Sounding

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All the starless night he cruised joyfully south, butting through rising seas at a steady four knots, his enormous flukes stroking upward in power and sinking in rest.

He had been traveling thus for days, in growing excitement, churning awash for a half-mile to breathe, submerged for the following four.

Tonight he was blatting, from spring-taut internal lips in his headcase, a loud and repeated peal: "Blang . . . blang . . . blang . . . " The sound, like a mallet slamming an empty steel drum, would have deafened a man in the water. The sperm whale was echo-scanning peaks of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge below him, listening for reverberations from the walls of an undersea canyon that scored the ocean bottom and was the ninth mark he must fix in his mind before turning southwest.

He seemed alone but knew that he was not.

Twenty fathoms beneath him, on an erratic course that he knew would end off the shoals of Newfoundland, swarmed a school of cod. He echoed on them curiously at his low-frequency cruising range, swept them finally with a ratchety put-put-put-put— like the sound of an ancient outboard motor—which told him there were hundreds: good-sized, aimless and mindless as krill.

The massive bull was aging, and sometimes dove on cod if they were large enough, for they were never deep and the fat expended was negligible. But he had taken three giant squid, the last one twenty feet across, over the Iceland Basin less than an hour ago, and he had a rendezvous to make. And so he plowed onward.

He belonged to the largest species of all toothed whales, and that species most easily distinguishedby man, who had at first called him the emperor. His head—squared bluntly in profile, steep-browed, cylindrical—extended backward for a third of his length. It held hidden within it the internal lips, which were generating the loudest and farthest-ranging of his sonar peals, and seven tons of acoustically perfect light-yellow oil.

The head-case oil was so slippery that primitive whalers had confused it with semen, called it spermaceti, and renamed his species sperm—"sparm" in the dialect of New Bedford Yankees who had decimated his ancestors. They had hardly noticed that in back of the oil lay the largest brain the planet had ever known.

The aging sperm's head had been slashed and scarred in battle with giant squid and with other sperm as well. His narrow jaw, hinged to drop straight down and swing sidewise as well, was a beaming device for his sonar as well as a weapon, dredge, and clamp for squid. It was only five feet wide at the hinge, tapering forward, closing smoothly along the bottom of his headcase. Fifteen feet long, it was armed with curved and pointed eight-inch teeth, of which only one had been cracked in fifty-nine years. Two had been lost in combat.

His eyes were set above the hinge of the jaw, near small pectoral fins—all that remained of his genus's terrestrial forelegs. With eyes so placed, twenty feet back from the front of his snout, he was blind dead ahead and aft. His vision in each eye was acute and independent, but he was much more a being of sound than sight.

A remora hung writhing from his lip; he had been alone for days, and there had been none of his own kind to remove it. A crust of barnacles rode his back, and whale-lice he seldom noticed. Twothirds of the way to his flukes was a mound that his species believed had once been a dorsal fin.

The sperm was sixty-five feet long and weighed, fresh from arctic feeding grounds, almost seventy tons.

For the moment, he eased the motion of his flukes. He could hear the thump of a vessel's screws twelve miles west and he echoed on it for a moment. It was making twenty-three knots.

Last year he might have veered away cautiously. This year was different, so he maintained his course, taking no action other than to drop his own frequency a dozen octaves to a pulsing, sonorous groan.

Now, with his ears attuned to his own deep notes, he picked up the moans of a finback herd. Listening passively in a sea of sound, he had no way of estimating their course or distance—perhaps fifty miles, perhaps half an ocean away. But he knew that at this time of year they would be heading north.

Cetacean legend told him that in the quiet days before propellers one could hear a finback bellowing from Greenland to Cape Horn. And the fin remained, along with the gloriously singing humpback, the most reliable long-range communicator in the seas.

Playfully, bored in his isolation, the sperm clanged out a mighty chain of bangs, hoping for an answer from the finbacks. This failing, he tried a roar from his nasal chambers, but heard no reply, for his range was no match for that of deep-groaning finbacks or blues or humpbacks, as if the millenniums that had split the sperm from the toothless grazers had penalized toothed whales for their far-reaching, larger brains by limiting their voices. Besides, his own years had worn smooth the septums and tongues of his larynx and phonation cavities—had perhaps enfeebled his lungs—and he knew that his bellow; once good for a dozen miles, was weakening.

He blasted one last time, listened, and gave up.

He began to scan the bottom again. Ahead, he thought he sensed the faintest of echoes from the canyon walls. He sent out a signal, glided for a moment, but heard no return.

The slap of the waves on his steep brow distracted him. A storm was whipping up.

In a few minutes he began to swim again, and soon he passed into a trance, one eye open, the other closed.

He had a brain biologically identical to man's but seven times its weight and volume. His kind had already possessed it for thirty million years when man's microcephalic ancestors tottered from African forests onto the savannas of the veldt.

His brain's nonmotor, thinking cortex had five times the convolutions of man's, and ten times the nerve cells.

Now half of it slept while the other half sounded ridges a mile below.

Copyright © 1982 by Hank Searls