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done with you will be up to the courts, but they'll hear no cries of
mitigating circumstances from me." Hwoshien turned to one of the nearby
peaceforcers. "Put him on the other catcherfoil, together with any manifests
or chip re-
cords you can find."
"What happens to my ship?"
"Nothing yet, though if you have so low an opinion of it, I wonder that you
care. It will be sailed back to
Mou'anui by your crew, under peaceforcer supervi-
sion. The courts will decide what to do with it as well as with its crew."
Hazaribagh and the tall man guard-
ing him started for the side.
"Just a minute." The downcast ship manager and his watchful attendant halted.
"If you could give us
some insight, if you have any idea what is causing the baleens to act in this
inexplicably belligerent fashion, that might be a contribution in your favor
the courts would recognize."
Hazaribagh's humorless laughter echoed across the deck. "If I knew that and
admitted it, that would make me at least partly guilty of what you've first
accused me of, wouldn't it? A neat trick." He coughed, said harshly, "I've not
the slightest idea. My fishing experts have no idea. Mass insanity that comes
and goes, manifests itself as rage against humanity?
Who knows? Perhaps they are at last sick of man-
kind's presence in their ocean."
Cora felt disappointed. She hadn't expected any revelations from Hazaribagh,
but she had bad hopes.
The ship manager was led down a boarding ladder to the suprafoil below.
Hwoshien rejoined the others.
"Something else doesn't make sense," Cora told him.
206 CACHALOT
"I seek clarification, not additional confusion," he muttered.
"In the attack we witnessed," she pressed on, "we saw two kinds of
baleens blues and humpbacks.
Latehoht and Wenkoseemansa were chased by rights and worried about the
presence of fins. Now, these are all plankton-eaters, but as far as I've read,
they never school together. Joint schooling of, for example, , humpbacks and
seis is unknown. I realize that studies of Cachalot cetacean society are
limited, but in all the preparation I did before we came here I didn't come
across a single example of joint schooling."
"That's right," Dawn said excitedly. "Not only are they functioning as a
group, the attacks involve mixed species."
"We've tried for weeks to find a purely scientific explanation," Merced said.
They all turned to look at him. "Maybe we're going about this the wrong way."
"How do you mean?" Rachael asked respectfully, cuddling her neurophon. She had
already been badger-
ing the crew of the peaceforcer suprafoil for replace-
ment modules for the instrument.
Merced appeared embarrassed, as he always did when everyone else's attention
was focused on him.
"We've been trying to find a biological explanation for the attacks. Now we
intend to concentrate on the
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cetaceans. If we throw out the insanity explanation and assume there is some
kind of intelligence at work behind all this, how would we go about
determining the ultimate cause?"
"I'm not sure I follow you," Cora said.
"That's because you're still thinking in terms of cetaceans. We all are. Let's
use the more obvious analogies rather than the less so. If a group of humans
attacked a town but insisted they didn't know what they were doing, how would
we begin to go about find-
ing out the cause?"
"Capture one of them and question him or her."
CACHALOT 207
Mataroreva looked at the little scientist approvingly.
Merced nodded.
"That's impossible," Cora said immediately. "You can't restrain a blue whale
without using something more than words. Even the use of a temporarily de-
bilitating narcotic drug could be interpreted by the
Cetacea as the use of violence. That would shatter the human-cetacean peace
you're always telling us about.
Anything milder than that, like a large net enclosure, would probably be torn
apart."
"There must be some way," Dawn murmured.
Mataroreva looked at them thoughtfully. "There may be. You can't compel
seventy tons or more of whale, but you may be able to convince it."
He went to the railing, slipping his translator unit back over his head. Loud
squealing sounds rose from the water below, and Cora hurried, along with her
companions, to adjust her own unit as they walked to the side of the factory
ship.
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