Chapter 62 The Wrong Verse

Wellington harbor took them in on the eighth day like a hand closing around something precious, and for thirty-six hours the Kairyu was not a warship or a listening post or the flagship of anybody's vigil but merely a small gray vessel with too many people waving at her from the quay. The choir was already there. That was the thing none of the returning voyagers ever quite got over, and they said so for years: the choir had formed before the teachers arrived — dockers and taxi drivers and three sisters who ran a bakery on the waterfront — singing the counter-melody in unison from a notation nobody could produce when asked, learned, they said, off the wireless, off a fishing fleet, off each other, the way people learn laughter. Ishikawa went ashore with his staff paper and his correcting pen and worked the quay like a surgeon triaging. By noon he had found four distinct variants in circulation, and by evening he had traced the worst of them to its source: a gramophone record cut three weeks earlier in a radio studio from a tape recorded off a tape played by a band that had learned the line from a sailor who had hummed it once, imperfectly, in a bar in Lyttelton. The record had sold four thousand copies. The variant was beautiful, Ishikawa admitted, holding it up to the light like a bad coin — it swung where the true line held, resolved where the true line waited, and closed the leaning chord with a comfortable little cadence that made an audience feel finished instead of awaited. "That is the poison," Ellison said, when the variants were laid out on the wardroom table. "Not malice. Comfort. The real melody ends by refusing to end — it leaves you standing at a door, and human beings cannot bear a door, so somebody has already begun selling keys." She touched the flattened notation. "And the deep can hear every one of these records. Every gramophone in every parlor in every port town on this ocean is broadcasting a closed door, and the water carries it." The consequence arrived with the fishing fleet on the second morning, and it arrived in silence. Six trawlers came up the harbor mouth with their nets foul and their holds empty and their skippers angry in the particular baffled way of men who have worked honest ground for years and found it suddenly barren. The grounds were dead, they reported — no fish, no birds, no dolphins, nothing — and one of them, a methodical man with forty seasons behind him, had done what methodical men do: he had written down dates. The barrenness had begun, everywhere his fleet worked, within a day of the crews taking up singing on deck for luck. Singing for luck was his own idea. He had the variant record. He had played it over the deck speaker, he confessed, every morning for a fortnight, because his men had asked. Ellison went out with him that afternoon in his wheelhouse and came back at dusk with the confirmation written in her field book in the flat hand she reserved for findings she hated. Where the wrong version was sung, the deep withdrew. Not punished — withdrawn. The keepers did not come; the whales altered course around the water like pedestrians crossing to the far pavement; the hum died out of the groundswell for miles. The true version, sung correctly in the same waters by the same men, brought everything back within hours. The correlation, she wrote, is total, immediate, and does not care whether the error was innocent. The deep hears intention, but first it hears pitch. Halloway's cipher traffic that same night delivered the other half of the world's bad news, and she read it to Tanabe in the chart house with the door shut, which was unlike her, and told the story in the level voice of a hydrographer reporting soundings. "The northern acoustic program is dark," she said. "Has been since roughly the week the calving hit the papers. Their research center answered no circuits for eleven days, then resumed traffic yesterday with a cover story about reorganization that my opposite numbers in two other navies describe as frightened. And here is why they are frightened." She set a transcript on the table — an inquiry document, marked exchanged-in-confidence, its classification strips torn by someone in a hurry. "Nine months ago they lost a tender in the southern ocean. A storm, sudden, the kind that takes one ship out of a formation. She went down with her whole company — thirty-one men. She was handling an experimental vehicle at the time. An autonomous acoustic survey craft, very large, very expensive, carrying an experimental projector array for seabed tomography — the science of singing calibrated tones into the floor of the ocean and listening to what comes back. Her designation transliterates, roughly, as Rusalka. In the inquiry summary someone has annotated, in pencil, that the vehicle was not recovered, was not destroyed, was not accounted for, and was last heard — this is their phrase — continuing the trial series." "Unmanned," Tanabe said. "Unmanned," Halloway agreed. "A machine built to make the loudest disciplined sound mankind has ever put in the water, orphaned in the deep nine months ago, programmed to continue operations, and currently — if my ears and your sonar agree — practicing a song it was never taught, somewhere ahead of this ship, getting it righter every day." She closed the transcript. "There is one more item, Captain, and I will thank you to hear it sitting down, because I did not. Among the salvaged buoy data from the night Zarya went down, the inquiry logged a final transmission from her. Not a distress call. Not an order. The storm had already taken her aerials by then; it went out on a loop antenna at the last of her power, and it was a voice — a scientist's voice, a woman's, the program's senior acoustician, Dr. Vera Lasek — and she was not talking to her crew and she was not talking to her admiralty. She was humming to the automaton, Captain. Calming it through the storm channel the way you would speak to anything frightened in the dark. It is the last thing the machine ever heard from its makers. A lullaby." Tanabe sat with that for the length of two bells. Through the hull, steady as a heartbeat, the true song leaned into its unfinished measure, and far ahead, patient on the road north, something practiced. "Signal Admiral Hollis," she said at last. "Request everything his intelligence people have on the northern program, the vessel Zarya, and Dr. Lasek, and request it tonight. Then lay a course for the intercept." She stood, and paused at the door of the chart house, looking north past the harbor lights to where the dark water began. "Thirty-one men and a lullaby. Our pupil is not studying the song, Lieutenant Commander. Our pupil is doing what any child does with its parents' voices." She went up the ladder toward the cold clean wind, and her last words came back down the hatch quieter than the sea. "It is keeping them."