CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Found World

The whale ship opened its mouth, and Nate and the crew spilled out onto the shore like sentient drool, which was some coincidence, since that's exactly what lay beneath the hard shell of the landing. They were met by a group of whaley boys, one of whom handed Nate a pair of Nikes, then went off to trade clicks and squeals and greeting rubs with the returning crew. It was so bright after nearly ten days in the whale ship that Nate couldn't immediately tell what was happening. The rest of the human crew were wearing sunglasses as they sat down on the ground to put on their shoes, only a few feet from the ship's mouth. From the rigid feel of the ground, Nate thought they might be on a dock of some kind, but then Cal Burdick took off his own sunglasses and handed them to Nate.

"Go ahead. I've been looking at all of this for a lot of years, but I think you'll find it interesting."

With the dark glasses, Nate was able to see. His eyes were fine, but his mind was having a hard time processing what they were telling him. It was as light as daylight (on an overcast day, at least), but they were not outdoors. They were inside a grotto so immense that Nate could not even make out the edges of it. A dozen stadiums could have fit inside the space and still left room for a state fair, a casino, and the Vatican if you snipped off a basilica or two. The entire ceiling was a source of light, cold light, it appeared - some sections yellow, some blue - great blotches of light in irregular shapes, as if Jackson Pollock had painted a solar storm across the ceiling. Half of the grotto was water, flat and reflective as a mirror, the smoothness broken by small whaley boys porpoising here and there in groups of five and six, their blowholes sending up synchronized blasts of steam every few yards. Whaley kids, he thought. Fifty or so whale ships of different species pulled up to the shore, their crews coming and going. Huge segmented pipes that looked like giant earthworms were attached to each of the ships, one on each side of the head, and ran off to connections on shore. The ground - the ground was red, and as hard as linoleum, polished, yet not quite shiny. It ran out for hundreds of yards, perhaps over a mile, and appeared to continue halfway up the walls of the immense grotto. Nate could see openings in the walls, oval passages or doorways or tunnels or something. From the size of the people and whaley boys passing in and out, he could tell that some of the openings were perhaps thirty feet around, while others seemed only the size of normal doors. There were windows next to some of the smaller ones - or what he guessed were windows - their shapes all curves and slopes. There wasn't a right angle in the grotto. Hundreds of people moved about amid as many whaley boys, maintaining the ships, moving supplies and equipment on what seemed very normal hand trucks and carts.

"Where in the hell are we?" Nate said, nearly wrenching his neck trying to look at all of it at once. "I mean, what in the hell is this?"

"Pretty amazing," Cal said. "I like to watch people when they see Gooville for the first time."

Nate ran his hand over the ground, or floor, or whatever this surface was they were sitting on. "What is this stuff?" It appeared smooth, but it had texture, pores, a hidden roughness, like stoneware or -

"It's living carapace. Like a lobster shell. This whole place is living, Nate. Everything - the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the passageway in from the sea, our homes - it's all one huge organism. We call it the Goo."

"The Goo. Then this is Gooville?"

"Yes," Cal said, with a big smile that revealed perfect teeth.

"And that would make you?"

"That's right. The Goos. There's a wonderful Seussian logic to it, don't you think?"

"I can't think, Cal. You know how all your life you hear people talk about things that are mind-boggling? It's just a meaningless clich?? - a hyperbole - like saying that you're wasted or that something is bloodcurdling?"

"Yep."

"Well, I'm boggled. I'm totally boggled."

"You thought the ships were impressive, huh?"

"Yeah, but this? One living organism shaped itself into this complex... what? System? I'm boggled."

"Imagine how the bacteria who live in your intestinal tract feel about you."

"Well, right now I think they're pissed off at me."

A group of whaley boys was gathering about ten yards away from them, pointing at Nate and snickering.

"They're coming down to check out the newcomer. Don't be surprised if you get rubbed up against in the streets. They're just saying hi."

"Streets?"

"We call them streets. They're sort of streets."

Now, out of the dim yellow light of the whale ships, Nate realized that there was a wide variety in the whaley boys' coloring. Some were actually mottled blue, like the skin of a blue whale, while others were black like a pilot whale, or light gray like a minke whale. Some even had the black-on-white coloring of killers and Pacific white-sided dolphins, while a few here and there were stark white like a beluga. The body shapes of all were very similar, differing only in size, with the killer whaley boys, who were taller by a foot and heavier by perhaps a hundred pounds, having jaws twice the width of the others'. He also noticed in the brighter light that he was the only human who had a tan. The people, even Cal and the crew, looked healthy; it just appeared that none of them had ever seen the sun. Like the British.

Nuñez came over and helped Cal, and then Nate, to his feet.

"How're the shoes?" she asked Nate.

"They're strange after not wearing any for so long."

"You'll be wobbly for a few hours, too. You'll feel the motion when you stand still for a day or so. No different from having been at sea in normal ship. I'll take you to your new quarters, show you around a little, get you settled in. The Colonel will probably send for you before too long. People will help you out, humans and whaley boys. They'll all know you're new."

"How many, Cielle?"

"Humans? Almost five thousand live here. Whaley boys, maybe half that many."

"Where is here? Where are we?"

"I told him about Gooville," said Cal.

Nuñez looked up at Nate and then pulled her sunglasses down on her nose so he could see her eyes. "Don't freak out on me, huh?"

Nate shook his head. What did she think, that whatever she was going to tell him was going to be weirder, grander, or scarier than what he'd seen already?

"The roof above this ceiling - which is thick rock, although we're not exactly sure how thick - anyway, it's around six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. We're about two hundred miles off the coast of Chile, under the continental shelf. In fact, we came in through a cliff in the continental rise, a cliff face.

"We're six hundred feet underwater right now. The pressure?"

"We came in through a very long tunnel, a series of pressure locks that pass the ships along until we're at surface pressure. I would have shown you as we came through, but I didn't want to wake you."

"Yeah, thanks for that."

"Let's get you to your new house. We've got a long walk ahead of us." She headed away from the water, motioning for him to follow.

Nate nearly stumbled trying to look back at the whale ships lining the harbor. Tim caught him by the arm. "It's a lot to take in. People really have freaked out. You just have to accept that the Goo won't let anything bad happen to you. The rest is simply a series of surprises. Like life."

Nate looked into the younger man's dark eyes to see if there was any irony showing there, but he was as open and sincere as a bowl of milk. "The Goo will take care of me?"

"That's right," said Tim, helping him along toward the grotto wall, toward the actual village of Gooville, with its organically shaped doorways and windows, its knobs and nodules, its lobster-shell pathways, its whaley-boy pods working together or playing in the water, where was housed an entire village of what Nate assumed were all happy human wackjobs.

After two days of looking for meaning in hash marks on waveforms and ones and ohs on legal pads that were hastily typed into the machine, Kona found a surfer/hacker on the North Shore named Lolo who agreed to write it all into a Linux routine in exchange for Kona's old long board and a half ounce of the dankest nugs[1].

"Won't he just take cash?" asked Clay.

"He's an artist," explained Kona. "Everyone has cash."

"I don't know what I'm going to put that under for the accountant."

"Nugs, dank?"

Clay looked forlornly at the legal-pad pages piling up on the desk next to where Margaret Painborne was typing. He handed a roll of bills over to Kona. "Go. Buy nugs. Bring him back. Bring back my change."

"I'm throwing in my board for the cause," said Kona. "I could use some time in the mystic myself."

"Do you want me to tell Auntie Clair that you tried to extort me?" Clay had taken to using Clair as a sort of sword of Damocles/assistant principal/evil dominatrix threat over Kona, and it seemed to work swimmingly.

"Must blaze, brah. Cool runnings."

Suddenly something sparked in Clay's head, a d??j?? vu trigger snapping electric with connections. "Wait, Kona."

The surfer paused in the doorway, turned.

"The first day you came here, the day that Nate sent you to the lab to get the film - did you actually do it?"

Kona shook his head, "Nah, boss, the Snowy Biscuit see me going. She say keep the money and she go to the lab. When I come back with my ganja, she give me the pictures to give to Nate."

"I was sort of afraid of that," Clay said. "Go, blaze, be gone. Get what we need."

So three days later they all stood watching as Lolo hit the return key and the subsonic waveform from a blue-whale call began scrolling across the bottom of the screen, while above it letters were transcribed from the data. Lolo was a year older than Kona, a Japanese-American burned nut brown by the sun with ducky-yellow minidreads and a tapestry of Maori tattoos across his back and shoulders.

Lolo spun in the chair to face them. "I mixed down a fifty-minute trance track with sixty percussion loops that was way harder than this." Lolo's prior forays into sound processing had been as a computer DJ at a dance club in Honolulu.

"It's not saying anything," said Libby Quinn. "It's just random, Clay."

"Well, that's the way it's gone so far, right?"

"But there's been nothing since that first day."

"We knew that might happen, that there couldn't be messages on all of them. We just have to find the right ones."

Libby's eyes were pleading. "Clay, it's a short season. We have to get out in the field. Now that you have this program, you don't need the manpower. Margaret and I will bring back more tapes - we have them coming in from people we trust - but we can't afford to blow off the season."

"And we need to go public with the torpedo range," Margaret added, less sympathetic than Libby had been.

Clay nodded and looked at his bare feet against the hardwood floor. He took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he smiled. "You're right. But don't just blow a whistle and hope someone will notice. Cliff Hyland told me that the diving data was the only thing they were worried about. You're going to need proof that humpbacks dive close to the bottom of the channel, or the navy will claim that you're just being whale buggers and there's no danger to the animals. Even with the range."

"You're okay if we go public, then?" asked Libby.

"People are going to know about the torpedo range soon enough. I don't think that's dangerous for you. Just don't say anything about the rest of this, okay?"

The two women looked at each other, then nodded. "We have to go," Libby said. "We'll call you, Clay. We're not running out on you."

"I know," Clay said.

After they left, Clay turned to the two surfers. Thirty years working with the best scientists and divers in the world, and this was what it came down to: two stoner kids. "If you guys need to go do things, I understand."

"Outta here," said Lolo, on his feet and bounding toward the door.

Clay looked at the screen where Lolo had been sitting. Scrolling across it: WILL ARRIVE GV APPRX 1300 MONDAY__HAVE__SIZE 11 SNEAKERS WAITING FOR QUINN__END MSS__AAAA__BAXYXABUDAB.

"Get him back," Clay said to Kona. "We need to know which tape this was."

"Libby gave them all to him."

"I know that. I need to know where she got it. Where and when it was recorded. Call Libby's cell phone. See if you can get hold of her." Clay was trying to make the screen print before the message scrolled away. "How the hell does this thing work?"

"How you know I'm not leaving?"

"You woke up this morning, Kona. Did you have a reason to get out of bed other than waves or pot?"

"Yah, mon, need to find Nate."

"How'd that feel?"

"I'm calling Libby, boss."

"Loyalty is important, son. I'll go catch Lolo. Confirm which tape it was."

"Shut up, boss. I'm trying to dial."

Behind them the cryptic message scrolled out of the printer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Single-Celled Animal

Stockholm syndrome or not, Nate was starting to get tired of the whole hippie-commune, everything-is-wonderful-and-the-Goo-will-provide attitude. Nuñez had come by for three days running to take him out on the town, and every person he met was just a little too damn satisfied with the whole idea that they were living inside a giant organism six hundred feet under the ocean. Like this was a normal thing. Like he just wasn't getting with the program because he continued to ask questions. At least the whaley boys would blow wet raspberries at him and snicker as he walked by. At least they had some sense of the absurdity of all this, despite the fact that they shouldn't even have existed in the first place, which did seem to be a large point of denial on their part.

They'd installed him in what he guessed was a premier apartment, or what you'd call an apartment, on the second floor, looking out over the grotto. The windows were oval, and the glass in them, although perfectly clear, was flexible. It was like looking out on the world through a condom, and that was just the beginning of the things that creeped him out about this place. He had a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, and a shower - all of which had big honking sphincters in the bottom of them - and the seal on the door around his refrigerator, if that's what you called it, appeared to be made out of slugs, or at least something that left an iridescent slime on you if you brushed up against it. There was also a toothed garbage disposal in the kitchen, which he wouldn't even go near. The worst of it was that the apartment didn't make any attempt to conceal that it was alive. His first day there, when the human crew from the whale ship had come by for a drink - a housewarming - there had been a scaly knob on the wall by the front door that when pushed would cause the door to open. After the crew left and Nate returned from his shower, the doorknob had healed over. There was a scar there in the shell, but that was all. Nate was locked in.

There was a tom-tom thrumming of stones hitting his front picture window. Nate went to the window, looked out on the vast grotto and harbor, then down on the source of his torment. A pod of whaley-boy kids was winging stones at his window. Thump, thump-a, thump. The stones bounced off, leaving no mark. When Nate appeared at the window, the thumping became more furious, as the whaley kids picked up the pace and aimed right at him, as if a well-placed shot might drop him in a dunking tank.

"There's a reason cetaceans don't have hands in the real world!" Nate screamed at them. "You are that reason! You little freaks!"

Thump, thump-a, thump, thump, clack. Occasionally a missed throw hit the shell-like frame of the window, sounding like a marble hitting tile.

I sound like Old Man Spangler yelling at my brother and me for raiding his apple trees, Nate thought. When did I turn into that guy? I don't want to be that guy.

There was a soft knock on the shell of his front door. As he turned, the door flipped open like shutters, two pieces of shell retracting on muscles hidden in the wall. Nate felt like a surprised box turtle. Cielle Nuñez stood in the doorway with canvas shopping bags folded under her arm. She was a pleasant woman, attractive, competent, and non-threatening; Nate was sure that's why she'd been chosen to be his guide.

"You ready to do some shopping, Nate? I called to tell you I was coming, but you didn't answer."

The apartment had a speaking apparatus, a sort of ornate tube thing that whistled and buzzed green metallic beetle wings when there was a call. Nate was afraid of it.

"Cielle, can we drop any pretense that we are just buddies out for the day? You lock me in here when you leave."

"For your own safety."

"Somehow that always seems to be the argument the jailer uses."

"You want to go get some food and clothes or not?" Nate shrugged and followed her out the door. They walked along the perimeter of the grotto, which seemed a cross between an old English village and an Art Nouveau hobbit housing project: irregularly shaped doors and windows looking into shops that displayed baked goods and other prepared foods. Evidently the Goo wasn't big on having fire around for home cooking. All the cooked foods were prepared somewhere else in the complex. There was a warming cabinet in Nate's apartment that looked like a breadbox made out of a giant armadillo shell. It worked great. You rolled the top open, put the food in, then promptly lost your appetite.

"Let's get you something to wear today," Cielle said. "Those khakis are on loan. Only the whale-ship crews are supposed to wear them."

As they walked, a half dozen whaley kids followed them, chirping and giggling all the way.

"So I'd get in trouble if I started kicking whaley kids down the street?"

"Of course," Cielle laughed. "We have laws here, just like anywhere else."

"Evidently not ones that forbid kidnapping and unjustified imprisonment."

Nuñez stopped and grabbed his arm. "Look, what are you complaining about? This is a good place to be. You're not being mistreated. Everyone's been kind to you. What's the problem?"

"What's the problem? The problem is that all you people were yanked out of your lives, taken away from your families and friends, taken from everything that you knew, and you all act like it doesn't bother you in the least. Well, it bothers me, Cielle. It fucking bothers me a lot. And I don't understand this whole colony, or city, or whatever this thing is. How does it even exist without anyone knowing about it? In all these years, why has no one gotten out and spoiled the secret of this place?"

"I told you, we were all going to drown - »

"Bullshit. I don't buy that for a second. That gratitude toward your rescuer only lasts for a short while. I've seen it. It doesn't take over your life. Everyone I've met is blissed out. You people worship the Goo, don't you?"

"Nate, you don't want to be locked in, you won't be locked in. You can have the run of Gooville - go anywhere you want. There's hundreds of miles of passages. Some of them even I haven't seen. Go. Leave the grotto and go down any one of those passages. But you know what? You'll be back looking for your apartment tonight. You are not a prisoner, you're just living in a different place and a different way."

"You didn't answer my question."

"The Goo is the source, Nate. You'll see. The Colonel - ;

"Fuck the Colonel. The Colonel is a fucking myth."

"Should we get some coffee? You seem grumpy."

"Damn it, Cielle, my caffeine headache is not relevant." Actually it was, sort of. He hadn't had any coffee today. "Besides, how do I know it's coffee we're drinking? It's probably some mutant sea otter/coffee bean hybrid beverage."

"Is that what you want?"

"No, that's not what I want. What I want is a doorknob. And not an organic nodule thing - I want a dead doorknob. One that always has been dead, too. Not something that you used to be friends with."

Cielle Nuñez had backed away from him several feet, and the whaley kids who'd been following them had quieted down and gone into a defensive pod formation, the big kids on the outside. People who were out walking, and who normally made a point of nodding and smiling as they passed, took a wide detour around Nate. There was an inordinate amount of whistling among the milling whaley boys.

"That going to do it for you?" Nu;ez asked. "A doorknob. I get you a doorknob, you're a happy man?"

Why should he be embarrassed? Because he'd scared the kids? Because he'd made his captors uncomfortable? Nevertheless, he was embarrassed.

"I could use some earplugs, too, if you have them. For sleeping." For ten hours out of twenty-four, the grotto went dark. Cielle explained that this was for the comfort of the humans, to help them keep some semblance of their normal circadian rhythms. People needed day and night - without the change many people couldn't sleep. The problem was, the whaley boys didn't sleep. They rested, but they didn't sleep. So when the grotto went dark, they went on about their business. In the dark, however, they were all constantly emitting sonar clicks. At night the grotto sounded like it was being marched upon by an army of tap dancers. Consequently, so did Nate's apartment.

Nu;ez nodded. "We can probably do that. You want to go get a steaming hot cup of sea otter now?"

"What?"

"I'm just kidding. Lighten up, Nate."

"I want to go home." He'd said it before he even realized it.

"That's not going to happen. But I'll send word. I think it's time you met with the Colonel."

They spent the day going to shops. Nate found some cotton slacks that fitted him, some socks and underwear, and a pile of T-shirts from one tiny shop. There was no currency exchanged. Nuñez would just nod to the shopkeeper, and Nate would take what he needed. There was little variety in any of the shops, and most of what they carried was goods from the real world: clothes, fabric, books, razor blades, shoes, and small electronics. But a few shops carried items that appeared to have been grown or made right there in Gooville: toothbrushes, soaps, lotions. All the packaging seemed to come out of the seventeenth century - the shopkeepers wrapped parcels in a ubiquitous oilcloth that Nate thought smelled vaguely of seaweed and indeed had the same olive color as giant kelp. Patrons brought their own jars to carry oils, pickles, and other soft goods. Nate had seen everything from a modern mayonnaise jar to hand-thrown crockery that had to have been made a hundred years ago.

"How long, Cielle?" he asked as he watched a shopkeeper count sugared dates into a hand-blown glass jar and seal it with wax. "How long have people been down here?"

She followed his gaze to the jar. "We get a lot of the surface goods from shipwrecks, so don't be impressed if you see antiques; the sea is a good preserver. We may have salvaged it only a week ago. A friend of mine keeps potatoes in a Grecian wine amphora that's two thousand years old."

"Yeah, and I'm using the Holy Grail to catch my spare change. How long?"

"You are so hostile today. I don't know how long, Nate. A long time."

He had dozens, hundreds more questions, like where the hell did they get potatoes when they didn't have sunlight to grow anything? They weren't bringing potatoes up from a shipwreck. But Cielle was letting him get only so far before claiming ignorance.

They had lunch at a four-stool lunch counter where the proprietor was a striking Irishwoman with stunning green eyes and a massive spill of red hair and who, like everyone, it seemed, knew Cielle and knew who Nate was.

"Got you a Walkman then, Dr. Quinn? Whaley boys will drive you to drink with that sonar at night."

"We're going to get him some earplugs today, Brennan," Cielle said.

"Music, that's the way to wash the whaley-boy whistles," the woman said. Then she was off to her kitchen. The walls of the cafe were decorated with a collection of antique beer trays, glued in place, as Nate had learned, with an adhesive that was similar to what barnacles secreted to fasten themselves to ships. Nailing things up was frowned upon, as the walls would bleed for a while if injured.

Nate took a bite of his sandwich, meatballs and mozzarella on good crusty French bread.

"How?" he asked Cielle, blowing crumbs on the counter. "How does any of this stuff get made if there's no flame?"

Cielle shrugged. "No idea. A bakery, I'd guess. They make all the prepared food outside the grotto. I've never been there."

"You don't know how? How can that be?"

Cielle Nuñez put down her own sandwich and leaned on one elbow, smiling at Nate. She had remarkably kind eyes, and Nate had to remind himself that she had been ordered to be his friend. Interesting, he thought, that they'd choose a woman. Was she bait?

"You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Nate?"

"Of course, everybody does."

"And that guy goes back to Camelot from the late nineteenth century and dazzles everyone with his scientific knowledge, mainly because he can make gunpowder, right?"

"Yes, so?"

"You're a scientist, so you might do better than most, but take your average citizen, a guy who works at a discount store, say. Drop him in the twelfth century, you know what he'll achieve?"

"Make your point?"

"Death by bacterial infection, more than likely. And the last words on his lips will probably be, 'There's such a thing as an antibiotic, really. My point is, I don't know how this stuff is made because I haven't needed to know. Nobody knows how to make the things they use. I suppose I could find out and get back to you, but I promise you I'm not holding out on you just to be mysterious. We do a lot of salvage on the whale ships, and we have a trade network into the real world that gets us a lot of our goods. When a freighter leaves pallets of goods for the people on remote islands in the Pacific, all they know is that they've been paid and they've delivered to shore. They don't stay to see who takes the goods away. The old-timers say that it used to be that the Goo provided everything. Nothing came in from the outside that wasn't on their backs when they got here."

Nate took a bite of his sandwich and nodded as if considering what she'd just said. Since he'd arrived in Gooville, he had spent every waking moment thinking about two things: one, how this whole place could possibly function; and two, how to get out of it. The Goo had to get energy from somewhere. The energy to light the huge grotto alone would require tens of millions of calories. If it got energy from outside, maybe you could use that same pathway to get out.

"So do you guys feed it? The Goo?"

"No."

"Well, then-"

"Don't know, Nate. I just don't know. How does dry-cleaning work?"

"Well, I assume that they use solvents, that, uh - Look, biologists don't have a lot of stuff that needs to be dry-cleaned. I'm sure it's not that complicated a process."

"Yeah, well, right back at you on all of your questions about the Goo."

Cielle stood and gathered up her parcels. "Let's go, Nate. I'm taking you back to your apartment. Then I'm going right to the whaley-boy den and find out if they can get the Colonel to see you. Today."

Nate still had a couple bites of his sandwich left. "Hey, I've still got a couple of bites of my sandwich left," he said.

"Really? Well, did you ask yourself where in Gooville we got meatballs? What sort of meat might be in them?"

Nate dropped his sandwich.

"Bit of the whining wussy boy, aren't we?" said Brennan as she came out of the kitchen to take away their plates.

Nate was reading a cheesy lawyer novel that he'd found in the small library in his apartment when the whaley boys came for him. There were three of them, two large males with killer-whale coloring and a smaller female blue. Only when the blue squeaked "Hi Nate" in a mashed-elf voice did he recognize it as Emily 7.

"Wow, hi, Emily. Is just Emily okay, or should I always say the Seven?" Nate always felt awkward with someone afterward, even if there wasn't anything for the ward to be after.

She crossed her arms over her chest and bugged out her left eye at him.

"Okay," Nate said, moving on, "I guess we'll be going, then. Did you see my new doorknob? Brand-new. Stainless steel. I realize it doesn't go with everything else, but, you know, it feels a little like freedom." Right, Nate. It's a doorknob, he thought.

They led him around the perimeter of the grotto, beyond the village, and into one of the huge passageways that led away from the grotto.

They walked for half an hour, tracing a labyrinth of passageways that got narrower and narrower the farther off they went, the bright red lobster-shell surface fading into something that looked like mother-of-pearl the deeper in they went. It glowed faintly, just enough so they could see where they were going.

Finally the passageway started to broaden again and open into a large room that looked like some sort of oval amphitheater, all of it pearlescent and providing its own light. Benches lined the walls around the room, all in view of a wide ramp that led to a round portal the size of a garage door, closed now with an iris of black shell.

"Ooooh, the great and powerful Oz will see you now," Nate said.

The whaley boys, who normally found practically anything funny, just looked away. One of the black-and-whites started whistling a soft tune from his blowhole. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" or a Streisand tune - something creepy, Nate thought.

Emily 7 backhanded the whistler in the chest, and he stopped abruptly. Then she put her hand on Nate's shoulder and gestured for him to go up the steps to the round portal.

"Okay, I guess this is it." Nate started backing up the ramp as the whaley boys started backing away from him. "You guys better not leave me, because I'll never find my way back."

Emily 7 grinned, that lovely hack-a-salmon-in-half smile of hers, and waved him on.

"Thanks, Em. You look good, you know. Did I mention? Shiny." He hoped shiny was good.

The iris opened behind him, and the whaley boys fell to their knees and touched their lower jaws to the floor. Nate turned to see that the pearlescent ramp led into a vibrant red chamber that was pulsing with light and glistening with moisture as the walls appeared to breathe. Now, this looked like a living thing - the inside of a living thing. Really much more what he'd expected to see when the whale had eaten him. He made his way forward. A few steps in, the ramp melded into the reddish flesh, which Nate could now see was shot through with blood vessels and what might be nerves. He couldn't get the size of the space he was in. It just seemed to expand to receive him and contract behind him, as if a bubble were moving along with him inside it. When the iris disappeared into the pink Goo, Nate felt a wave of panic go through him. He took a deep breath - damp, fecund air - and strangely enough he remembered what Poynter and Poe had told him back on the humpback ship: It's easier if you just accept that you're already dead. He took another deep breath and ventured forward a few more feet, then stopped.

"I feel like a friggin' sperm in here!" he yelled. What the hell, he was dead anyway. "I'm supposed to have a meeting with the Colonel."

On cue, the Goo began to open in front of him, like the view of a flower opening from the inside. A brighter light illuminated the newly opened chamber, now just large enough to house Nate, another person, and about ten feet of conversational distance. Reclining in a great pink mass of goo, dressed in tropical safari wear and a San Francisco Giants baseball hat, was the Colonel.

"Nathan Quinn, good to see you. It's been a long time," he said.