Beyond the Ice Limit

29

ROSEMARIE WONG WAS used to working in labs full of male jerks, but Prothero really took the cake. He was a jackass—a brilliant jackass. And not just brilliant, but a truly creative scientist, something as rare in science as it was in music or literature. He was someone who habitually thought outside the box, whose mind made startling connections across entire categories, who cleaved mundane reality to find the gem within, and whose acidic skepticism ate away at even the most universally accepted truths. Many of his intellectual leaps were crazy, but once in a while they were not. When she had started working with him two years ago, he had just gone through a string of lab assistants, one after the other, nobody lasting more than a few months. Wong had decided that, come hell or high water, she was going to get along with this prize ass because she believed he was a great scientist who, someday, was bound to go somewhere unusual. Somewhere important. And when that day came, she would be there with him.

In this, she had been spectacularly correct. This secret mission to the South Atlantic was giving Wong a chance to do science beyond her wildest dreams. Just to be part of humanity’s first encounter with an alien life-form was mind blowing. If it meant she had to put up with world-class asininity, juvenile crudeness, and preteen temper tantrums on a daily basis, that was the price to pay. As a protective carapace, she had developed a sort of sarcastic, bantering relationship with him that seemed to earn at least a modicum of his respect—and kept his nasty temper at bay. She also had come to realize the vulgar nastiness was a form of respect: it was Prothero demonstrating to her that he wasn’t going to treat her nicely or gently, because he considered her his equal.

“Wong, where the fuck is my hat?”

Prothero came around the corner of her work bay, holding a screwdriver in one hand and a motherboard in the other.

“It’s on your head.”

Prothero clapped his hand to his head—his bare head—and then grimaced. “Ha, ha. Where is it?”

“Probably in the bathroom, where you always leave it.”

Prothero went out the door and came back a moment later, wearing his hipster hat. “Here’s what I’ve been thinking: we’re going to translate that whale signal.”

“Translate it? As in, decipher whale-speak?”

“Exactly.” He pulled up a chair backward and sat down. “And I know just how to do it. I’ve got the world’s biggest collection of blue whale vocalizations, here in this lab. We’re going to reverse-engineer it.”

“So you think the Baobab is trying to talk to us?”

“That thing’s been sitting there on the seafloor for, what, five years? Listening. And what does it hear? Well, two miles down there isn’t much sound. The only sounds that carry that deep are whale vocalizations. Whale-talk is damned loud. It carries a hundred miles. You following me?”

“Yes.”

“All right. So the Baobab is listening, listening, listening…and maybe it starts to figure out what the whales are saying. And now it’s trying to communicate with us in the only language it knows.”

This was one of those crazy Prothero leaps. “So what’s it saying?” she asked.

“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” said Prothero, and laughed hilariously at his own lame joke.

“Here’s what I think,” she said, when Prothero had stopped wheezing.

“You know I don’t give a shit what you think. But tell me anyway.”

“It’s randomly playing back sounds it recorded. They mean nothing.”

Prothero shook his head. “This thing’s intelligent—I’ll bet anything on that. And it’s sending us a message.”

“So how exactly are you going to translate it?”

“You mean, how are you going to translate it. You, Wong, are going to find the closest digital match between that Baobab sound and the blue whale vocalizations in my database. And then we’re going to find out what the blue whale was doing when it was recorded making that sound—and that’ll give us an idea of the meaning. Like, was the whale chasing prey? Was it a mother calling her calf? Was it fucking?” Prothero laughed again.

Wong shook her head. “If it’s trying to communicate, why not by some other means than whale calls?”

“No doubt it’s highly attuned to sound. Sound is the best way to communicate underwater. Electromagnetic fields dissipate, and light can’t penetrate more than four or five hundred feet. This thing evolved to live in the dark depths of a watery world. It developed a sonar-resistant skin; it used sonar to “look” at Gideon Crew when he was down there collecting the wreck of Paul. Naturally it uses sound to communicate. And whale calls are all it has heard.”

“Digital sound. Which means it’s a machine. There’s no way for a biological system to evolve so as to produce digital sound.”

“Wong, Wong, Wong…” Prothero shook his head. “Maybe it’s a machine, maybe it’s a biological system, maybe it’s a combination of the two. Whatever it is, it’s talking to us. Now get your ass to work and find out what it’s talking about.”