The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (26 page)

“Whales,” Perrault called back. Auer shifted the lens to him, but he didn’t take the binoculars from his eyes. Far ahead, a tail lifted from the water, flourished, then slid gracefully under.

“Humpbacks, I think,” Madsen added from his perch on the coach house.

“Really.” Kimura wriggled up the companionway. He shivered—he was in just the poly-cotton blue pullover jacket and pants, and a pair of Eddi’s Dacca shoes, made out of recycled plastic bags—but kept climbing, until he stood in the crimson sunlight. When he put out a hand to steady himself it landed on Sara’s thigh. She stepped away, but he didn’t seem to notice, just groped again and this time got a winch. “Humpbacks? A pod?”

“Doesn’t sound like it,” Bodine called back. She saw why his head looked deformed: earphones were clamped to it. He lifted one side. “I’m not sure what it is.”

“I’m heading for them,” Dorée called, and the captain, without turning, nodded.

The twin bergs slowly rose, the sky golden-white as French vanilla above them. Turquoise shadows shifted at their bases. Petrels and whalebirds darted across the fissured faces. At their base the slow swell, almost imperceptible in the open, exploded with a sullen roar. Sara clung to the lifeline. It was still the Antarctic, but the lack of wind made it seem almost warm.

“They’re not humpbacks,” Madsen called. “I’m not sure what they are.”

“Killers?”

“No, they’re all black. And they’re bigger.”

They rounded a point of ice, and there they lay. Blowing, rolling on their backs, tossing out their flippers. Here and there one breached, thrusting its massive body free of the liquid element that buoyed it, then crashing back in a burst of spray. Up forward Madsen was in an excited discussion with the captain. At last Perrault nodded, and the Dane shouted back, “They’re right whales!”

“Rights?” Kimura and Auer both echoed.

“
Eubalaena.
I’ve never seen them before! Let’s bring in the genoa. Then drop the main. We can watch, but we’re not going any closer.”

Anemone
slid past another massive wedding-cake furrowed and seamed and spotted with lichen like old rust, or old blood. The sails hummed down and she drifted sedately to a halt and began rolling as her crew gathered on the port side, each with binoculars or camera or video recorder.

Auer and Madsen both fed Dorée sentences, with the camera off; then the actress talked excitedly into the lens about how huge these whales were, how endangered, how they’d gotten the name “right whale.” “They were rich in oil, easy to harpoon, and they floated after they were dead. That made them the ‘right’ whales to kill. They’ve been protected since 1937. The species may be slowly recovering, but is still quite rare.”

They seemed to be feeding, but in a leisurely way. The sea had taken on a strawberry-jam tinge, and looking down into it Sara noted streams of krill moving past. A current? Or could they swim? She just didn’t know enough about this ecosystem. She lifted her binoculars, trying to pick out an individual, but in the flurry of feeding and play she couldn’t be sure where any given right surfaced or blew again. They’d need to tag them with sonar transducers. Plot their movements with GPS. Any serious study would require more boats, more researchers, and far more time and money than she’d ever be able to assemble.

For the first time the whalers’ contention made a brutal sense. The only way to extract actual data from whales was to kill them. But as Hideyashi had pointed out, that yielded only the grossest information. Like trying to study theology by autopsying a dead bishop.

She lowered the glasses, then raised them again. A whale blew, sunlight sparkling through the spray in a caressing rainbow. Calves roamed the pod, venturing away from their mothers. “Dolphins with them,” Kimura said beside her. “Between that one that just sounded, and the floe?”

“I don’t—I don’t see them.”

“Hourglasses, I think. The little black-and-white ones. We often saw them together.” She realized he meant
we
as he and the other whalers.

Bodine poked his head up again. “Got something weird here.”

“What, Mick?”

“Remember the 5R call? The five-click names? I’m picking that up here. Loud and clear.”

For a moment she was confused, then remembered. “So there are sperm whales here too?”

“I’m only picking up one. And not in the pod, I don’t think. Somewhere off to the west.”

“Keep the tapes running,” she called back. “Maybe we can get a specific call and localize it to a visual sighting.” He nodded and disappeared again into the forepeak.

They lay to, marveling, for some time. Gradually the rights, wary at first, moved closer. Led, as both Lars and Hideyashi said was usual, by the calves. They were much bigger than humpbacks, their fins shorter, almost blunt, with a notch that reminded her of the leaf of a shamrock. At one point an adult sniffed within a hundred yards, close enough to make out the blanched callosities on its head. Kimura said these were small colonies in their own right, of whale lice, barnacles, worms, a whole ecosystem that lived on the leftovers of the whale’s feeding.

“Is that enough?” Dorée said at last, tossing her hair over a shoulder.

Eddi lowered the camera. “If you think so, Tehiyah.”

“There’s got to be something there we can use. I’m so cold! I’ll come back up later.” She shivered dramatically, and let herself down the companionway.

The cinematographer set the camera carefully in its case, arranged lenses and memory chips, snapped it closed. She straightened and gazed at the whales. Said, tentatively, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the water.”

“Good grief, Eddi. It’s got to be beyond freezing.”

“We have wet suits. Lars? Wouldn’t you like to swim with them?”

Madsen rubbed a dirty blond beard. “Uh … maybe. I don’t see any leopard seals or killers. Really think we could?”

“We’ll probably never have another chance.” She fiddled with the case. “I have a waterproof housing for this. But I don’t want to go in alone … Sara?”

“You’re crazy.” Sara laughed. “You’re not getting
me
in there.”

*   *   *

She teetered uncertainly where the stern ramp dropped to the water. The inflatable bobbed astern. The swim platform Perrault had rigged shifted under her weight as she struggled the fins on over heavy booties. Her whole body was sausaged into thick rubber. Under that was thermal underwear and a wool sweater, but her skin was still goose-pimpling in advance. Eddi kept saying it would be cold at first, then warm as the water next to her skin heated. What she didn’t say was how warm “warm” was, and Sara was getting the feeling her own standards of comfort and those of the ex-trainer might be different. Above her Madsen swung a leg over the side. Below, Auer was finning her way to the inflatable. When she reached it she grabbed a line and turned. Hooked an arm and aimed the camera, now in a plastic housing. “Come on, Sara. Soon as you get in the water, it’ll feel a lot nicer.”

“Oh shit,” she muttered, already regretting she’d caved in. Sailing to Antarctica was crazy enough. But splashing around in freezing water with whales—she had to admit, though, Eddi was right. She’d probably never have the chance to do this again.

“Waiting for you, Sara-o,” Lars called from above. She muttered, “Shit,” pressed the mask to her face with one hand, as Eddi had, and took a long stride out.

Blue light. Incredible, stabbing cold. She gasped and fought her way to the surface. The suit made that easy; in fact, it would have been hard to stay down. She bobbed, gasping and hacking, fighting to get air through the snorkel even as her whole inside seemed to recoil away from her skin, which was rapidly being coated in liquid ice from the neck down. The cold was so intense that after the initial burn, which felt like being plunged into hot grease, it numbed within seconds.

Beside her a crash, a burst of foam, as the Dane plunged in a few feet away. “Swim,” Auer called. “Kick, Sara. It’ll warm you up.”

Shitshitshit. Sara, you idiot. She kicked. Reached for the line and followed it. More sea came down the snorkel and she coughed it out, nearly retching. Oh yes, this was fun.

“Get on the line. On this side. Lars, you on the other … Dru, you can cast us off. All right, everybody, kick.”

She got the snorkel cleared and sucked a cold lungful. Activity did seem to drive the numbness back, so she kicked, hard, hanging off the Zodiac. The idea seemed to be to use its dull bulk for support and, maybe, camouflage as they approached the pod. They couldn’t fire up the motor, of course. She kept flailing and kicking. Chills shuddered down her flanks. A stitch twisted a needle between her ribs.

She relaxed her death grip on the line, and her mask sank through the surface. She jerked it up, then realized she could still breathe. The harsh hollow rush rasped in her ears. She blinked, fighting terror, and looked down.

Into an immense blue depth. Save for strands of some brownish-red substance it was perfectly clear, as if she were floating in blueberry Kool-Aid. Except for the rusty drifting skeins the water was perfectly transparent; she could see every bubble-laced flick of Lars’s fins. When she bobbed up again they were heading off away from the whales.
Kick
 … she swam harder and they straightened out.

Gradually she noticed muffled clicks and a high-pitched wheezing. A grinding, like tectonic plates colliding. The cold retreated, though her face still prickled with icy pins. She lifted her head. The spouts seemed barely closer.

They came to packed ice and had to detour. Eddi swam ahead to reconnoiter a lead. A lifted arm beckoned them forward, and she kicked again, getting tired now, breath ragged, limbs lagging.

Then they were through, and the embayment opened. Above, a wrinkled, gently warping surface, intensely blue. To left and right masses of ice reached down, grown over with shaggy submarine meadows of bluish-green algae. She looked down into infinity, following red-gold rays that descended into the dimness until lost in a powdered midnight blue-black.

Through those searching beams coursed huge
things
of such power and slow deliberate grace her breath froze in the plastic tube that contained it. Like locomotives gliding past, but locomotives so perfectly streamlined, so minutely controlled, that the tiniest flick of a massive fluke altered their courses. As one passed she traced the slowly rising and falling tail, the seemingly infinite flexibility of the whole aft three-quarters of the animal. The queer distorted mouth, lower jaw so huge it seemed as if the face were upside down. Buff and white callosities dotted the nose and head, and a school of small fish accompanied it as it slowly passed. She couldn’t locate the eye, but the sea was filled with clicking and grunting. They were definitely being examined. And possibly, discussed.

She let go, thrust herself under the raft, and finned after the creature, pulse suddenly lumbering with such huge slow beats her vision throbbed. But it moved on, away, unhurried, as if its internal watch ticked in aeons. The great broad tail slowly swept up and down as its outlines blurred into haze. Then it was gone, and she had to rise, lungs aching, and there was the raft, and the outlines of her friends … she surfaced strangling and blowing, and spat out the mouthpiece. “Did you see it? Did you?”

“We saw,” Madsen said from the far side. “There’s another off to our left. Come on, we’ll swim in among them.”

She hung on the handropes, panting, catching her breath. Hadn’t he been the one excoriating whale tourists earlier? “Are you joking?”

“Come on.” He let go, and swam forward.

She hesitated, looking all around for some dimly dreaded threat. The blue was empty, but it still echoed and groaned. And underneath everything lay that queer low grinding, which had to be ice, but sounded like giant wheels crushing basalt to dust. Dozens of white-and-black torpedoes undulated by at the edge of vision. She goggled, throat closing, before they snapped into scale; penguins, zagging with just as much grace as their vast competitors, but much more rapidly. She let go, retucked the snorkel, and swam after Lars, the pounding of her heart making things tremble in the corner of her vision. She glanced back to see if Eddi was coming, and caught an old-gold flash off a lens pointed her way.

She finned on, approaching a pulsating, fuzzy ocher cloud that at the edges fizzed apart into tiny creatures. She waved a hand slowly, trying to catch one, but they sensed the motion and evaded her.

She kicked on into the brown fog and her faceplate was blanked out by a darting, perking soup of tiny beings, so many the sea grew dark. The animals that drew the birds, the whales, the penguins.

Beautiful as it looked, this blue-and-scarlet world was a battle zone of death and feeding. She suddenly remembered, with a thrill of fear, how the humpbacks had circled, drawing their airy nets around these swarms; then suddenly surged up, enormous mouths agape. But surely all these clicks and buzzings meant they knew she was here. They could sense the trembling, pulsating bubbles of her lungs. Couldn’t they? She looked over one shoulder, thinking to ask Eddi, but she wasn’t in sight.

Lars jackknifed and sank, driving himself downward. She finned slowly to where he’d dropped away. She was deathly afraid, yet also queerly fearless. As if she too were one of these colossal creatures, masters of an icy universe roofed with undulating sun, floored with forever violet. But what was he doing? Hovering a few feet down, staring into the haze—

Out of which was taking shape—

The gigantic right coalesced out of the hazy blue, head-on. The huge curved mouth grinned as it swam, tail pumping up and down every four seconds. Bubbles trailed from its back, forming a silvery stream. They slowly lofted, rocking and glittering like rose pearls. The whale grew, passing just below them, and she saw Madsen had positioned them so. The fissured skin slid by beneath her like a passing asteroid. She reached down and closed her glove on the edge of its dorsal.

And almost had her arm jerked out of its socket. The current pressed her mask into her cheeks and made the useless snorkel flutter and snap against her ear. She rode for endless seconds, the massive beast undulating beneath her, the surface shimmering above, her whole body flapping like a flag in a high wind; until the whale rose, and she turned her face up and laughed aloud, being towed along in the open air. Then suddenly was all but deafened as a rubbery orifice snapped open and a blast of compressed air and funky water blew her mask askew. She let go and tumbled, and thought for a moment fearfully
the tail
but the massive slab of black flesh tilted and she was gently lifted, then slid off into the water again. Where she bobbed and spun, rocked by the massive backwash as her living chariot moved serenely off, trailing a vee-shaped train lined with a rocking slip of foam.