The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (37 page)

Madsen kicked at the water sloshing back and forth. “But if we shut down, we lose the bilge pumps.”

“But if it’s following us … Hy, how fast can a sperm whale swim?”

Kimura said, “
Physeter macrocephalus
can make up to forty kilometers an hour when he is being chased. But not for long periods. Maybe half that, over distance.”

“What’s that in knots?” She’d never been good at converting.

“It would be about forty miles an hour, to sprint. Maybe fifteen or twenty, to keep going?”

Madsen grimaced. “Jesus. I thought we’d be getting some distance on him. But maybe not.”

“What else can you tell us?” Sara asked the Japanese, suddenly conscious that they weren’t making the best use of the closest thing to a whale expert aboard.

Kimura settled himself in the bunk; his voice grew precise, almost pedantic. “Well, this one is middle-aged. Forty to sixty years old. From the size, and the fact he, it, travels alone—the younger bulls pod in age groups; they only become solitary later.”

They were interrupted by a louder racket aft, a teeth-edging clatter added to the already noisy engine vibration. “Something else let go,” Madsen observed gloomily. “I’d better go look.”

The companionway clacked back, revealing a square of near black. Snow eddied down in whirls before falling into the sloshing water and vanishing. It seemed to be coming down much more heavily than when she’d been on deck. “Hey! I’m freezing my ass off up here,” Auer yelled. “How about somebody else takes a freakin’ turn?”

“Just a sec, Eddi.” She made herself add, “I’ll come up. But we’re trying to decide what to do.”

“Well, make it fast. Please.”

A minute or two later, without warning, the engines shut down. First one, shaking the whole boat with a resounding series of knocks, then the other. The salon went quiet. The buzzing in the galley died. When he came back Madsen said, “Well, that’s it. They’re tearing out of the mountings and seizing up.”

“Maybe it’s best,” Kimura said. “With the whale, I mean.”

“Maybe, but we’ve still got this leak.” Madsen kicked up spray. “We can run the small pump for a while, it’s electric, but once the battery dies…”

“Let’s make sure we’ve gotten away from that thing,” Sara said, getting up. Reluctantly, she pulled her mustang suit down from where she’d hung it to drip. It stank of mildew. As she thrust her legs in she smelled sweat and sex too. Don’t think of him. He was gone, along with Dru and Tehiyah. They’d be hard put to make it to safety themselves, the way the Dewoitine was coming apart around them. She didn’t want to go topside again. Once she got home, she’d never go to sea again. Just the ferry, back and forth to Hyannis. “Uh, Lars, what sails we want up?”

“We should be okay with the main. I hope. Just keep both reefs in it.”

“That won’t give us much speed.” She moved toward the companionway, grabbing a scarlet scarf to wrap around her face. Tehiyah’s? Well, she wouldn’t be needing it anymore. The most unsettling thing now was watching Lars’s confidence erode. Who’d been senior in his and Bodine’s partnership? She’d thought it was the Dane. But maybe not.

“If he can’t hear us, we won’t need speed,” the Japanese said. “We can dodge away and he will not find us. And maybe I can see if he is back there. With the equipment Mr. Bodine had.” He started to struggle up, but stopped at a sitting position, holding his side with eyelids squinched closed. “Is there more of pills? And you said, tea?”

“I’ll get it.” Lars blinked and stood. “Go on, give Eddi a break. I’m going to get a GPS position. I’ll come up in an hour. Three left fit to crew. An hour on, two hours off?”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said, coughing as a chill shook her. She really didn’t want to go out into the snow. Into the wind. Up on deck, exposed.

“We’ll get out of this, Sara.” He tried a grin.

“Yeah. Sure we will.” She gave the groaning Kimura a quick pat, squeezed Madsen’s arm, and headed up.

18

The Night and the Darkness

The snow blew past in wavering curtains, so thick at times she couldn’t see fifty yards. At other moments a caricature of the moon sped through cloud-wrack, an uncanny doppelgänger of the dimmed-out, low-lying sun. Above her the wind genny clattered away, vibrating in the gusts.

She stood braced into the wind-cheating upward flip of the coachroof, glasses laid across it, every fiber shuddering, face and fingers unfeeling as ancient marble. The wind streamed through the shrouds with a discordant hum. The main, reefed down, strained taut as the boat heaved upward, then fought like a captured demon when she sank. Sara kept aiming the binoculars aft, searching their wake, but was afraid to spend long with her back to the bow.

With good reason. An hour past midnight a pale ghost glimmered ahead. She stepped aft, disengaged the self-steerer, and took the wheel. The berg rose above her on a dark wave, burning white in the queer eclipse-like semidarkness, then sank away. She sketched a dodge northeast, then turned east again. When the twilight vibrated unbroken ahead once more she hooked the steerer up again and resumed her post.

Moon and sun waned amid the speeding clouds. For long periods they disappeared entirely, leaving her submerged in a weird objectless dusk so disorienting she had to beat her sides with her arms to reassure herself she was awake, or even alive. But then they emerged again, feeble and flickering, distant candles, but there, riding with her on her flight through a desolation that seemed more than ever hostile to any life but that which moved hidden far beneath. From below came sporadic hammering and clanking. Madsen or Eddi trying to fix something. She stamped wooden feet in frozen boots. Snow built epaulets on her shoulders, coated her mask. The cold grew more intense, and she began to shake. She shook for a long time. Then, very gradually, the shudders eased off.

Sometime later the companionway hatch banged open. She tried to back away and stumbled, only just catching herself before her face smashed into the wheel.

A bulky worm heaved itself from the dimly lit square. The square vanished with a thump, and the figure straightened to a half bow. “You all right?” Madsen muttered, as if through heavy cloth. In the gray obscurity he had no face, only a blank oval with the merest suggestion of goggles.

“Yeah. F-frozen though, though.”

“Much ice?”

“Now and then. Might be smaller pieces I can’t see. We scraped one a while ago.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“What were you doing down there?”

“Trying to brace the starboard side. Some of the frames are broken.”

“The keel?”

“Nothing we can do about that until we get to calmer water. What I’m really afraid of—” His head bent; he peered around. “Huh. Seas are bigger.”

“Yeah, they’re kicking up again. What is it you’re really afraid of?”

“We’re taking water through the starboard buoyancy tank. The one that’s supposed to be airtight. Hey.” He squinted. “What happened to Tehiyah?”

Sara frowned, glancing toward the bow. A rift in the snowfall showed flapping canvas. The cold fingers of the wind had partially unwrapped the body. The head rose defiantly erect. Frozen solid, of course, but no doubt still as beautiful as ever. An ice sculpture. A grisly figurehead. She started to answer, but found no words to acknowledge the horror and fatigue. Instead she murmured, “The moon’s going down.”

“I’ll sheet out. I don’t see how the thing could still be following us. But we need to keep that water down. I told Eddi to turn in. She’ll be on deck next. Can you bail? For maybe half an hour?”

Bail, she thought. Haul water, after freezing up here? Anger tried to take her, then fell away. She doubted she’d ever feel emotion again. She felt him squeeze her shoulder, and nodded apathetically. Then bent to slide the door back. Leaving Lars upright in the dusk, swaying with the roll, the boom surging against its restraints as the wind danced with castanets beneath the bitter moon.

*   *   *

Belowdecks a single light burned all the way forward. A feminine snore sawed from Eddi’s cubicle. Sara stripped off boots and propped them upside down on the drain mat. Stripped off her suit. It crackled with ice as she beat at it. She leaned against the bulkhead and breathed slowly, closing her eyes. Fuck bailing. She was turning in. But as she took her first step aft she cursed wildly as her stockinged foot plunged into inches of freezing water.

She put her boots back on, went into the galley, and found the square brown bottle. She lifted it, murmuring, “To you, Tehiyah. Mick. Dru.” The rum ignited in her throat. She shuddered. Hunger stirred at last. She rooted out a can of corned beef from some previous voyage and forked the frozen fat and forbidden red meat out of the sharp tin into her mouth, shuddering as warmth slowly pulsed out from her marrow into fingers and feet once again.

Then, reluctantly, she searched for the bailer. For aeons in the sloshing, frigid dimness she lifted bucket after bucket from boot height in the open bilge to waist level, wading across the width of the salon, and dumping it in the galley sink. Then trudged back for another, over and over, like Sisyphus.

When she could not lift her arms again, when her hands crimped into spasmed claws from the drag of the wire bail, she hung the bucket at last and waded toward the light. As she neared, it became a glimmer at the end of a long tunnel.

Deep within the forepeak someone bent over the keyboard. A screen flickered. She clung to the hatchway, fear harrowing her spine. Then he lifted his head and she saw it was not Bodine’s ghost but rather Hy. Kimura peered into what must be to him utter darkness. She hesitated, then ducked inside and walked bent through the shifting of lines and tackle until she crouched beside him.

“What are you doing?”

“Listening,” he whispered. Very carefully, he lifted the headphones, hissing as his torso twisted, and fitted them to her ears.

She closed her eyes. A distant shushing, a subdued susurration almost below the level of hearing. It swelled and waned like surf on a faraway strand.

“What is it?”

“Listen closely.”

She did; to that unsettling, uncanny rush and ebb like a tide rustling a million crepitating potato chips along the ocean floor. Her lips parted. For a moment she wondered how deep it was here, how many fathoms down the black ocean reached to meet lightless rock. The Japanese frowned at the screen and fingernailed a dial.

Then she heard it. A staccato clatter, far away, succeeded by a slow deep sequence of tones or notes unlike anything she’d heard from the humpbacks. It died away echoing into deeps vast as interplanetary space, reverberating, growing fainter and fainter, lower and lower.

“What is that?” she whispered, suppressing a shiver.

“The first clicks, they are what we call a ‘coda.’ It is the whale identifying itself.”

“The 5R. Mick said—he told me about it.”

“I think it is the one that attacked us. From the way Mick described its call. He said he also recorded it. But I can’t access. The files are password-protected.”

She bent her fingers back one by one, wiggling them. As soon as she let go they curled into a fist again. “And then…?”

He pushed back from the keyboard, the smooth face creased with worry. Winced, and rubbed his side. “The rest of its call? It is not one I have heard or read of.”

“Who’s it calling to?”

“That too I do not know. But I hear no answer.”

She shivered again. Someday the last whale in the sea would call like that, to generations passed away, a whole world erased. “Can you, um, speculate?”

He looked away, frowning. “That is not a very scientific thing to do.”

She suppressed a sigh. “Try it, Hy. Take a flier.”

A spoke of light shimmered. He put it on the speaker, and they listened again: the clicking introduction, then the lingering, echoing whistle, rising and falling, drawn out, trailing off at last into that uneasy continuing breath of the sea.

“If I were to guess … it might be something like a hunting call. Or even a … battle chant.”

She sat appalled. Finally managed, “Are you serious?”

“Why not?” He turned a blazing gaze on her. “A strange repeated call no one has heard or recorded. It has been hunting us. Isn’t that so?”

“… I guess so.”

He shrugged. “Or perhaps something like a death song? To assert that positively, no, I could not. But you asked me to speculate.”

She shuddered, imagining the beast searching through the deeps, listening for the engine-mutter of its prey. Sorting through the grinding of ice and the crash of wind-driven waves for their telltale spoor. Tuning through the crash and whisper of the sea for them, as Bodine had tuned through it for those he sought. If that was what it had homed in on before, and not simply the echo of their air-filled hull, or the humming whisper of their lute-stringed keel through the water. “So it’s still tracking us?” she whispered.

“It is far astern now, I think.” He ratcheted a geared knob and watched the display; ratcheted a few more degrees. Only a faint radiance flickered, a spoke bent upward here and there, then died away.

“How far?”

“That I can’t tell. Only the bearing. That is all the equipment can give.” He hesitated, then added, “It is still back there. Calling. That is all I can say with certainty.”

She sat back on her heels, boots squishing, feet icy once more. The liquor glow had ebbed. The chill was creeping back. Her heart seemed to pump reluctantly, laboring to push some fluid thicker than blood. Like a whale’s, slow and tremendous, counting off life against some timescale longer than a human’s.

“And if it catches up?” she whispered.

“Then we die,” Kimura whispered back. As if, she thought, it could hear them if they spoke aloud.

The call came again, eerie, tremulous, the frequency shifted by the electronics to a sound they could register with their feeble, narrow human senses. While all around them passed other sounds they could not hear, messages they did not even suspect, in what to them was only the night and the darkness.

“We ought to have some kind of plan. What we should do, if it does.” She cast about for any possibility, and found so little. Abandon
Black Anemone
for a floe? Slow but sure death. Find the whaling fleet again, throw themselves on their mercy? Even if they were so inclined, that fleet lay hundreds of miles astern.