Watermind (22 page)

“This juice is a bad boy,” Peter said with admiration.

The lagoon sample held a warehouse of other particles even more exotic than those Yue found earlier: Jerky little motorized ratchets only a few molecules in size. Asynchronous semiconductors designed to speed up local coordination in massive computer circuits. Neuromorphic nanochips copied after the human optic nerve for use in robotic eyes.

CJ laughed and clapped her hands.

“It gets better.” Peter called up a graphic file showing the pair of microchip chains they'd found drifting at the center of the EM field. To the naked eye, the thready conglomerate appeared invisible, or at best a milky blur. He said the structure polarized and refracted light, camouflaging its position. But once Yue lit up the mass with isotope marker dyes, it resembled a loose drifting braid of yarn. CJ gazed at the image with an open mouth. Yue had been the first to call the structure a skein.

Finally, Peter showed CJ their real breakthrough. Nested inside the paired chains, they found a working mote computer.

“Working?” CJ's breath caught.

“Yeah, a live mote. It's emitting radio waves.” Peter spoke as if he could hardly believe it himself. His sunburned skin was peeling, and his hair stood up in greasy
white shocks. He showed her the image on screen, then compared it to a schematic downloaded from a Canadian manufacturer's Web site. The image showed a layered cube, smaller than a pinhead, laced with complex circuitry and packing its own miniscule solar battery. “It's got waterproof sensors, a processor. It's designed to take weather readings and send bursts of radio code.”

The discovery went to CJ's head like a drug. When Yue acknowledged that some of the microchips were actively echoing the mote's signals, CJ felt like crowing.

She rushed to the lagoon rim, pealed back the plastic cover and stuck her arm in elbow deep. The water wasn't frigid, it felt warm and tingly.
You're real.
She felt ready to burst with gladness. She bounced up and spun Peter Vaarveen in a circle. Yue sneered, but Peter didn't seem to mind.

Yue insisted the microchip skein was an accidental arrangement with no permanent form, like a splash or a rainbow. She even played a time-exposure sequence showing how it repeatedly dissolved and reformed, always in a slightly different shape.

“So what? We're all accidents.” CJ felt too elated to get mad. “You could say the whole universe is a fricking accident.”

“Oh brother.” Peter tried to get the women on another subject. He told them the particles were circulating in synchronized patterns, and he downloaded a flocking “boid” simulation to show what he meant. On his screen, a cluster of computer-generated green spheres wheeled and shifted like schooling fish. CJ found the graphic eerie and hypnotic, but Yue called it a kid's video game.

Yue stood clutching her elbows with her long spiny fingers. “I have business at the canal. Someone let our captive out of its collar yesterday, and I have to catch it again. So unless you have more brilliant theories, Ms. Reilly, let's get this farce over with.”

Hormonal heat flushed CJ's cheeks and robbed her of the sharp comeback she longed to hurl. She couldn't have
guessed that the older woman's emotions were as muddled as her own. At that moment, Yue wanted to drown CJ in the river. Yue had seen her leaving Roman's hotel room.

For a moment, Yue stared at her rival. Then she marched away to the end of the dock, refastening her braid. Roman had slept with this trashy little tart? Insufferable. But Yue had been through this before, and she knew Roman's affairs didn't last. Inwardly, she scolded herself for letting feelings interfere with her work. But she had sacrificed so much. Her bones ached. Her skin felt too tight.

She clawed through her pocket for the red-and-black capsule, then swallowed it without water. There was much to do. Creque was repositioning the collar this morning, trying to enclose the colloid again. She needed to be there, but Roman insisted that she help this stupid girl. She rubbed her hands to hide the trembling. Then, with a bitter cough, she returned and set to work.

Peter lowered the speakers into the water. “Shall we begin our little broadcast?”

For the next hour, Yue, Peter, and CJ bounced rhythmic tones through the lagoon. They tried binary code, prime numbers, logarithms. Sometimes, the water rippled and hazed, but Yue demonstrated beyond a doubt that these so-called “responses” were merely currents of heat convection.

In fact, the air grew sweltering, soon topping 90°F, and the water under the blue plastic simmered like a Jacuzzi. When Yue called a halt, CJ was too absorbed to stop. From the steps, Yue cast one last resentful glance at CJ's narrow shoulders hunched over the equipment. Then she ordered Peter to drive her to the canal.

 

Tuesday, March 15

2:00
PM

 

CJ slumped against the rail, baking her butt on the hot concrete by the lagoon, unwilling to give up. Sound waves propagated through the water, and sensors processed the feedback. In slow currents of heat, the skein revolved languidly, like a liquid crystal kaleidoscope. It accumulated new bits of toxic scum from the lagoon walls, but nothing else happened. No flashing lights. No pulsing magnetism. Gradually CJ began to consider that she might be wrong.

Then two events coincided. Her cell phone chimed, and Max appeared with a cardboard box. He was dressed in his usual sleeveless T-shirt, blue jeans, and leather work boots. He kicked sheepishly at the catwalk and murmured, “Thought you might want something to eat.”

Simultaneously, Roman's voice rustled in her ear. “Good afternoon, little hen.” Her face reddened. She switched Roman off without answering.

Quickly, she rifled through a crate of lab equipment to hide the fact that she couldn't meet Max's eyes. “You're not working with Rory today?”

“Got the afternoon off,” he said simply, not mentioning the long overtime hours he'd been racking up.

When she felt a little calmer, she faced him. He didn't seem angry. His placid smile made her want to tear her hair out.

From the cardboard box, he handed her a plastic container and a spoon. Inside, she found a scoop of cold homemade blackberry bread pudding. His Aunt Roberta had picked and frozen the berries last summer, and this morning he'd blended a quart of them with bread crumbs, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, butter, and eggs, then spiked the mix with his secret ingredient, Cointreau.
He'd made this pudding for her once before, that time he took her fishing in the pirogue.

“Max—”

He touched her lips and looked away. Why wouldn't he let her talk? She seized the spoon and stuffed her mouth full. The silence lengthened and grew awkward. When she forced herself to swallow, the half-chewed berries hurt her throat going down.

“It was a mistake,” she stammered. “I shouldn't have gone with him.”

Max shifted to face the lagoon through the hot metal bars of the rail. He wore a clean
paryaka
tied around his head, although it was already dotted with sweat. Sunlight gleamed on his swarthy cheeks. He sat with his elbows resting on his knees, peering into the uncovered strip of water.

“
Djab dile
speak yet?”

CJ made a noise, half groan, half sigh. He wasn't going to let her apologize. What a mess she'd made. What a royal mess. She turned and followed his gaze. The blue cover scintillated under the ruthless sun, and the air above it wavered with hot humid mirages, like invisible flames.

She tore off a broken fingernail. “We're not getting any response. I don't know what I expected.”

Max slipped the headset over his ears and listened to the audio signals she was transmitting through the water. She'd transcribed simple mathematical expressions as whole notes, and the synthesized tones chimed in a onetwo rhythm as steady as a metronome. Repetitive, ordered, lucid.

He scratched his ear. “Maybe . . .”

“What?” she said irritably.

“This beat is tiresome, Ceegie.
Bing bing bing.
How he tell us apart from a machine?”

She threw up her hands. “I'm trying to translate human language into signals a primitive mote computer can process. That means starting with basics. Syntax, lexicon, rules about meaning. You think that's easy?”

“Don' sound easy,” he agreed.

She eyed him. “Obviously, you have another idea.”

“Naw, it's nothing. You go on with your bing bing.”

CJ clenched her teeth. “Max, sometimes you drive me batshit. Just say what's on your mind.”

His golden brown eyes reflected the sun. Instead of speaking, he hummed an old ballad. His rich baritone rose through a melancholy crescendo, then slid sideways to a bluesy wistful close. When the song finished, he said, “You
sav
? Machine cain' do that.”

CJ shrugged. “And your point is?”

He grinned and scat-sang a different song, lilting and playful, bouncing upward in G major. After that, he whistled a stalwart march in B flat. When he launched into a stormy overture, she interrupted.

“I get it. Sure. Music is not math. It conveys—what?—a mood? But you're talking about dense acoustic detail. Shifting frequencies and amplitudes, harmony, melody, syncopated rhythm. That's too much complexity for a mote.”

“Ceegie, little children know what a song mean. Even animals know. Music don' require translation.” Max's sonorous baritone crooned again, and this time he sang the zydeco chorus that first made the frozen pond vibrate in sync.

CJ watched the water. She seized his arm. “Could it work?”

His biceps hardened at her touch, and he patted her hand. “Take a look at what ol' Max brought.”

His cardboard box held dozens of CDs, collected over the years from yard sales and bargain stores. Aboriginal dreaming songs from Australia, traditional Hawaiian slide guitar, Andean Mountain flutes, Creole
séga
from the isles of the Indian Ocean. He'd brought Tajik rap, Tibetan throat-singing, and West African kora, along with Debussy's “Reverie,” Duke Ellington's “Prelude to a Kiss,” and of course, plenty of pure classic zydeco.

“Something in here bound to interest
djab dile,
” he said.

She opened random jewel cases to read the liner notes, and in her excitement, she shuffled the silvery disks like a deck of cards. Max's hands closed over hers and stopped her. Reverently, he replaced his CDs in their cases, arranged them in the cardboard box and covered them with his
paryaka
to keep out the sun. His naked black curls glistened with moisture.

“First, something easy.” He pulled out an old Casio portable keyboard, stained with tobacco smoke, wine, coffee, and the fingerprints of many hands. After connecting it to the amplifier that fed the Lubell speakers, he played a soft scale. “Show me how you catch what
djab dile
say back to us.”

CJ worried with the controls of her feedback monitors. “We're tracking changes in the EM field, wavelength, frequency, power level.”

“And sound?” he asked.

“Liquid can't make sound.” She raised her eyebrows, doubting. “I've been here the whole time. I didn't hear anything.”

She listened to the fizzy splash of water against the underside of the plastic cover, the quiet swish of tiny ripples, the susurrus of steam. She flicked her thumbnail against her teeth. Then she exploded into activity, tearing through the crates of equipment, knocking everything into disarray.

“Here it is.” Max pulled an old hydrophone out of his duffel. He'd bought it at a flea market so he and his cousins could listen to beaked whales in the Gulf.

She seized it and rushed to the water's edge, then had to ask him how it worked. Once Max connected it, they listened to the rich sloshing babble in the lagoon. Quickly, she coded one of the computers to display the feedback as a wave form, like an oscilloscope. Then she angled the screen so Max could watch.

But he didn't need it. He sat cross-legged, balancing
the keyboard in his lap, playing soft simple scales in 4/4 meter and listening to the noise from the hydrophone with his eyes closed.

She scraped a folding chair across the concrete, sat in front of the computer and slotted a fresh disk to record Max's improvisation—and, she hoped, the colloid's response. But signals from the lagoon remained mixed. Overlapping waves jittered across the screen from left to right, without pattern or form. The water noise duplicated all the other feedback monitors. It was inconclusive. Another useless test.

Her attention kept wandering to Max's fingers sweeping over the black and white keys. How fluently he played, as easily as other people talked. Fresh guilt assaulted her as she watched him improvise a lyrical riff, a languid trickle of melody, a spill of half notes and a somber swell of bass.

Almost by accident, she noticed the first pattern. Max had stopped playing. He sat rigid with his eyes shut tight, head cocked toward the hydrophone receiver. She was thinking how much better he looked without the bandana, how sweetly his black curls framed his face, when a single coherent wave emerged from the static and bounced across her computer screen.

She saw it from the corner of her eye. Then it vanished, and there was only static. Monitors registered a slight turbulence, maybe a passing breeze. Certain regions along the gooey skein were generating ions, but Yue had already documented that. Molecules were randomly losing and gaining electrons, shifting their electrical charges to and fro and creating tiny pockets of polarization in the water. But that had nothing to do with music. Yue had also noted concentrations of heat and acidity at one end of the skein—a by-product of microbe activity.

CJ kept watching. She tugged at her damp cotton panties that had bunched between her legs. Perspiration streaked her hair. Under her thin T-shirt, salty droplets collected between her breasts and rolled down her belly.
She fantasized an icy bottle of Coca-Cola. She could almost taste its foam.