I just don’t know what dose he actually got.”

Minutes passed. The Zodiac drifted along with the whale. Finally the animal rolled onto its side, and that huge eye met Farley’s.

Farley cut the engine. “I guess he got a pretty good hit.”

Chopper laughed, then grimaced.

The Zodiac’s remaining momentum brought the boat within ten feet of the ocean monarch. Minutes earlier, the whale would probably have altered course or dived. Instead he rolled onto his back, raised his flukes, and with his almost-white belly above the water, looked like a giant frolicking beagle—a beagle whose lower jaw resembled an eight-foot obsidian I-beam embedded with massive ivory axheads.

Farley remembered a memento his grandfather had kept in his office, the image of a tall ship carved on one of those teeth: scrimshaw. One day shortly after Farley’s parents died, the Captain had caught him playing with it. Little Farley hadn’t understood why the man was so upset. Farley never saw the scrimshaw again. As with so many things the Captain had done, Farley now understood. People have no right to reduce those teeth, the weapons of Earth’s greatest warrior, into toys or souvenirs.

The whale rolled back over, now all but motionless, and released a lazy spout, the whale version of a relaxed sigh. Then he raised his flukes and slapped the water. The Zodiac bounced on the resulting waves.

“Check it out,” Chopper said. “He’s wasted.”

The whale’s eye was right next to them, and it transmitted none of the intensity it had minutes before. Floating just above the surface, the creature rose and fell with the ocean swells. Most of his length was just below water level, but his forehead was a few inches above and he breathed without effort.

“It’s time, my man,” Chopper said. “Enjoy this.”

Farley nodded, wishing he could detach himself from danger like Chopper could.

He threw the life preservers overboard so that he’d have those little islands of stability, just in case. He rolled over the side of the boat and swam parallel to the whale. For some reason, he didn’t want the animal to watch him. Just behind the flipper, he swam to the whale’s side. The skin was thick, wrinkled, and scarred. He straightened his body and floated at the shore of this terrific island.

“Come on, Farley, stand up!”

Farley looked back at Chopper. What a sight: Chopper with his crumpled shoulder and a grin threatening to crease his face. The
Cetacean Avenger
loomed behind him, its crew watching from the deck.

He caressed the whale’s back and could just make out giant, muscle-corded vertebrae beneath the grizzled skin. The whale made a deep-throated sound. It was either really pissed off or purring for more. Farley laughed away his own fear, kicked off his fins—they’d just get in the way now—and crawled up the whale’s spine. He worked his way to the forehead and spread himself out to distribute the pressure of his weight just above the whale’s eyes.

“It’s cool,” Chopper yelled from the Zodiac. “Moby is copacetic. Plenty of time—get to work.”

Farley shifted the backpack around and pulled out the audio data acquisition equipment: two dozen hydrophones, each designed to acquire data in a specific frequency band, to store sixty continuous hours of sound and vibration, and to transmit those data through the satellite link, whenever the whale surfaced, to both the lab in Santa Cruz and the DAQ laptop aboard ship.

The low-frequency hydrophones were a foot in diameter. These would be used to record the visceral sensory data of the whale’s movement. A crucial part of the VR experience would be imparting the roller-coaster ride of diving two miles deep. In designing how the equipment would be attached, Farley and Chopper had spent more than a week evaluating different suction techniques until they found one that would be infallibly effective yet minimally irritating to the skin. That had been a waste of time. The array of scars across the body of this deep-sea war veteran indicated an incredible pain threshold. They’d chosen a rubbery carbon composite at ten times the cost of an aluminum system, but this whale wouldn’t notice anything unless the hardware interfered with his sonar. To reduce the debilitating effect, Farley attached the hydrophones in a circular array just behind, but in audio contact with, the cavity of spermaceti. They attached
in two steps. First, just as with any suction cup, Farley pushed them on. Then, to keep them fixed even under tremendous stress, the cup had a valve attachment to which he attached a small canister. The canister contained a nearly perfect vacuum that sucked any remaining air from the suction cup.

Then came the difficult part. To reconstruct visual images from sonar, the most sensitive detectors had to be attached in audio contact with the whale’s jawbone. These would record even the faintest of returning echoes. Farley pulled these two detectors from his pack, each no larger than his hands, took a deep breath, and rolled off the whale’s back. He swam under the beast, right up to that I-beam jaw. The whale’s mouth hung open like that of a stoned frat boy. Farley attached a detector to each side, just ahead of the point where the jaw hinged.

He passed the giant eye as he surfaced. The whale rolled so that his eye followed Farley. This time, instead of feeling a wave of wisdom or sentience, he caught a blast of humor.

There were six more detectors to attach: low-frequency monitors that he’d place near the flukes; two scent/taste detectors, crude devices that could monitor salinity, iron levels, and hydrocarbons; and a camera that he attached just in front of the dorsal ridge. It would have little value in the murky depths and, without a light source, wouldn’t have much use at sea level either, but people are visual mammals, and everyone on the project wanted a camera.

As Farley fixed the video camera, the whale blew an almost vigorous spout and arched his back. The forehead submerged and the flukes pushed off into a gentle, shallow dive. Farley took a deep breath, let go, and swam away. Chopper might enjoy being thrown through the air into the two-inch-thick steel of a ship’s hull, but Farley preferred a more subtle dismount. As the whale went under, Farley stayed at the surface.

He kicked his way to one of the life preservers as the whale swam a slow circle around him. He only caught glimpses of that giant eye but had no doubt that the animal was watching him.

Others were staring at him, too, and not just the crew aboard the
Cetacean Avenger
. At the peak of a swell he saw white dots on the horizon. At first he thought they were whitecaps, but the sailor in him knew there wasn’t enough wind to produce whitecaps. They were hundreds of meters away: sportfishing boats like the one piloted by Sayyid Hassan, self-proclaimed King of Somalia.

W
hile the crew was engrossed in the Moby-Dick theatrics off starboard, Tahir watched the modern-day pirates move in from port. He headed upstairs and made it to the bridge just behind Captain Gaynes. One of the sailors indicated a computer monitor and said they were just a mile from the coast. Gaynes took a pair of binoculars from a peg. So did Tahir. Gaynes glanced at him, and Tahir replied with the look he’d used to discourage commentary from gangbangers in San Francisco and soldiers in Iraq. Gaynes didn’t say anything.

Gaynes scanned the horizon and called out names that the pilot wrote down. There were ten boats configured in three clusters, one to the north, one south, and the one Tahir had seen a minute before closing from the west.

Tahir asked, “How many hostiles?”

“They’re all hostile,” Gaynes said. “But once we get Sy Hassan aboard, the others might leave us alone.”

“Might?”

Gaynes pulled the binoculars down and looked at Tahir. “Why do you think they’re called pirates?”

Flying over swells ahead of great rooster-tail wakes, the pirates closed in fast.

Gaynes motioned to the boats approaching the
Cetacean Avenger’s
bow. “Those assholes don’t care what we’re doing, but if they think we have anything of value, they’ll try to take it.”

“This is your network?”

“Allies, information network, whatever. They want wealth, and I want to protect whales.” Gaynes took the binoculars off, hung them back on the peg, and moved for the stairs. He paused and said, “Mr. Tahir, in pursuit of a noble goal we sometimes find ourselves with strange bedfellows.”