Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,15
the whitecaps in the channel. "Doesn't look like we'll be getting out today. Finish your breakfast, and then we'll go pay your rent."
Nate looked at Clay quizzically.
"I can't give him money," Clay said. "He'll just smoke it. I'm going to go pay his rent."
"Truth." Kona nodded.
"You don't still work for Fuller, do you, Kona?" Nate asked.
"Nate!" Amy admonished.
"Well, he was there when I found the office ransacked."
"Leave him alone," Amy said. "He's too cute to be bad."
"Truth," said Kona. "Sistah Biscuit speak nothin' but the truth. I be massive cute."
Clay set a stack of bills on the table. "By the way, Nate, you have a lecture at the sanctuary on Tuesday. Four days. You and Amy might want to use the downtime to put something together."
Nate felt as if he'd been smacked. "Four days? There's nothing there. It was all on those hard drives."
"Like I said, you might want to use the downtime."
CHAPTER SIX
Whale Wahine
As a biologist, Nate had a tendency to draw analogies between human behavior and animal behavior - probably a little more often than was strictly healthy. For instance, as he considered his attraction to Amy, he wondered why it had to be so complex. Why there had to be so many subtleties to the human mating ritual. Why can't we be more like common squid? he thought. The male squid simply swims up to the female squid, hands her a neat package of sperm, she tucks it under her mantle at her leisure, and they go on their separate ways, their duty to the species done. Simple, elegant, no nuance...
Nate held the paper cup out to Amy. "I poured some coffee for you."
"I'm all coffeed out, thanks," said Amy.
Nate set the cup down on the desk next to his own. He sat in front of the computer. Amy was perched on a high stool to his left going through the hardbound field journals covering the last four years. "Are you going to be able to put together a lecture out of this?" she asked.
Nate rubbed his temples. Despite a handful of aspirin and six cups of coffee, his head was still throbbing. "A lecture? About what?"
"Well, what were you planning to do a talk on before the office was ransacked? Maybe we can reconstruct it from the field notes and memory."
"I don't have that good a memory."
"Yes you do, you just need some mnemonics, which we have here in the field notes."
Her expression was as open and hopeful as a child's. She waited for something from him, just a word to set her searching for what he needed. The problem was, what he needed right now was not going to be found in biology field notes. He needed answers of another kind. It bothered him that Fuller had known about the break-in at the compound. It was too soon for him to have found out. It also bothered him that anyone could hold him in the sort of disdain that Fuller obviously did. Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually - coincidentally - in French.) Nate was neither French-Canadian nor much of a hockey player, so the idea of having invoked enmity enough in someone to have that person ruin his research... He was mortified by it.
"Amy," he said, having spaced out and returned to the room in a matter of seconds, he hoped, "is there something that I'm missing about our work? Is there something in the data that I'm not seeing?"
Amy assumed the pose of Rodin's The Thinker on her stool, her chin teed up on her hand, her brow furrowed into moguls of earnest contemplation. "Well, Dr. Quinn, I would be able to answer that if you had shared the data with me, but since I only know what I've collected or what I've analyzed personally, I'd have to say, scientifically speaking, beats me."