Free The Infinity Link by Jeffrey A. Carver Page B

the click and rasp of dolphins and other creatures. Earlier, several of the herd had caught the moan of a blue, its lonely song reverberating through the deep layers. Always, too, there was the drone of the manships plodding their courses back and forth across the sea, a minor but continual irritant.
    Songs filled their thoughts. For some, a special restlessness accompanied their return to these waters—a renewed memory of the songs of last year's joining—songs that had come from a place they did not know and touched them in a way they did not understand—songs that had come to enchant them, songs whalelike and yet not-whale, filled with bewildering and intriguing harmonics, evoking images of emptiness and incalculable distances, and a migrational swim lifetimes long.
    A godwhale, some said. Would the godwhale's visions return?
    As the waters grew warm, the herd began to fragment. Some whales cavorted on the surface while others tuned their voices. The new year's songs began reverberating, and a change was at once felt, in new tones and rhythms, some of them not-whale rhythms. The altered strains were in their own voices—not from the outside, but from their own hearts, an echo and a harmony to the songs that had so haunted their sleep last year. Whatever those songs had been, they were now a part of the whales' own language.
    The herd moved southward. There was no hint of the godwhale's song itself, and some wondered if it would ever be heard again, or if it and the mystery of its existence would become merely a part of the lore, embroidered and changed until the original was lost from memory.

Chapter 8
    As Joseph Payne's eyes adjusted to the gloom, a ghostly illumination welled up around him. Misty, blue-green space; the hiss and mutter of the sea. The tropical Pacific: depth, sixty meters. Translucent rays of sunlight slanted down like moonbeams in a forest. Below him, the blue deepened; and far below was the darkness of the abyss.
    The music and the narrative that whispered in his head made him feel a part of the sea, a part of the cascading chain of life that surrounded him here. He turned to and fro, like a shark swaying its head, searching the depths for prey. The music and narration faded, and then all around him was solitude and tranquility, silent and gloomy spaces, the sea's emptiness.
    He became aware of a thin, droning sound at extreme range, the propeller whine of a distant ship enveloping him in the sea's cathedral-like acoustics. Overhead, he caught sight of a moving shadow—a cluster of pelagic fish, darting and swerving. A beam of light stabbed upward, illuminating the iridescent undersides of the fish; then they flashed one way, and another, and were gone.
    Emptiness . . . and then a new sound, a familiar low moan that ended with a sharp rise in pitch. The cry was repeated, followed by a sighing stream of bubbles, and then a mournful keening, ending in a downward wail. Payne recognized the humpback whales' songs; he had heard their recordings many times before, and now, as always, reacted to them with a feeling of wistfulness and longing. Was it a whale's cry for companionship, or something else entirely? He didn't know; but in the whales' songs there was always a feeling of space, and distance, and loneliness.
    He squinted upward toward the sunlight. A whale's shadow moved high overhead, but was growing as it descended, diving lazily toward him. It swelled, blocking the light until it filled the world over his head; and then it banked and wheeled around to peer sideways at him with a single large, unblinking eye. The encounter lasted for a heartbeat, as Payne stared back into the creature's eye, sensing the imponderability of its gaze. Its mouth was turned downward in a sour grin. Did it wonder at this strange creature in its realm? The whale slid by him, its rounded belly and roughened, grey-white flukes so close that Payne instinctively drew back. An enormous tail fluke swung past his face, and