The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (38 page)

No. Hideyashi was right. If the creature found them again, they’d all die. She hugged herself, seeing the inrushing water, feeling the final embrace of that bitter sea. Even if it didn’t return, the damage it had already done might finish them.
Bail
, Lars had told her. Without the engines, the wind genny could provide only so much power. “Maybe you’d better turn this off,” she told him. “Conserve electricity.”

“Well, you know, we are learning something.”

“We are? What exactly are we learning here, Hy? And will it really matter, in the end?”

She waited for an answer, but he just breathed hard and clutched his side.

She was getting up to go aft when he murmured, “There is perhaps another possibility.”

“What?”

He looked away. “Oh, it is nothing. Forget I said it.”

This was the second time he’d done this. A wave of fatigued rage rose again, sharper now than during the bout topside with Lars. She gripped his neck and said fiercely, “
What
, Hy? Don’t fucking
tease
me. Spit it out.”

He murmured, face still turned away, “I was just thinking. It might be possible this is not a whale.”

She shook him, eliciting a squeak of pain. “Then
what is it
?” Then dropped her hands. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—but you’re testing my patience. We’re about to die, maybe, and you—”

He hesitated again, but must have caught the look in her eye. He hurriedly said, still not meeting her gaze, “It might be a
kami
.”

“A
kami.
Is that a Japanese word? Wait. You used it before. What is it, again?”

He worked his tongue around, obviously sorry he’d brought it up. “Oh, well, it is from Japanese … religion. Or no, folklore. In English it would be a god, or a demon … or maybe a spirit … but not exactly any of those.”

She wasn’t sure she was hearing this right. “What are you saying? That it’s a supernatural being? Hy, I thought—”

“I know, I know.” His hands fluttered up like startled moths at the same time a hollow scrape began up forward. They both froze. The scrape grew louder, drawing aft, accompanied by thumps and shudders. Someone, probably Madsen, had driven wooden wedges into gaps between the frames and the composite skin. That thin membrane vibrated ominously to a renewed cracking and scraping. Then subsided, as whatever they’d hit drifted free. This time.

When she looked back he was wiping his forehead. Who could sweat, in this cold? She said cruelly, “Are you
okay
, Hy? Because saying this thing is some kind of fucking spirit, well, that’s pretty far out there. Especially for a
neuroanatomist
.”

To her surprise he didn’t look ashamed. “Well, you know, the words do not translate exactly in the way you use them in the West.” He took a breath. “A wise priest once said, ‘One should not bring logic to any discussion of Shinto.’ In our culture, that other world is not separate from ours. It
is
ours. Right here with us, always.”

She remembered then: His father was a priest. Maybe, under enough stress, everybody reverted to childlike beliefs, childish behaviors. She hadn’t thought he was that far gone. So she said only, “Okay, I guess that’s a … hypothesis. But how would you test it? And what would it mean? About the whale, that is.”

“Oh, it actually might make sense.” He looked almost eager. “You see, Shinto holds that anything we feel but cannot grasp, anything very powerful or very beautiful or that we human beings cannot understand—that can be
kami.
It does not have to be what you Westerners would call ‘gods.’”

“Hy. This whale is powerful. Maybe even smart. But it’s not some underwater ghost, or visitor from the spirit world. It’s just a very violent rogue male, that’s decided we’re—”

He shook his head. “But you see,
kami
can appear as animals. Can have both a merciful and a violent nature. If the manifestation is violent, this means the human and the spirit world are out of balance.”

She snorted. “And what’s that mean? And how do we bring them back ‘in balance’?”

“To that, the answer is simple. Any priest will tell you that. We will have to placate it in some way.”

She started to laugh, but stopped. Crazy, yet … hadn’t she felt something uncanny about it too?

No. No! This whole discussion was ridiculous. She must be even more tired than she’d thought, maybe even a little drunk. She turned to leave, but found a dark shape blotting out the exit. She tensed.

“It’s just a whale,” Eddi Auer said from the doorway. She sounded exhausted, not like someone just awakened from a refreshing sleep. Her voice dragged. “Just a huge whale. And it’s hurt, so it’s calling. Is this water on the floor deeper? It feels deeper. And are we leaning over to starboard?”

“We need to keep bailing,” Sara said, though her forearms spasmed painfully as she said it. “I put in half an hour. Maybe that’s not enough.”

“You think that’s what its vocalization means, Eddi?” Kimura said. “It is calling for help?”

“That’s what it’s saying. It’s wounded. You saw that harpoon. But I guess no one’s answering.”

“Sperms are fairly rare in icy waters,” the Japanese said. “Though they have been reported. I was surprised to see it here, myself.”

“If there was some way to help it—”

“
Help
it?” Sara couldn’t restrain a sardonic laugh. “It tried to sink us!”

Eddi said stubbornly, “Or maybe it was just trying to rub the harpoon off. Did you ever think of that?”

Sara and Kimura looked at each other as Auer went on. “If we could do something for it, maybe get that harpoon out, it’d realize we’re different from the whalers. And isn’t that what we’re out here for? To help them?”

Sara raked her hands through her hair, feeling like pulling it out, roots and all. It was dirty and sticky, but she didn’t give a damn how it—or she—looked just now. “Well, these are interesting theories. That it’s some kind of vengeful spirit. Or a poor wounded lion, looking for a mouse to pull the thorn from its paw. But with any luck, we’ll be in Australia in a few days. Eddi, you on your way up?”

“It’s gonna be my turn soon. Shouldn’t you be in your bunk? You don’t look so good.”

“I guess so.” But she didn’t feel sleepy, just terribly tired. The fatty beef churned in her stomach. “I guess … guess I’ll lie down. Yeah.” She shook her head once more, marveling at the human capacity for delusion. Then stumbled out.

*   *   *

When Eddi roused her she sat bolt upright from a horrible dream she instantly wished she was back in. The interior was pitch-dark, creaking. She stared at Auer’s face outlined by a flashlight. “What time is it?”

“You looked like you needed the sleep. Come on, Sara. We’re not going that fast, but we need a lookout on deck.”

“Ice?”

“None for the last hour. Maybe we’re out of it. The snow’s letting up too. Need a hand?”

“No. No, I’m all right. I’m getting up.”

The flash winked out. She groped into her suit and found her boots floating. This woke her the rest of the way. Her cubicle had been dry when she’d crawled into her bunk. The clatter of the bucket in the salon was succeeded by Eddi’s curses.

Topside the sky was only faintly lighter than when she’d gone below, but only a little snow whispered across her face mask or scratched at her goggles. The seas still bulged astern, marching after them through a light haze. The moon was gone. She missed its pale vigil, but turned the illumination up on the instruments to give the illusion of company.

The sun never quite set, but that didn’t mean it was day. The waves rolled black against gray. They seemed to curve upward, so that
Anemone
sailed at the bottom of a well. Very gradually the zenith lightened to a toneless pewter against which the masthead and sail were curving shadows. The snow was definitely lifting.

All at once, very suddenly, a fissure of opaline light cracked apart and there was the sun. She blinked as its rays lanced deep into the peaked waves, igniting a painful blue at their thin crests while they still remained black as obsidian in their hearts. They passed by, sizzling as they toppled, and she reflected dully how fearsome they would have seemed to her once.
Anemone
did seem less lively. Still lifting to each wave, but reeling as she did so, and always with that nagging inclination to starboard. Sara looked forward. The wrapped bundle lashed up there had its boots almost in the water. The tarp had unwrapped even more during the night. It flapped and cracked as the wind toyed with it, streaming it out over the sea. God, she had to fix that … had meant to do so before, but …

She turned and craned aft, searching each peak as it rose, rolled forward, shining indigo, then grass-green, and at last a brilliant priceless malachite veined with quartz as it surged past, breaking with a milky spatter against the quarter. The boom creaked as they rolled. Moving with tired deliberation, staggering, she stepped up on the cockpit seat and from there to the top of the coachroof. She balanced the binoculars on gloved fingertips to search long and earnestly the path the broad stern impressed into the heaving sea. From one quarter of the horizon to the other, then, slowly, back again. And at last lowered the glasses, blinking as cornflower afterimages pulsed and subdivided behind her retinas.

They were alone. Save for, far to the west, an inchoate shadow that might be fog. The rest of the horizon was distinct, with scattered clouds sailing past at no great altitude. But no spout had disturbed the undulating surface. No wave had broken on anything resembling a reef of pale coral.

The hatch slid back with a clack. Madsen’s bare head emerged like a turtle’s. He squinted pouched, swollen eyes at the low orb of the sun. His first words were, “We’re taking more water.”

She stared, sagging. He added, “But we made sixty miles last night.”

“That’s good, right?”

“I’m no navigator, but we’re headed in the right direction.” He sighed and heaved himself up. Searched around. “Any sign of—of it?”

She shook her head. “And the ice—haven’t seen any since dawn. Are we out of it?”

“Not according to the chart, but I’m getting the impression that chart’s just a guess. Especially this far east.”

She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer to her next question. “How far is it to, um, Australia, anyway, Lars?”

He looked away. “About four thousand miles.”

Holy crap, she thought, but didn’t allow her lips to shape the words. “Nothing closer?”

He explained that two or three small groups or individual islands dotted the Southern Indian Ocean, but they were uninhabitable. “Landing there this close to the end of the season—well, we’d be better off running downwind all the way to Tasmania. Yeah, it’s a long way. But nine or ten knots, that’s a thousand miles every four days.”

“So sixteen days, we’ll be there.”

“If we can stay afloat.” He pulled himself the rest of the way up. “But the water’s getting ahead of us now. Have to go to full-time bailing. Eddi’s down there now—”

“Lars … there are only three of us who can steer and bail. I don’t think we can do that nonstop for sixteen days.”

“Then we’ve no other choice but to start the engine.”

She couldn’t suppress a shiver. She didn’t want to even voice what Hy had told her, his guess about what had lured the whale to them. “You said it was shaking the boat apart.”

“No, I said
running the props
was shaking the boat apart. We can idle one engine. Just use it to run the pump. That’ll stretch our fuel too.” He blew out again and searched the western horizon once more. She turned too, looking past the racketing genny and the searching slanted finger of the steering vane to trace their wake back over the smoothly rolling hills that darkened from olive to indigo as clouds moved between them and the sun. A single albatross balanced far above, as if Nature herself were monitoring this trespasser on her final keep. He added, “So the real question is whether it’s still after us.”

She shuddered. The sunlight helped, but the wind was still biting cold. The short Antarctic summer was drawing to an end. What would the temperature fall to in another two weeks? “Uh, what’s Hy say?”

“Those weird calls he was hearing? He lost them.”

“That’s good.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “You need to get below. Don’t bail just yet. We’ll figure something out. Get some sleep, Sara. I’ve got the watch.”

She wanted to believe his confident tone was based on more than wish. But, too tired to respond, she just nodded. And was bending to the companionway when a black head bobbed up, its crown narrowly missing striking her in the teeth. Kimura, some awkward burden cradled in one crooked arm, so that he was coming up one slow step at a time, crabbed sideways, sheltering whatever it was he carried. He winced at each step, favoring his side. She sagged to the bench seat, mind empty. Just a pair of eyes, watching whatever happened next.

“Good morning.”

“Hy, what you got there?” Madsen looked up from the self-steering mechanism. “Brought us up a snack?”

“It is not for you.” The Japanese moved without haste. He was freshly shaven and his hair looked shorter than the night before. A white hand towel, neatly folded into a band, was tied across his forehead. With careful deliberate motions he laid out objects on the seat. A dish of cooked rice. Two sardines, arranged on a saucer with consummate artistry. A small raft nailed, no, lashed together, of the spare timber—“dunnage,” Quill had called it—stowed in one of the forward lockers for repairs. On it sat the lower half of a gallon bleach bottle, the white plastic cut into a makeshift chair or throne. More complexly knotted string fixed this to the raft. The last object Kimura produced was the rum bottle, still a third full. He placed it carefully in its carved, braided receptacle.

“Uh, what’s this?” Madsen said, looking taken aback.

“A placating ritual.” Hy rearranged the bottle as if to find some slightly more aesthetically pleasing aspect that to her looked exactly the same. “I will be the
ujiko.
The officiant.”