Read The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond Online
Authors: Howard Steven Pines
The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond (47 page)
McPinsky held a sheet of paper aloft. “I’d like to read an excerpt from the minutes of a recent International Whaling Commission meeting.” He removed his glasses. “‘Chefs around Tokyo said that they have developed new gourmet recipes to entice more people to eat whale meat, which was once a precious source of protein during the lean times following World War II. New menus tout such creations as whale spring rolls, whale cutlets, and whale bacon. Japan still conducts whaling through a loophole in the 1986 IWC moratorium on commercial whaling that allows whales to be slaughtered for research purposes.’”
With his glasses back on, McPinsky eyed the audience and said, “Our sins are immense, yet we can rectify our behavior and maybe even redeem ourselves by bestowing upon them a great gift. Think about the physicist Stephen Hawking. Despite the man’s crippling handicap, cutting-edge technology has endowed him with a voice to express his brilliant mind so that we may all benefit. Similarly, the Torch of Prometheus will transform the whales’ voices into a virtual opposable thumb, enabling them to both experience and share the visual reflection of their thoughts and ideas. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to know if the Uberwhale and his companions are indeed the Stephen Hawkings and the Helen Kellers of the deep.”
“Thank you, Theo,” said Lama Dawa Cham, resting a hand upon McPinsky’s shoulder. “It’s a glorious vision: a gift of human science for the enlightenment of another species and for the redemption of our own souls.” Then he turned to face the audience. “Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It is my sincere hope that humanity will act with renewed wisdom for the sake of all future generations of all the species upon our planet.”
Lama Dawa Cham closed his eyes and mouthed a silent prayer. Reopening them, he illuminated the room with his world-renowned smile. The audience rose as one in a boisterous ovation. When the holy man and the scientist linked their arms together and bowed, the cameras flashed like fireworks, and the headline photo appearing in the news media would bear the caption:
TWIN SPOKESMEN FOR A NEW WORLDVIEW
.
For the first time in Dmitri’s memory, the members of an entire audience openly embraced. With the energy of the crowd swirling all around them, the members of the Research in Paradise team clasped hands and sat in silence. It was the dawn of the first day of the second sun.
E
PILOGUE
B
EHOLD THE
C
REATIVE
P
AGEANT
“Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through time.”
Henry Beston 1928—
The Outermost House
Somewhere in the Straits of Lahaina, a young humpback practices her first mathematics lesson. Following the example of her tutor, she vocalizes the shape of a circle in two-dimensional frequency space. The teacher proceeds on to the next exercise. Uber makes the necessary adjustments to his vocal tract and sings the shape of a circle in three dimensions, tilted in all three planes relative to the previous circle. The student does not respond but instead, begins to drift up to the surface, leaving a trail of bubbles. Uber watches as she spirals upward in a helical orbit, her movements synchronized in accordance with Archimedes’s principle of buoyancy. With the precision only a mathematician or physicist could appreciate, and against all odds, her breath has designed a perfectly proportioned, one-hundred-foot-diameter bubble ring, its ecliptic plane unerringly parallel to the surface. She is enveloped by the halo’s luminous ascension, encircled by a crown of jewels sparkling amongst beams of liquid light.
Like a high-wire acrobat, she arcs back down in a great loop until she is directly beneath the rising ring. Then she launches straight up, like a quickening missile converging on its target. When her foamy creation bursts through the surface, she rockets directly through the center, and leaps into the sky.
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to honor Ying Lee Pines. Racing at the speed of light, she made this book possible with her tireless work ethic and unstinting support. I want to thank my grown children, Josh and Jamie, for challenging me to clarify the premise of the existential themes of my story. This book is my legacy to them and a reminder that we share a world of wonder.
Being a retired engineer and a debut novelist, I struggled with the multi-dimensional challenges of craft development. I’m indebted to my three primary editors, all award-winning fiction writers, for persevering through a literary novice’s steep and prolonged learning curve. With their guidance, the germination of an idea flowered into a dream fulfilled.
I’d like to thank my original mentor, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and the Left Coast Writer’s community for their support in guiding the transformation of my ideas onto the printed page. Linda was both midwife and physician to the birth and development of the first few revisions of the manuscript. Her uncanny ability to intuit the author’s and the protagonist’s personal and story goals laid the foundation of the novel. Molly Dwyer’s application of critical thinking skills to the assessment of point of view, character, and scene credibility helped to elevate
The Whale Song Translation
from a work in progress to a bona fide narrative. Molly’s literary “tough love” stressed respect for the readers’ sensitivity to intrusive narration and excessive description. Debra Ratner’s dialogue expertise and advocacy for the humanity of all the book’s characters added a layer of personal richness to the story that was sorely lacking.
This book bears the indelible imprint of others. Lynne Michelle’s endless hours of proof reading and copy-editing guidance led me to the promised land of a publishable manuscript. Alan Rinzler’s developmental suggestions helped breathe new life into the narrative voice, led to the selection of the “right” opening scene, and gave birth to an important new character. A handful of friends generously donated their time to peer review an early revision of the manuscript, copyrighted in 2009 as
The Turing Translation
. Their insights and suggestions have graced subsequent revisions. Brooke Warner’s expertise instilled in me the confidence to take the leap into publishing.
I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to the residents of Maui for their spirit-of-Aloha hospitality and enlightened stewardship of the Valley Isle’s natural bounty. Much of the marine mammal material in this book was culled from the excellent publication
Humpbacks of Hawai‘I—The Long Journey Back
, written by the co-founders of Maui’s Pacific Whale Foundation. Visit their website: www.PacificWhale.org.
We should all salute the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other environmental and marine mammal organizations, for chronicling the adverse effects of anthropogenic noise pollution on marine mammals. For an overview of the controversial subject of the military sonar experiments depicted in the book, I highly recommend a visit to their website, www.nrdc.org/wildlife/marine/sonar.asp, and the short video narrated by Pierce Brosnan posted there.
And last but not least, I’d like to acknowledge Maui’s humpback whales. This book’s inspiration was spawned the moment I first thrilled to a humpback rocketing from the deep blue sea. I was ultimately compelled to tell this story when, during a “recreational” analysis session of a humpback whale song recording, I grokked the intriguing implications of waveforms eerily similar to frequency-modulated human speech.
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
As a child of the post-Sputnik boomer generation, and as someone captivated by the sixties “Race to the Moon,” I suppose I was destined to be a math and science dude. Since the moment I realized computers could solve math problems at the “speed of light,” I’ve been hooked.
My career passion for software engineering began during the seventies energy crisis as an alternative energy research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After Reagan pulled the plug on that project, I had a smashing good time devising improved designs and tuning strategies for the ion beam lines attached to the lab’s HILAC “atom smasher.” However, it wasn’t until I’d joined a startup company specializing in digital voice products that I discovered my true calling.
My writing is informed by a twenty-five-year Silicon Valley software engineering career that’s led to five patents in wireless voice technology. In the adaptation of voice and modem algorithms for communication devices, I became fascinated by the theoretical and physical foundations of speech. I was amazed to recognize the connection between the natural process that created spoken language and the design of cell phone technology—they had both found the solution predicted by a fundamental law of communications. The realization of this convergence is the inspiration for my fictional trilogy-in-progress,
The Torch of Prometheus
.
The Whale Song Translation
is the first installment of the trilogy.
The idea for the book’s “Speakeasy” speech-therapy system is based on a speech-modulated, shape-writing prototype I developed and demonstrated at the Fremont campus of the California School for the Deaf in 1985. My understanding that human speech evolved into a process of shape-writing and shape-matching generated the interspecies communication experiment at the core of the novel. To learn more about the underlying principles common to speech, language, and whale songs and, if my time permits, maybe even a demo of the shape-writing app featured in the book, visit www.HowardStevenPines.com.
Born in Los Angeles and a lifelong Californian, I have a love affair with the Pacific Ocean that is steeped in childhood summers playing in the waves. As an über-fan of speech, sound, and surf, my motto is: “Ride the wave, ride the wave equation.” Entranced by Northern California’s coastline, beaches, and migrating whales, I currently shuttle between the scenic bay and coastal communities of El Cerrito and Mendocino. Maui is a favorite vacation getaway destination, and the inspirational setting of my debut novel and its forthcoming sequel.
Table of Contents
7 - Speech Lab--A Bridge of Light and Sound
14 - The Best and the Brightest
21 - The Six Thunderclaps of Professor McPinsky
22 - Collusions of an Academic Hit Man
24 - Creationists and Luddites--Full of Passionate Intensity
