For marine biologist Soledad, it starts with the mass stranding and ghastly death of a thousand sperm whales. Working for the Cetacean Translation InstituteâCETIâto understand whale communication, she uncovers increasingly bizarre and disturbing behavior among the deep-sea leviathans to which she has dedicated her life.
For astronomer and former astronaut Jack Dash, it began with an accident on a spacewalk thirty years ago and is rekindled by a disappearing star. Working for the search for extraterrestrial intelligenceâSETIâhe probes the increasingly dark and obscure corners of deep space and time trying to fill in the blank spaces on the map.
Their obsessive investigations entwine them in a mystery spanning the remotest places on Earth, the farthest ocean depths, and the emptiest regions of the night sky. What they discover shatters their understanding of the universe and our place in it. For both of them, it ends with missions requiring their unique expertise to safeguard the future of Earthâs conscious life in a cosmos more terrifying than ever imagined.
For marine biologist Soledad, it starts with the mass stranding and ghastly death of a thousand sperm whales. Working for the Cetacean Translation InstituteâCETIâto understand whale communication, she uncovers increasingly bizarre and disturbing behavior among the deep-sea leviathans to which she has dedicated her life.
For astronomer and former astronaut Jack Dash, it began with an accident on a spacewalk thirty years ago and is rekindled by a disappearing star. Working for the search for extraterrestrial intelligenceâSETIâhe probes the increasingly dark and obscure corners of deep space and time trying to fill in the blank spaces on the map.
Their obsessive investigations entwine them in a mystery spanning the remotest places on Earth, the farthest ocean depths, and the emptiest regions of the night sky. What they discover shatters their understanding of the universe and our place in it. For both of them, it ends with missions requiring their unique expertise to safeguard the future of Earthâs conscious life in a cosmos more terrifying than ever imagined.
When most people said they loved the ocean, they meant they loved looking at its surface from the land, during the day, in good weather. Perhaps they loved the sound, or the smell. They didnât love the darkness of being hundreds or thousands of kilometers from any light source other than the moon, stars, and bioluminescence. They didnât love the frigid, murky depths and the impossible creatures that dwelled there.
And they definitely didnât love the storms.
Soledad loved the sea unconditionally. She was grateful for this feeling because conditions were dreadful as the Wayward Wallaby creaked and crested yet another wave on the twenty-kilometer trip to Rottnest Island from Perth, Western Australia, already the most isolated city in the world. But a five-hour flight and gale-force winds hadnât caused her the slightest hesitation.
An event this momentous, this bizarreâthis terribleâwarranted her immediate presence and took precedence over all else.
At least sheâd happened to already be in Sydney visiting an old âfriend.â If sheâd been at the home base of the Cetacean Translation InstituteâCETIâon the opposite side of the world in the Caribbean, then the data from this hopefully once-in-many-lifetimes tragedy could have been lost forever.
The Wadjemup Lighthouse was just visible through the rain-splattered window, shining through the darkness to warn ships of the extensive reef system around the twenty-square-kilometer island. Soledad had learned everything she could about Rottnest on the flight. A ship graveyard even existed off its southwestern shore with over fifty sunken vessels.
Now the island would be a different kind of graveyard.
âBloody nice night for a sail,â said the captain to no one in particular, white-knuckling the wheel. Sheâd forgotten his name. Wesley? With his distinctive Australian accent, neon green tank top, flannel shirt, no shoes, and open beer despite the weather, he qualified as what locals from older generations might pejoratively call a âbogan.â But no matter the late hour and storm, heâd agreed to transport her and the dozen other volunteers whoâd heard what was transpiring, gathered at the docks, andâfutilelyâwanted to help. The ferries that serviced Rottnest from the mainland didnât run this time of night and were canceled until further notice, and the air taxis wouldnât fly in the storm. CETI was a decently funded nonprofit, but Soledad had financed this trip herself because others were dubious of its usefulness. She wasnât about to charter a private plane or helicopter.
And Captain Wesley was attractive in a roguish kind of way. Around her age too. Soledad hadnât planned to be divorced by thirty-two, but here she was, following in her motherâs footsteps. She may have loved the ocean unconditionally, but true unconditional love between people was rare, perhaps impossible. A chemical reaction to induce gene propagation could only go so far. Her ex-husband Rodrigo had had a condition that she be home at least half the time instead of in distant, hard-to-reach places. Sheâd had a condition that he not fuck other people. Agree to disagree. Perhaps Captain Wesley wouldâ
âBrace!â he yelled. The side of Soledadâs head smashed into the window as the boat thudded into something massive at the waveâs trough. She bounced off the wall and fell hard onto her back, landing awkwardly on the bulky gear in her backpack. She groaned, took off the backpack, rolled over, got to her knees.
Everyone in the cabin except Wesley, with his iron grip on the wheel, had been thrown from their feet. He offered her a hand. She initially refused, first checking that her recording equipment wasnât visibly damaged. It was waterproof and rugged, not invincible. God forbid this trip was for nothing and the opportunity a waste. She accepted his hand and climbed to her feet.
âWhat was that?â she asked. Sheâd been looking at the captain with her eyes off the sea and her hand off the railing. Never turn your back on the ocean, Soledad.
âReckon it was a whale,â he said, scanning the dark, turbulent waters around the boat, âwhich makes sense. Hope the Wallaby will be right. Sounded like it could have cracked the hull. Wouldnât wanna have to jump ship in these waters. Probably heaps of sharks awaiting the greatest feast of their lives.â
Ship strikes were increasingly a risk for both whales and boaters. But even for Soledad it was difficult to be too concerned about the fate of a single cetacean at a time like this.
She helped everyone else back to their feet. There were no serious injuries, but all were rattled, even tenser than theyâd already been from riding the rough seas in a ten-meter boat well past its prime.
âCould the storm have thrown them off course?â asked Wesley. âRare to get one this big this time of year.â A fair, but fairly dumb question. Waves and wind werenât exactly new.
âNot this kind of storm,â she said, âbut solar storms are one theory for the cause of mass strandings. Sperm whale noses are the largest biological sonar systems in the world, and the disruptions to Earthâs magnetic field can throw off their navigation.â
âYou a marine biologist or something?â he asked.
âYes, exactly.â He looked impressed. âBut there hasnât been any unusual solar activity in the past few days.â
âSo we donât know for sure why these things happen?â
âThere are lots of theories, but no. Thatâs actually why Iâm here.â
âMaybe they had a rager and a few too many schooners,â he said with a grin, clearly trying to lighten the mood. You had to love the Australian spirit. âOr barrels.â
The island grew closer as they carefully motored westward. More lights became visible on the land and water. One approached them. Guided in by what must have been Australiaâs coast guard, Wesley dropped Soledad and the mostly seasick others at the main dock in Thomson Bay, apparently the only one of the islandâs many bays not rendered inaccessible.
âIâm going to see if I can help tow,â said Wesley. âAnd rememberâthe sun will still rise tomorrow.â
âGood luck, and be careful,â said Soledad. âThanks for the ride, Captain Wesley.â
âItâs Warren,â he said, then smiled and saluted. Fuck.
Soledad hurried down the dock ahead of the others. People in uniforms tried coordinating the newly arrived volunteers from the Wayward Wallaby and a few other brave vessels. Chaos reigned. Presumably a protocol didnât exist for this specific situation, at least not on this scale. Mass whale strandings were rare enough that few true experts on how to deal with them existed.
It sounded like the authorities wanted to concentrate resources in one of the bays on the islandâs southern side where they believed there was a better chance of helping some of the creatures survive.
But Soledad wasnât here to save these whales. The rain would delay death by dehydration, but theyâd suffocate under their own immense weight before that happened. And that same mass made it nearly impossible to pull one safely back to deeper water, where it was likely to just beach itself again.
Soledad was here to understand why, and to prevent such a thing from happening again.
She slipped away and headed north along the waterfront, away from the crowds and commotion. The path ascended to Bathurst Point and another, smaller lighthouse. Dread grew at the sight that awaited her. She now had a vantage point over the surrounding area. Lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the night. Soledad gasped, but not because of the simultaneous boom.
The beaches and shallows were filled with the black bulks of dying sperm whales. The estimate was more than a thousand, by far the largest mass stranding of these whales in recorded history.
She was no stranger to dead whales and had encountered stranded cetaceans before, but the knowledge that the same tragic scene was playing out on every beach and in every bay around the island was difficult to process. For an endangered species with only an estimated several hundred thousand members left, this was equivalent to losing something like thirty million people. The nuclear annihilation of one of the worldâs largest cities. And Soledad felt a deeper connection to and responsibility for these animals than she did for members of her own species.
But she had important work to do.
Soledad descended slick wooden stairs over the shrub-covered dunes to Pinky Beach, if she remembered correctly. She didnât know where its name came from, but come morning it would be fitting for a gruesome reason.
Her foot slipped on the last stair. Once again she landed awkwardly, but thankfully this time it was on her ankle instead of the equipment, and the wet sand was a little more forgiving than the floor of the Wayward Wallaby. Sheâd always felt more comfortable in water than on land, but this was getting ridiculous.
She climbed to her feet and surveyed the beach. It wasnât huge, perhaps two-hundred-fifty meters long and twenty-five wide at the present low tide. About two dozen whales were stranded on the sand, with more in the shallows. They were mostly full-grown bulls, which was atypicalâadult males spent most of their lives alone, so mass strandings often comprised females and young that lived together in pods. The few calves present must have followed the adults ashore; the cries of distressed whales could serve as siren songs for such social and altruistic animals, luring others to share their fate.
A handful of people milled about, probably some of the islandâs few hundred permanent inhabitants, their intrigue at such strange visitors overcoming the elementsâ discomfort. One of themâa man so massive he seemed part whale himselfâlooked to be performing some kind of ritual. Unsurprising given that sperm whales, and whales in general, had been and were still sacred to so many cultures.
Soledad hobbled to one of the whales farthest up the beachâa twenty-meter-long, fifty-thousand-kilo behemoth, writhing in the sand. It could have been twice her age or olderâthe upper bound was unknownâand was taller than her one-hundred-seventy-five-centimeter frame even with all its weight crushing it against the ground, the ocean no longer below to prevent it from being sucked towards the Earthâs core. Now that she was among the giants, a distinct sound was audible over the wind, rain, and waves: clicks. Sperm whale speech. It was higher-pitched, sharper, and more spaced out in air than water, but still unmistakable, at least to an expert like her.
This Morse-code-like creaking was used for communication and echolocationâfor hunting prey in the dark. Underwater it was the loudest sound ever recorded in nature. Louder than a rocket launch, it could blow out your eardrums if you werenât careful, as Soledad had almost learned the hard way early in her career. Sperm whale speech lacked the haunting beauty of the humpback whale songs that had captivated the world and kicked off the conservation movement, but it was more precise, easier to decode and analyze.
And thatâs exactly what Soledad and CETI had spent the past decade doing.
But although sperm whales inhabited all the worldâs oceans, and plenty of mass strandings had been documented over the centuries, these events were rare enough that researchers lacked the precisely recorded and annotated mountains of data needed by the algorithms to understand what was said at such moments. More importantly, sperm whale communication was optimized for use underwater, so very little was usually said by stranded whales. But the local authorities had reported hearing the strange sound all around the island. Perhaps it could offer clues on how to prevent such calamities. Sure, she could have asked those local authorities to do the recording, but doing the important things herself had served her well in her career. Thus Soledad took the recording equipment from her backpack, tested once more that it workedâthank godâand assembled it on the beach.
Several enormous lightning bolts in the distance brightened the night enough to distinguish the storm clouds from the storm-tossed sea for an instant, before they blended back together into an undifferentiated darkness. The thunder rolled through her a few seconds later. Nature was so beautiful, and so terrible.
She sat down on the wet sand, swept her long, black, soaking hair from her face, and stared into the leviathanâs apple-sized eye. It stared back. Sheâd spent countless hours in the presence of these magnificent creatures, but something was different this time. She could viscerally feel the animalâs pain and confusion, almost like it was projected into her. Someone once told her that human-level intelligence is a curse because weâre the only animals that know weâre going to die and understand the full implications. What anthropocentric nonsense.
Soledad wept, and the downpour made it look like the whale did too.
Where the Light Does Not Reach by Tom B. Night is easily one of the most intelligent and intense undertakings in a book that I have read in a long time. It's an incredibly intelligent work, speculative, and a wonderful read that I cannot recommend highly enough. It's easily one of my favorites I've read in the past few years.
The book follows two people in vastly different fields, if not what often feels like different worlds: Soledad, a smart and sought-after marine biologist, and Jack Dash, a former astronaut, now astronomer who's particularly interested in the study of voids, or "nothing" as he likes to call it. But the moon does impact the oceans' tides, so these worlds cannot be so far apart, right?
Their worlds come crashing together in the space of one night in southern Australia when a series of devastating and unusual, almost unexplainable occurrences happen. Soledad finds herself on the shore of "Pinky Beach" in Australia, overlooking approximately one thousand sperm whales who have unexplainably beached themselves on the shore. Night unflinchingly addresses the darker aspects of an animal becoming beached, especially an animal of this size and at this magnitude, and Soledad does all she can to uncover any answers she can about why they beached themselves and what they're communicating to each other through their clicks as they die one by one on the shore. In the meantime, Jack Dash is literally out walking in the field, enjoying the fresh night air, when he witnesses a star blink out of the night sky. Working for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), he begins to explore possible explanations for the disappearance, from visual disturbances to extraterrestrial behavior to other problems in the night sky that we might not yet be privy to.
After the ghastly deaths of the whales and a series of frustrating interviews about the missing star, an exhausted Soledad and Jack meet for the first time in an Australian bar, both trying to unwind from unnecessarily long and grueling days. Their connection and intellectual communication is immediate, and their fascination in each other's work and their current troubles is fascinating as an intellectual and comforting as a human being. Though it seems at first like they might only come together in this meeting for one night, as these unusual events continue to developâand even more questions ariseâtheir worlds come crashing back together, both questioning how each other's studies could answer each other's predicaments. While the moon impacts the tides, could the disappearing star have something to do with the late whales? More importantly, how did the star blink out on the inside of five minutes, a statistical anomaly (if not impossibility), and if someone/something was involved... what exactly was being achieved?
Truly, Where the Light Does Not Reach was such an interesting read, challenging the reader to open up their mind to the possibilities, and with its many references to current events and trendy topics (like AI and aliens in the ocean), it made it feel like this was all occurring right under our noses, or that it could come not too far in the future. Walking in immediate-future settings, and walking the line between fiction and non, this was world-bending at its finest!