The Swarm (31 page)

They pulled up at the landing jetty. Palm's research station was opposite, housed in an ancient sailing-boat, the first British Columbia ferry, now nestled prettily on the shore, supported by logs and surrounded by driftwood and rusty anchors. It was also his home, which he shared with his two children.

Anawak was trying not to limp. Delaware was silent.

A few minutes later the three were sitting round a small beech-bark table in the ferry's bow, Delaware sipping Coke. From their vantage-point they could see Tofino with its houses on stilts. Strawberry Isle, a few hundred metres away, was much quieter than the town, and they were treated to a variety of nature's sounds.

‘How's the knee?' Palm asked. He was an affable, bald man with a curly
white beard, who seemed to have been born with a pipe in his mouth.

‘I'd rather not talk about it.' Anawak tried to ignore the hammering in his head. ‘Why don't you tell me what you've found?'

‘Leon doesn't like it when people ask him how he is,' Delaware said pointedly.

Palm coughed. ‘I've had a long chat with Ray Fenwick and Sue Oliviera,' he said. ‘We've had a lot to talk about, what with J-19's dissection and the other stuff that's happened since. You see, on the day your plane crashed another whale was washed ashore, a grey. It wasn't one I'd seen before, and it's not in any of the databases. Fenwick was too busy to fly over, but Nanaimo needed the usual autopsy samples so I got a few people together and we took it apart ourselves. A god-awful task, I can tell you. We'd just about got down to the heart and I was standing in the ribcage when I slipped - blood and slime everywhere, in my boots and splattering down from above. We looked like zombies at a feeding frenzy. A not-so-romantic view of the heart, that's for sure. Anyhow, we took samples from the brain as well.'

The thought of another dead whale filled Anawak with sorrow. He couldn't bring himself to hate the animals for what they had done. To him they still deserved protection. ‘What did it die of?' he asked.

Palm gestured vaguely. ‘I'd say it was an infection. According to Fenwick, that's what did for Genghis too. But the weird thing is that there's something inside those whales that doesn't belong there.' He pointed to his temples and traced a circle with his finger. ‘Fenwick found a clot in their brain stems. And some kind of leakage between the brain and the skull.'

Anawak sat up. ‘A blood clot? In both whales?'

‘Not a blood clot, although at first we thought it was. Fenwick and Oliviera were pretty keen on the idea that noise was behind the change in the whales' behaviour. They weren't going to mention it till they'd found some proof, but for a while Fenwick was convinced it had something to do with the effects of that sonar system—'

‘Surtass LFA?'

‘That's it.'

‘No way.'

‘Is anyone going to tell me what this is about?' Delaware chimed in.

‘Well, a few years ago the American government decided to grant the
US Navy permission to use low-frequency active sonar for the detection of subs,' said Palm. ‘The system's called Surtass LFA. They're trying it out all over the place.'

‘Seriously?' said Delaware, appalled. ‘But what about the Marine Mammal Protection Act? Surely they're bound to it.'

‘All kinds of people are bound to all kinds of Acts,' said Anawak, with a grim smile. ‘But there are loopholes. Evidently the Americans couldn't pass up on the opportunity of putting eighty per cent of the world's oceans under surveillance, which is what Surtass lets them do. Anyway, the system cost three hundred million dollars, and its operators were insisting it wouldn't hurt the whales.'

‘But sonar is bad for whales. Any fool knows that.'

‘Unfortunately it hasn't been adequately proven,' said Palm. ‘Past experience shows that whales and dolphins are incredibly sensitive to sonar, but no one can say for sure what effect it has on feeding patterns, reproduction or migration.'

‘It's ridiculous,' snorted Anawak. ‘At 180 decibels, a whale's eardrums can explode. Each underwater transmitter can generate two hundred and fifteen. The combined effect is much louder, of course.'

Delaware looked at them. ‘So…how does it affect them?'

‘That's why Fenwick and Oliviera went for the noise theory,' said Palm. ‘Years ago, when the navy started experimenting with sonar, there was an upsurge in beachings all over the world. Large numbers of whales and dolphins died. They all showed signs of heavy bleeding in the brain and in the inner ear - injuries consistent with noise damage. In each instance, environmentalists proved that NATO military exercises had been going on close to where the bodies were found. But tell that to the navy!'

‘You mean they denied it?'

‘Until recently the navy always denied any link between sonar and the beachings, but they've had to admit that in some cases sonar was indeed to blame. The problem is, we still don't know enough. The only evidence we have of damage is from the dead whales. Everyone's got their own theory. Fenwick, for instance, thinks underwater noise causes outbreaks of collective madness.'

‘Noise just disorients them', growled Anawak. ‘It causes beachings, not attacks.'

‘Well,
I
think the theory's worth considering,' said Delaware.

‘Oh, really?'

‘Well, why not? The creatures are going mad. It started with a few and then it spread, like a mass psychosis.'

‘Licia, that's rubbish. Look what happened to the beaked whales that died in the Canaries after NATO held a pow-wow there. They're about as sensitive to noise as you can get. Of course they went crazy. They were so panicked that they beached themselves in their rush to get out of the water. Loud noise makes them want to
flee
.'

‘Or maybe they want to attack the noise,' countered Delaware, stubbornly.

‘Attack what? Zodiacs with outboard motors? Since when is that noise?'

‘It must have been something else, then. An underwater explosion.'

‘Not round here.'

‘How would you know?'

‘I just do.'

‘You can't bear to be wrong, can you, Leon?'

‘That's rich, coming from you.'

‘Besides, there've been beachings here before. It's been going on for centuries. Ancient stories tell of—'

‘I know that, Licia. I think we all do.'

‘Fine. So do you think the Indians had sonar?'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘Everything. Beached whales are being used for ideological purposes without a second thought—'

‘Uh-huh. So now you're suggesting I'm thoughtless.'

Delaware glared at him. ‘I'm suggesting that mass strandings don't necessarily have anything to do with artificial noise, and that noise might cause something other than mass strandings.'

‘OK, folks!' Palm tried to pacify them. ‘You're arguing over nothing. Fenwick has decided that the noise theory has too many holes in it anyway. OK, so he's still into his collective madness thing, but—Are you even listening to me?'

They turned.

‘OK,' said Palm, when he was sure he had their attention. ‘So Fenwick and Oliviera found the clots and decided they'd been caused by external factors. Superficially they resembled blood clots, so that's what they assumed they were. Then they removed the substance and ran some
tests. It was the colour of whale blood, but the substance itself was transparent and disintegrated on contact with air. Most of it was too far gone to be useful.' Palm leaned across the table. ‘But they took a look at some of it. The results matched some findings from a few weeks previously. They'd seen the substance once before. In Nanaimo.'

Anawak was silent for a second. ‘What is it?' he asked hoarsely.

‘The same substance you found in the mussels on the
Barrier Queen
.'

‘So the substance in the brains and on the hull—'

‘Identical. Organic matter.'

 

Anawak had only been up for a few hours but already he felt drained. He took Delaware back to Tofino in the boat. His knee twinged painfully as he climbed the wooden ladder to the jetty. He felt helpless, depressed and at the mercy of whatever unpleasantness was on its way next.

Clenching his jaw, he hobbled into the deserted office of Davie's Whaling Station, fetched a bottle of orange juice from the fridge and flopped on to the armchair behind the desk. One thought after another raced through his mind, like a dog chasing its tail.

Delaware had followed him.

‘Grab yourself something.' Anawak pointed to the fridge.

‘The whale that brought the plane down…' she began.

Anawak opened the bottle and took a gulp.

‘That whale must have hurt itself, Leon. It probably died.'

He thought for a moment. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I expect you're right.'

She walked over to a shelf with plastic miniatures of whales for sale, in all different sizes. A group of humpbacks were resting peacefully on their flippers. She took one down and twisted it in her fingers. Anawak kept a watchful eye on her. ‘Something's making them do it,' she said.

He leaned forward and switched on the portable TV next to the radio. Perhaps she'd take the hint and go. He didn't mind her company but his need to be alone was growing by the minute.

Delaware replaced the whale on the shelf. ‘Can I ask you something personal now?'

Oh, not again. Anawak was on the point of snapping at her, but shrugged instead. ‘I guess so.'

‘Do you come from the Makah?'

He nearly dropped the bottle. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?' he bleated.

‘It was something you said to Shoemaker when we were getting on the
plane, about Greywolf falling out with the Makah if he kept going on about whaling. The Makah are Indians, right?'

‘Right.'

‘Your people?'

‘I'm not a Makah.'

‘But aren't you—'

‘Look, Licia, don't take this personally, but I'm not in the mood for family history.'

She pursed her lips. ‘OK.'

‘I'll call you when Ford gets in touch.' He smiled wryly. ‘Or you call me - he'll probably not want to wake me or something.'

Delaware shook her red ponytail at him and walked slowly to the door. She paused. ‘And another thing,' she said, without turning. ‘It's time you thanked Greywolf for saving your life. I've been to see him already.'

‘You've done what?'

‘I mean it. You can despise him for everything else, but he still deserves thanks. If it wasn't for him, you'd be dead.'

She went.

Anawak slammed the bottle on to the table and took a deep breath.

 

He was still sitting there, flicking through the channels, when an emergency broadcast came on. The TV stations were full of newsflashes with the latest on the situation in British Columbia, plus broadcasts from the US where shipping was at a standstill too. In the studio, a woman in naval dress was speaking. Her short black hair was combed sleekly off her face and there was an austere beauty about her features. She looked Oriental, perhaps Chinese. No, half-Chinese. One small detail didn't fit with the rest: her eyes were a deep unAsiatic blue.

A text box popped up at the bottom of the screen:
General Commander Judith Li, US Navy
.

‘Should we consider withdrawing from the coast of British Columbia?' the interviewer was asking. ‘Giving it back to nature, so to speak?'

‘I think you'll find that we haven't
taken
anything in the first place,' said Judith Li. ‘We live in harmony with nature although, of course, there's room for improvement.'

‘Yet in the present situation there seems little sign of harmony.'

‘Well, that's something we're working on in close collaboration with
leading scientists and scientific institutes on both sides of the border. Sure, it's alarming when animals collectively change their behaviour, but it would be wrong to over-dramatise the situation. It's certainly no cause for panic.'

‘In other words, you don't believe we're dealing with a mass phenomenon?'

‘Before speculating on the
type
of phenomenon, I'd want to know for certain that this is a phenomenon at all. In my opinion, we're looking at a cumulative series of broadly similar events—'

‘Events that the public knows nothing about,' the interviewer interrupted. ‘Why is that?'

‘We're keeping the public informed.' Li smiled.

‘Well, I'm surprised and delighted to have this chance to talk with you, but let's be frank: the provision of public information, both here and in the United States, has been patchy to say the least. And now we're finding ourselves in a position where we're unable to report the views of experts since all attempts at communication are being blocked by the authorities.'

‘Crap,' growled Anawak. ‘Greywolf was only too happy to shoot his mouth off. I thought
everyone
heard it.'

On the other hand, had Ford been asked for an interview? Or Fenwick? Palm was an expert on orcas - had any news crews or reporters been in touch with him? And what about himself? It wasn't so long ago that
Scientific American
had cited him in an article on cetacean intelligence, but no one had come banging on his door.

Belatedly he was struck by the absurdity of it all. In any other circumstance - terrorist attacks, plane crashes or natural disasters - anyone resembling an expert was dragged in front of the cameras before the day was out.

Yet they were working steadily in silence.

Come to think of it, even Greywolf hadn't given vent to any outbursts since that interview in the paper. Until then he had seized every opportunity to push himself forward. The hero of Tofino had been dropped.