Watermind (23 page)

“Hear that?” Max opened his eyes and smiled. He played another simple riff, then paused and leaned toward the hydrophone, listening.

CJ watched the oscilloscope. Another perfect wave bounced across the screen. Then it broke into a jittery row of sine curves, like a heart monitor tracking cardiac arrest. She sat on the edge of her chair. Max played another few bars, then listened.

That's when she noticed the ion data on one of the other screens. Ordinary molecules were taking extra electrons, then letting them go, popping from neutral to positive, positive to neutral—in
rhythm.
She pounded the keys to create a graphic map—and there it was, a coherent line of sine curves. In the bright false hues of the graphics program, her computer painted standing waves of ionization in 4/4 time.

Rapidly, she checked other sensor feedback—pH, photometrics, turbidity, turbulence—all the columns of data were dancing in rhythm.

“Molecular music.” Her voice came out hushed.

“Oh yeah, he got sync.” Max pressed his ear to the receiver. “He playing back my rhythm, beat for beat.”

She bounced in her chair and squealed, “He's composing music from chemistry!”

“Composing? Naw, girl, he just copy me.” Max's cheeks dimpled. “He play
bèl,
very precise, like an echo.”

“He echoes you? But I thought—” She scrolled through a column of figures. “I thought he was answering.”

Max bit his lip. “Ceegie,
ma chagrenne.
You discover a very excellent music machine made of water and trash. Tha's no small thing.”

“Right.” She tried to laugh, but her face had a grayish cast. She'd been working too long at too intense a level. Max couldn't guess what she hoped for, but he realized a music machine wasn't it. He'd blundered again, nothing new. He felt like a gnat.

“
Djab dile
learning,” he said. “Take time to learn music. You wait. We give him a composition lesson.”

“How?”

Max repositioned the keyboard across his knees. “Start with G major.”

He sounded the chord, first with all the notes together, then each separately in ascending order. After that, he played simple melodies in G, mixing and rearranging the handful of notes in various patterns. CJ checked her disk drive to make sure she was recording what Max played. Her screens showed the skein altering its kinetic energy to imitate the notes.

“We do this till he learn,” Max said.

CJ sat on the rough warm concrete and watched raindrops bouncing on the lagoon cover. Then she got up to check her screens. Impatience drove her back and forth from the workstation to the water, while Mac played the soft plain notes of his music lesson for a beginner.

 

Tuesday, March 15

3:50
PM

 

Across town in his cloistered office, Hal Butler took a swig of Dixie beer. Loose slips of paper, flash drives, magnetic disks, fast-food wrappers, and several well thumbed paperbacks littered his desk, not to mention his size-eleven loafers filled with his sockless sweaty feet. At the center of the chaos lay his tape recorder, chock-full of hearsay, gossip, and distorted speculation about the Watermind.

The news scoop of his life had finally materialized. Riches, glory, long lines of succulent young women, his own personal nirvana lay within reach. This story merged all the best qualities of his favorite films,
Swamp Thing,
the
Creature from the Black Lagoon,
and that stirring 1958 classic,
The Blob,
where an alien dollop of raspberry jam tried to eat a small town. Hal could almost taste his Pulitzer. The Watermind would sail him into the Journalism Hall of Fame. But regrettably, he had no facts.

The Reilly chick was waffling. She wouldn't commit to the interview, and she kept ducking his phone calls. He upended his aluminum can and let the cold beer roll down his throat. Lovingly, with a razor blade, he squared up a line of cocaine on a mirror. Then he snorted the white dust through a straw.

Seconds later, he experienced a sudden blinding epiphany. What this story needed was a picture—something memorable and graphic that would resonate in the reader's mind. On a legal pad, he roughed out a conceptual sketch—a sort of howling liquid genie with fangs—not unlike the machine-generated monster in
The Forbidden Planet,
a motion picture he greatly admired.

Ah yes. The drawing revitalized his energy. He squared up his keyboard, flicked his fingers and punched in the URL for the Holy Trinity discussion forum. In a trice, he transmogrified from dedicated newshound Hal Butler into his secret alter-ego, Jeremiah Destiny, apocalyptic blogger extraordinaire. Soon, he was instant messaging his muse.

Hal aka Jeremiah knew very little about his faithful online pen pal, Soeur Rayette, only that she lived somewhere in Baton Rouge, wrote antebellum prose, and agreed with him on every topic. He envisioned her as a fair Acadian goddess, his own Evangeline, a wise and soulful little hottie. Tonight, as usual, they bared their hearts about the Watermind.

In the past few hours, hundreds of people had responded to Hal's blog about the artificial intelligence coalescing from Mississippi River trash. Though skeptics whined, most respondents believed his blog implicitly. A smart water-based computer made of floating rubbish, why not? Hal/Jeremiah's online readers had their own misty
methods of verifying the truth. For them, a machine-being born from the poisonous effluent of Western civilization seemed not only true but inevitable.

Hal spread his laptop on the floor between his knees, stroked his copper hair and asked Rayette to give him more facts about the Watermind. But Rayette, as usual, demurred.

“Let us turn to the Lord for an answer,” she messaged.

“Yes, dear. Consult your Bible.” Hal snuffled another white line of coke. Rayette had once described to him how she solved life's riddles by opening her King James at random. He found her spirituality charming. He also knew that whatever verse her fancy happened to light on, he would be able to spin it. He picked white crumbs from his nostrils and ate them.

As usual, Rayette forwarded the Lord's answer in red italic:

“And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.”

Hal quickly replied, “Alas, sweet Soeur, as the disciples witnessed this mighty wonder and cried out, so you, too, must cry out and tell the world what you've seen. That is the Lord's commandment to you.” He bold-faced the last sentence.

“Verily, I am sore afraid,” she answered.

Hal cracked his knuckles and keyed, “Yes, miracles are frightening, but how can the Lord be wrong?”

A long interval passed before her next instant message arrived. “Good night, dear friend. I must pray.”

“Shit.” Hal watched her click off. Then he scribbled on the back of an ad circular. “Nothing strikes more fear in the human heart than a miracle. . . . Hmm, good line.”

 

Tuesday, March 15

7:07
PM

 

At the Gulf-Pac dock, Peter Vaarveen grumbled under his breath, “Fuckin' boat anchor.” The portable battery for his multichannel analyzer weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and Peter was not accustomed to heavy labor. But Roman had ordered them to move immediately off the Gulf-Pac dock because a lawsuit was brewing, and Hammer Nesbitt's hospitality had come to an end.

Peter stretched and arched his back. In the sky, he saw a flock of dark birds wheeling like a liquid wave. He watched them turn and plunge, and suddenly, they seemed to change color as their speckled underwings caught the slanting light. Ornithologists once believed that flocks communicated through electromagnetic emanations. But Peter knew their charming aerobatics emerged from the same simple rules which drove his computer boid: Stay close; follow your neighbor; go with the flow.

He scowled at the heavy battery. “Help me with this,” he called to the knotty, walnut-colored man in the gray work shirt.

But Rory Godchaux made no move. Rory had been running crews for too many decades to take orders from a chemist. Besides, Rory was not in good spirits. The blue gates were sealed up tight, but the boys on the
Refuerzo
couldn't get their collar in the right place. The magnetic water kept creeping along the canal bed, slipping away from them.

On top of that, Rory couldn't fill his nightshift. Three of his best workers called in sick, and one quit. Mr. Meir kept approving overtime, but Rory couldn't find anyone to hire. And he was getting damned tired of eating soggy
takeout from the Shrimp Hut. He wanted to go home to his wife's fried catfish and spoonbread. He wanted to sink between her hot creamy thighs and rub his nose in her plump belly. He could almost taste her pickle brine.

He said, “Merton, go give the scholar yo' hand truck.”

While Merton Voinché and Betty DeCuir packed up the science machinery and loaded it onto a waiting Quimicron barge, Rory sat on an iron bollard, cocked up one knee, and worked a toothpick around his left incisor. People were scared, that's why they wouldn't work. Some said a devil was moving in the water.
Loa
spirits.
Djab dile.
He'd heard them talking. He fished a shred of shrimp meat from his teeth and rolled it with his tongue. Yesterday, young Alonzo burned his hands in the water, but Mr. Meir hushed that up. Rory touched the cross he wore under his shirt and whispered to the Virgin. “Mother of God, pray for us sinners. . . .”

A few yards away, Li Qin Yue closed her eyes and listened to the canal. She was lying flat on her back on the Quimicron barge, supervising the transfer of her equipment and letting the deck's residual heat penetrate her bones. Wind ruffled the canal, altering its surface from silk to velvet and rolling the barge in a shallow tide of compression waves.
Plash. Plash. Plash.
The barge rocked with the same rhythm that soothed Cleopatra once on another river, an ocean away in time.

In the distance, the
Refuerzo
repositioned its collar. Its engine whined. Li Qin was very tired. She never slept well, but since coming to Baton Rouge, she'd barely slept at all. Today was her birthday. She was fifty-nine years old, but no one knew that. Fifty-nine years old, and still just a glorified lab tech.

Plash, plash,
the warm deck rocked like a hammock, lulling her, while the last glow of sunset deepened to purple. For just one moment, Yue wanted to forget her age, to forget her fading career, to forget her empty apartment—bereft of even houseplants because she was never home to water them. Roman Sacony paid her two hundred thousand
a year to answer at his beck and call. For a paltry two hundred thousand, she'd bargained away her life, her soul, her chances. She was almost old enough to be his mother. Why did she slave for him year after year, when he never looked at her anymore, not like he once did.

And yet, she had found his heat. The heat that obsessed him. How did the colloid form ice? What was absorbing the heat? Finally she could answer him, in concept at least. The heat was in the bubbles.

Suspended throughout the colloidal mass, she'd found microscopic bubbles of CFCs. Chlorofluorocarbons—notorious destroyers of the planetary ozone layer. Better known by their trade name, Freon. When Freon absorbed heat, it formed gas bubbles. When it released heat, it liquefied. It was the perfect liquid cooling system.

People had been dumping old refrigerators and AC units in the river since the early 1930s, and hundreds of them must have washed up in Devil's Swamp. Now, by random chance or twisted fate, the ubiquitous proplastid goo was saturated with microbubbles of Freon. And the electrostatic currents were cycling heat to and from this Freon foam—apparently,
at will.

At will. Yue pondered those words. She blotted her cheek with her hand. Soon she would call and give Roman the news, and possibly win his fleeting approval. Hot perspiration coated her body like a second skin. The barge deck sweated, and her damp limbs seemed to glide on a film of condensation. So much wetness had pooled under her eyes that she couldn't tell if the stinging came from perspiration or tears.

 

Tuesday, March 15

11:14
PM

 

Unseen in the darkness of Devil's Swamp, a bleak drizzle fell. Each drop carried gases from the upper atmosphere, sulfur dioxide from Texas power plants and ozone from Los Angeles freeways. There were also Honduran fruitfly eggs, orchid pollen from the Congo, and lunar dust. In the surfaces of a thousand green pools, the hot teeming drops gouged craters as round as pennies—evanescent craters of liquid, as ephemeral as notes of music.

CJ and Max were too engaged in their experiment to worry about rain. In their circle of floodlight by the lagoon, they hardly noticed the drizzle that drummed on the tarp sheltering their work area. And though CJ made wisecracks about camping, she bounced and twitched with too much adrenaline to mind the weather. Since Max taught her how to hear the colloid, her weariness had vanished, and her logic had sharpened to lambent intensity.

“Molecular music,” she dubbed the rhythms in the skein's material substance. Standing waves of polarization, pulsing isotopes, shifting temperature inversions, seesawing pH—and always, steady upwelling streams of pure clean water. The more she searched at the molecular level, the more material rhythms she found. All this time, the colloid had been echoing her attempts at communication, but until Max showed her, she didn't know how to listen.

“He'll learn to compose, I know it. Soon, soon, he'll talk to us.” She couldn't keep still. “Oh Max, I love you!”

She was too keyed up to know what she meant by those words. Max smiled and nodded, but her careless affection cut him like a machete. Tonight, they could pretend a little, sheltered under their cozy tarp, but tomorrow, he knew
she would become a famous scientist, and he would go back to the cleanup crew.