Watermind (31 page)

Roman shoved Max toward the bridge. “Tell Meir to get us moving.” Then he rounded on Peter. “Recharge the gun.”

Max sprinted to the bridge, tying his
paryaka
over his nose and mouth. He found Meir slumped on the deck. Quickly, he revved up the engines and plowed away. At the stern, Peter and Roman were starting to gag, but Li Qin Yue still clung to the rail like a zombie, transfixed by the mesmerizing patterns and by anaphylactic shock.

“She's going down!” Peter yelled, as the helicopter hit the water.

 

Thursday, March 17

9:33
PM

 

CJ swerved around the oncoming Coast Guard tender
Pilgrim.
Its siren blared like a banshee as it streaked toward the sinking copter, but CJ raced in the opposite direction. She had no time to watch the rescue. She crossed the bay, steered into the main river, then cut off her engine and drifted with the current. She was following the spectral bloom of the colloid's energy field. She had watched it flow over NovaDam's leaking bag, then dwindle and nearly fade as it merged with the mainstem river.

She didn't know why Roman's yacht remained anchored instead of chasing the colloid downstream. She couldn't guess that Yue had inhaled a chemical nerve agent. She had no idea that the crews on both the
Chausseur
and the
Refuerzo
were vomiting and coughing. Her own eyes watered from staring at the field finder so long.

Around her, signals washed along the river, AM, FM, UHF, radar, sonar, and microwave. GPS buoys bounced coordinates. TV stations bounced commentary. Cell towers bounced urgent messages. And the moon bounced silver light. Overlapping waves of ethereal communication bathed the Mississippi and sliced through the water without causing a splash. Deep under the surface, the colloid ghost passed through them.

CJ watched the EM field slide down the riverbed like a long translucent comet. Around its massive head, a corona of diffuse suspended particles streamed off in spiraling fractals, only to be recaptured by its long thready tail. Unnoticed by anyone, CJ rode the troughs and crests of the thundering river. She zoomed past the industrial warrens of Beaulieu, the university campus, the low-roofed communities of Antonio and Cinclare.

As the lights of Baton Rouge disappeared behind her,
dark southern clouds closed overhead, and her boat spun among colossal barges and freighters. Their roving spotlights flashed across her bow, and their ragged wakes tossed her like flotsam. She sat low in the cockpit to shelter from the wind and spray—and to keep the boat stable—while the Lubell speakers trailed behind like fishing lures.

“I won't hurt you. Please talk to me.” She cooed to the liquid conglomerate as if to a frightened child. “You'll like this music. I promise.” And she played the second in Max's progression of disks. As the sound waves mixed and waffled through the booming current, she opened her cell phone and called Max.

“Ceegie. Praise the Lord.”

“You sound hoarse. Have you caught a cold?” she asked.

“Never mind that. Are you safe? You didn't breathe those
mechan
fumes?”

“Why aren't you guys following the colloid?”

They spoke at cross purposes, and it took a minute before they began to understand each other. Max told her the
Chausseur
's decks were awash in vomit, piss, and diarrhea, caused by the wicked
mechan
fumes. Max had suffered the least exposure, but his throat still stung, and his heart hammered. The helicopter pilot was dead.

“God,” she whispered. “Are you okay, Max? Did you see a doctor?”

“Yeah,
lam.
Don' worry.”

The phone felt sweaty in her hand. This was a bad development. Damn Roman Sacony with his seaplanes and water dams. This was his fault.

“They'll want vengeance. They'll kill the colloid for sure.”

“Kill or be kill,” Max answered.

CJ couldn't answer that. Another death. From the symptoms Max described, she guessed the colloid had synthesized a nerve gas, but how did it understand the human nervous system? Then she remembered the icy fingers probing her flesh.

Her boat drifted toward a buoy, so she powered up the engine to veer around it. She didn't want to think about the helicopter pilot's death. Her prodigy had killed again. In the riverine heat, she shivered.

“Max, you've got to make them understand. We can't judge the colloid by human standards. He won't know we're intelligent beings until we find a way to communicate.”

“
Lamie,
why you care so much about this devil water?”

Max had asked that question before, and she had tried to answer. But her reasons still felt as mixed and legion as the brown river. “He's alive,” she said. “I want to find the reason behind the miracle.”

“Science,” Max said glumly.

His word choice surprised her. She pleated the hem of her cotton shirt between her fingers. “What draws you to music?” she asked. “It's not for money. Why do you write songs?”

Max took a while to reply. “Music is how I breathe.”

“Ah.” She laughed.

“But music don' spray
mechan
fumes.”

“No,” she said, “but music may save us. I'm playing your beginner lesson now. I hope he's listening.”

 

Thursday, March 17

10:10
PM

 

Peter Vaarveen worked steadily in his field lab in the
Chausseur
's galley. He was studying a drop of algae proplastid. When his microscope blurred out of focus, he took off his glasses and rubbed his rheumy eyes. An hour ago, Li Qin Yue had been rushed to the hospital in a state of near death, and since that time, Peter himself had been shivering and hawking phlegm. He wasn't sure if his
muscle tics came from the poisonous gas or from a growing rancor for all things Quimicron.

He focused again on the droplet of sap, then zeroed in one algae cell, and enlarged a snippet of its ribonucleic acid, its RNA. Like a minuscule memory card, this tiny messenger carried a code to build a new protein. Only, its memory had been wiped and rewritten to trigger rampant photosynthesis. Peter watched with fascination as the enslaved algae spun sugar from sunlight at a staggering pace.

Alone with his microscope, the biochemist grew serene. He'd always wondered how the colloid generated the massive energy it needed to change states so fast. A few photovoltaic cells couldn't account for it. Yue found heat stored in Freon microbubbles. And now, he found solar energy stored as sugar. The colloid certainly liked to diversify.

That was the weirdest, the colloid's awesome multiplicity. The damned liquid reached out in totally nondiscriminant ways to acquire, assimilate, and exploit whatever technology it happened to find—be it natural or man-made. “Like a fucking transnational corporation,” Peter snickered.

Still, even the most advanced neural nets required time and experience to grow smarter. And living organisms mutated slowly over long millennia. But this hybrid colloid was evolving at Warp Nine.

“What kind of little buggers are you?” He squinted through the eyepiece at the commandeered algae cells. His face dripped sweat, and behind his thick glasses, his blue eyes glowed.

Far downriver, CJ was also thinking about energy. She had only one extra can of boat fuel left, so she cut the Viper's engines and drifted to conserve her supply. Sprawled across the bench seat, she watched her field finder and cradled the phone to her ear, listening to the nameless washing static of cellular tide.

“What crap is Roman selling the news reporters?” she asked.

Max answered, “Hoo, they dis the dead pilot. Say he err.”

CJ kicked her bare foot against the steering yoke, and the Viper rocked in the current. A spiky dead tree skated toward her, then caught on a sand bar and slashed up and down, battling the force of the water.

Max told her how the Baton Rouge police cordoned off the area where the helicopter went down, and how a salvage ship brought floodlights as bright as day. He also described how they carried the lady Yue away on a stretcher. She looked bad, Max said, and CJ felt a pang.

“This could have gone differently,” she said, “if only Roman hadn't attacked.”

If only.

If only Harry had taken his meds, if only she'd behaved better, if only she hadn't walked out that night in a rage, then Harry might still be alive.

If his gun had jammed.

If the bullet had missed his brain.

On the lonely river, she told Max about the image that stained her dreams, the dark red scatter of droplets on the sea-green wall. Max let her talk without interruption, while his comforting breath rippled through the cellular flux. By the time she'd talked herself empty, the clouds were tearing apart to reveal a waxing moon. She slotted the next CD in the progression, and sound waves refracted through the water, warping into eerie wild cries. A mile downstream, a towboat sounded its horn.

“Yellow moon is the seed moon,” Max said. “Some call it ‘cradle moon.' Folks make love tonight, make a baby.”

“Humph!” CJ touched her abdomen and tried to laugh. She wondered if abortion was still legal in Louisiana.

“You don' want to be
moman
?” Max asked.

The question made her twitch. She'd never seen a picture of the woman her father married. Harry destroyed all
photographs of the first Carolyn Joan. This so-called mother had furnished a womb, merely that, a swampy breeding pond for merging DNA. Shared blood, broken water.

She checked her instruments. The EM field was growing stronger—and larger. Even on her handheld, its changeling shape was easy to see. It glided along the riverbed at the same speed as the current, a comet plume of excited particles.

“Max, I think—”

“Carolyn Reilly, I presume.”

CJ was startled by the strange voice on Max's phone. “Roman?”

“Yes, it's me. I've caught your spy. I'll fire him, Reilly, unless you come back.”

“You can't—”

Roman covered the phone and growled at Max. “Get off this boat. I don't care how.”

Max eyed his cell phone gripped in the CEO's fist.

“Go!” the man bristled.

Max wanted to punch Sacony's teeth in. But the thought of his daughter made him hesitate. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away. One day soon, he might not submit to the Miami man so quietly. Ceegie didn't approve of his meek attitude. Maybe he should have shown his fist. Yet deep down, Max knew he could no more change himself to please Ceegie than he could turn the flow of time.

At the rail, he raised his collar against the wind and studied the gray water, estimating how far he could swim. Where had Rory taken their speedboat? How fast could he get another phone? He watched the Miami man disappear below deck. Then he listened to the first gathering drops of rain.

Down in the galley, Roman made rapid hand signals to Peter Vaarveen. “Trace this call,” he mouthed silently. Then he spoke to CJ. “If you come back now, your
mulato
lover keeps his paycheck.”

“Bastard,” she said.

Roman almost smiled. “I'll put you in charge of the science team.”

At that, Peter gave the CEO a rude middle finger, but Roman didn't see it. Sullenly, Peter pushed his microscope aside, opened his laptop and ran a search for shareware to trace a cell phone call. Lightning flashed, and rancid spray blew through the open porthole. Roman kept CJ talking.

“I'm concerned for your safety. The colloid released poison gas.” Roman paced behind Peter, watching him work.

“Use your goddamned head,” CJ fumed. “You attacked, so he defended himself. That proves he's sentient.”

“You still believe the colloid's alive?” Roman hovered over Peter's shoulder, and Peter rather forcefully elbowed him away.

“A different kind of life, granted.” CJ dug through her backpack for a raincoat. Sharp droplets stung her bare arms. “His cognitive process is distributed across a loose fluid cloud, so he thinks more like a colony or a hive. But he's ingenious. Look how he escaped your trap.”

Peter jerked the phone from Roman's hand and punched a few buttons, then keyed information into his browser. Roman yanked the phone back and said, “Okay, Reilly, you may be right. I'm listening.”

CJ tugged on her crumpled raincoat and tried to connect the zipper while cradling the phone against her ear. “He's not just one thing—that's the incredible part. He's many different processes conglomerated together. Organic, synthetic, he's sampling everything—”

“That doesn't change the fact that your colloid killed two men and tried to kill us all.”

CJ didn't answer. Lightning struck the levee downstream, and a tree exploded in flames.

“You said it yourself, the colloid doesn't know us from rocks.” Roman leaned over Peter's shoulder and pondered the complex phone trace instructions, while CJ pondered the cone of energy on her field finder and said nothing.

“Come to me, Reilly. Yue's in a coma. I want you safe.”

Silver flashes blended with ship lights, and photons bounced off the water as millions of conversations propagated through satellites and cell towers in a continent-wide skein of babbling waves.

“I'll never help you destroy the colloid,” she said.

“Got her.” Peter tapped his screen. “She's at mile 224 on the Mississippi River.”

CJ overheard. “Who was that? You're tracking me? Fuck!” She flung her phone in the river.

Forty feet down, the colloid considered the unexpected gift.

 

Friday, March 18

1:00
AM

 

Living rain moved over the Earth. Searching. Sampling. Gathering intelligence. Silvery bright, it pooled in fields, trickled down to aquifers, and wicked up through plant roots. Its luminous shine quivered in the veins of leaves and pulsed in the treetops. Its fire illuminated CJ's arteries and laced through her heart. It quickened the fetus in her womb.