Extracts: Abridging Moby Dick

“Before there were flukes sounding in the oceans, there were hooves pressing into mud. In the Eocene heat, in the region of the ancient Tethys Sea, small, dog-like creatures moved from scrubland to the watery margins, their ears providentially built for hearing the possibilities that came from under the water -- for food, for safety, and for danger. Then came Ambulocetus, the “walking whale,” in size comparable to a modern human, amphibious in habitat, at home in river basins, swamp, lake, and sea coasts. Then Rodhocetus and Dorudon, with bodies lengthening; hind limbs diminishing; nostrils drifting back on the skull, serving as minimalist mastheads for breadth; their spine learning the grammar of undulation; the pelvis freed from bearing weight; a tail rehearsing the great downward stroke that would one day riot upon the sea.
 
“The Cetaceans answered their call to the oceans, and were mimicked by isolatos who pushed off from the land to do business on great waters. The psalmist saw the mariners and wrote of how they beheld the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. Whales did not go in ships, but they became the ships, wrapped in blubber, rigged with baleen or armed with teeth, driven on by curiosity, as Ishmael and Queequeg were. Ahab-like vengeance seemed not in the whales' vocabulary, but the consequences of kindred passions in duplicated humanity, like greed, brutality, and obsession, led to the whales' speedy extinction as measured in geologic time.  It is a hard thing, even now, to write this plainly, but the great whales are gone. Not simply hunted in a flurry of foam as in old Nantucket days, but by propellers of container ships and cruise liners, by seismic guns of war, by plastics ground small as plankton, and most of all the whales were diminished by warming currents that annihilated the meadows of brit and the pulpy kraken of the deep.

“Yet even a decade after the extinctions, there are those who keep the vigil, guarding nitrogen-cooled vaults and clean rooms, bastions that are not far from the sea, in the country that Melville said was the great original of whaling in the "West" -- the Danes, and their Nordic siblings. Tissue banks, once assembled for population genetics and forensic work, become arks, very unlike the Star Trek Enterprise returned in time for Humpback Whales to save planet Earth, but rather of a quieter, patient, egg-headed variety. From shed skin and archived biopsies, from century-old museum bones and baleen, genomes are assembled like ships in bottles. The plan, spoken in cautious future tense, is to coax edited cells into embryos, and grow them in artificial uterine seas where pressure and salinity can be tuned like instruments. It would not be, or so we conjecture, a resurrection of memory, since we imagine that no calf would inherit the routes once traced from Baja to the Arctic, but it would be a new beginning. If ever again there is breaching on the horizon, and great whales raise their tails in worship of the Sun, they will have risen from a new covenant, made child by child, law by law, until humanity and the sea allows the island bulks of flesh to sail again.”

Scott Carr, from Extracts, “Abridging Moby Dick” (2051)