"Boyett-EpiphanyBeach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyett Stephen R)

-- Hmm. The Creature has never made the connection before, but now he wonders if
the badness and weirdness of fish to the north and south has anything to do with
the abundance of humans there.

Well, anyway, here in Laguna Negra there are always interesting things to hunt
up, and humans are, admittedly, endlessly fascinating (from a distance!), and
when he's bored there's the continental shelf that plunges deep and dark away
not a few miles offshore. There's always something new to be seen there, you
betcha.

Besides which, nice stretches of shoreline to relocate to are becoming an
endangered species in themselves. And there's the inconvenience of moving, of
having to get settled in a new place and finding a suitable grotto and making it
up to be his very own. And he'd miss those Jackie Collins novels.

What to do, what to do?

He swims. His world washes across his body.

It's more difficult to plant a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the ocean than it is to
pound a luxury-resort sign in the sand. Because it flows, because it covers
seven-eighths of the planet, and mostly because the humans do not live in it --
yet -- the oceans have not been parceled out and sectioned off and redefined the
way the land has. There's a quaint and arrogant notion among humans that the
oceans belong to everybody (every human, that is). Beyond the Twelve-Mile Limit
begin International Waters, don't you know, so that sharks that swim eleven and
a half miles off the California shore are American sharks, but half a mile later
they are sharks of the world.

International indeed! They are non-national waters; if the entire surface of the
ocean were covered with ships, it would still represent only a ten-thousandth of
the ocean upon which they floated, and the teeming billions upon billions of
fish and plants and crustaceans and mammals beneath wouldn't give a damn. The
skin on a soup is not the soup.

Right now the Creature (currently an American Creature) is not thinking of any
boundaries and identities larger than personal ones. True, he's a visitor here.
But when humans enter the ocean, they're visitors, too. Heck, when you think in
terms of being alive, we're all visitors.

From the near distance the Creature hears a faint burbling followed by an oddly
childlike siren note bending downward. He recognizes it and kicks off from the
muddy sea bottom.

A few minutes later he senses the presence of the caller before he sees it: a
massive, graceful, two-toned, two-tonned, twenty-two-feet-long, large-teethed,
air-breathing mammal. A killer whale.

Even before he sees it floating on the surface at an odd angle and swimming
weakly shoreward, the Creature knows the whale is in distress. There's a certain