Watermind (44 page)

When her shoulder bumped something hard, she spun to fend it away. Then a powerful force lifted her out of the water into the bright sharp air. She lay choking and sputtering on the corrugated aluminum deck of the airboat. And there was Max.

“Hold to me,” he said.

In the burning sunlight, she clung to his forearm and fought for breath, and in seconds, she felt happier than she'd ever been in her life.

 

Sunday, March 20

2:09
PM

 

Through the broken dam they plowed, down the bottle-green tongue of standing waves. Up up up the airboat soared, skyward, into the blue. A foamy crest broke across the deck and drenched them in white. Then down they fell into the trough, only to rise again, up up up through another crest.

Finally, they spun out of the wave train into the chuting rapids below. As the flood gushed downslope, glistening green spindrift lashed around road signs and lifted concrete barriers. Gloriously it leaped in fissioning white
froth. Rabbits shivered in treetops. Beavers clutched at driftwood.

Spinning, dipping, rinsing clean, CJ and Max rode in the lap of the Watermind. The colloid grew calmer as it rushed unfettered toward the lake and the sea. Currents washed the airboat far out from shore, and when Max tried the engine, the ignition clicked uselessly.

“The electronics are dead,” CJ told him.

He rifled through the storage bins but found no oars. He massaged his bandaged hand.

“I love you,” she said.

Glucose esters saturated the breeze, and spray flew up in curling wisps. Sugar molecules collected in Max's curly hair like rosary beads. His amber eyes searched her face.

“I mean it,” she said.

She knelt on the deck and smiled at him. Then she beat a tentative 3/4 rhythm with her fist. Max smiled and nodded. He took off a work boot and drummed the corrugated metal with his sole, while his good right hand whispered over the deck, rasping a syncopated backbeat.

She remembered the castanets in her bag and got them out. “Play them,” she said.

He held up his bandaged left hand. “You do it,
lamie.
”

She lay flat on the deck, stuck her arms in the current and clapped the wooden shells underwater, while Max scat-sang an accompaniment in his powerful baritone.

Abruptly, the air turned chill, and their boat came to a thudding halt. Quickly, Max pulled her back from the water. She didn't understand until she heard the ringing crack. The water around them was icing.

With a reverberant snap, ice solidified across the marsh, coating stems and grasses, hardening over every surface in a frosty sheathe of white. Birds took to the air. Insects froze in place. Except for one helicopter circling overhead, a cottony silence fell. Then a low tone boomed through the ice. With rising hope, she recognized the rhythm.

Max cocked his ear. “It's a waltz.”

They listened. It was not a simple waltz. Stresses shifted unexpectedly and landed on offbeats. The rhythm grew richer, more nuanced. Again and again, the tempo leaped out of time, then beautifully recovered. It was like Max's syncopation, with a different accent.

“He heard us,” she said.

Max grinned. “Oh yeah. He jammin'.”

Soon, the booming music whispered to nothing, and opaque white silence stilled the air, as if the waltz had been a sublime dream. Miles away on the lake, boat sirens cried.

“Why did he stop?” she said.

Max's golden eyes flashed. “He giving us our turn.”

Of course. The Watermind wanted a reply. She could sense the bated expectation. But she had no idea how to answer.

“Like this,” Max said.

With his good hand, he clutched her fingers and rubbed them over the corrugated deck. Their joined fingers moved quickly under Max's motive guidance, wet skin against dry metal, a friction of edges. Their floating
frottior
rasped a subtle refrain, piquant in the bridge.

Unnoticed around them, a layer of ice sublimated in a fine sparkling mist. When CJ saw it, her breath caught. The cloud of infinitesimal ice crystals sifted together in loose molecular motion, catching the sunlight in brilliant tiny winks. Like faceted diamonds. Like microchips. She rolled on her back to watch the fog rise against the bright cloudless sky.

“Bèl.”
Max waved his hand, and fractal patterns spiraled through his fingers.

Then, to her exquisite joy, the fog refracted a fan of color. The apparition of light and water shimmered across the marsh. Six clear prismatic bands. The rainbow doubled, then tripled. Its fleeting hues dyed the air.

“He heard,” she whispered again.

“
Oui
. He make a painting.”

“A painting of water.” She grinned at Max's notion.

The ice fog massed thicker. Downy white, scintillating with flashes, it hovered over the frozen marsh and filtered the sunlight. Caught between solid ice and icy mist, CJ felt transported to winterland. Something feathery and wet tickled her eyelash. Then another wet feather kissed her cheek. She held out her hand and caught one.

“Snowflakes.” Max laughed. “First I ever see.”

He lay down beside her as the lacy crystals dallied through the air, gusting in veils too well patterned to be accidental.

“They're moving in alignment with the field,” she said while Max caught snowflakes on his tongue.

Soon the rainbow faded, and the fog dissolved. Its residue precipitated back to the ice and hardened in a smooth glaze. Again, the sky burned blue, and the Louisiana sun singed their unprotected skin. The airboat shifted, then dipped and swung free in the rapidly melting slush. Liquefied, the colloid surged on toward Lake Pontchartrain.

“He heard,” CJ whispered. “He knows we're here.”

Max tightened his grip on her hand. “We gotta ride it out.”

 

Sunday, March 20

2:48
PM

 

“
Madre de Cristo
. Idiot girl.” Roman jolted along the access road, careening around parked cars and skidding through the mire. He'd commandeered Michael Creque's flatbed truck, and its cumbersome four-wheel-drive gearing fought him at every turn. It drove like a tank.

Closer he steered to the rampaging stream. When he caught sight of Reilly in the boat with Max Pottevents, he
let out a groan of relief. Down the slope he churned, through brush and willows. Shallow ditches caught at his wheels, and sumps tried to snare him. When mud splattered his windshield, he switched on the wiper blades. He could just make out CJ's red windbreaker in the distance, the jacket he'd lent her days ago.

A hundred yards from his truck, the colloid rushed downstream, answering the call of gravity. No longer silver, it had reverted to the rusty mossy brownish black of swamp water. But Roman knew the
violador
had not changed. He saw through his adversary's disguise.

CJ Reilly had recognized the truth before him. The colloid could think and plan. How an unholy brew of pollution had spawned a sentient computer network, he still couldn't grasp. Its processes were too manifold and eclectic. Scientists would sift though the data for years. But Roman understood its motives. He knew that if this enemy survived, it would compete for resources and seek dominion over the Earth. There would be no conversation. No music. No rational exchange. There would be only war.

Here in this place, in this North American river, the colloid had defeated him. He had not come to terms with that yet. The word,
failure
, waited like a thorn in his mind. Already his logic was thickening around it, sealing out the pain. There would be time later, to regroup, to raise new funds, to plan an expedition at sea. Roman would not give up.

For now, he focused only on Reilly's red jacket. Foolish
querida
. So intelligent, and yet so reckless. For the first time, he genuinely wanted to comprehend her vagaries. As the truck jolted along, he caught quick glimpses of the Creole boat man. The boyfriend.

The aluminum airboat flashed sunlight as it spun through the unbridled flood. He wrestled the truck's steering wheel to keep her in sight. The truck was laboring over a rooty hummock when sun struck his windshield and blinded him. He opened the door and stood on the runningboard in time to watch the airboat smack a weir pin.

“Reilly!” He slammed his door and mashed the accelerator. Did the boat overturn? He couldn't see. The truck labored through a thicket of broken saplings, and he calculated. A hundred yards to reach the streambank. A fifty-foot rope in the back. The current moving at two thousand cubic feet per second. He pumped the accelerator.

“Swim, you idiot girl.”

Ahead, the ground slanted into a sinkhole, and he had to detour. Trees blocked his view. He swerved to miss a running deer, and he thought of her hair, the silly way it stuck out from her head like chicken feathers. His breath rose and fell in a prayerful chant.

“
Gallinita
, swim.”

 

Sunday, March 20

2:53
PM

 

High in the sky, Hal Butler circled the wreckage. Where the spillway emptied into Lake Pontchartrain, a huge midden of trash and mud had collected—tree limbs, weir pins, Styrofoam coolers. Hal saw dead bodies. “There,” he ordered his chopper pilot down.

When they dropped lower to catch some footage, Hal noticed one of the bodies reaching toward the other. Fascinated, he zoomed his lens for a close-up as the two people slid together and embraced. Survivors. A poignant scene. Hal knew at once it had Pulitzer quality.

Then he recognized CJ Reilly. The chick who refused his interview. He'd been watching her for days through various camera viewfinders. He almost felt he knew her. As she wrapped her legs around the dark man beside her, Hal's finger toyed with the “record” button. But as they kissed and clung to each other, he hesitated.

Somewhere deep in his vestigial heart, Hal Butler recognized a private moment. He surprised himself. He let the shot slip by. With a perplexed frown, he told the pilot there was nothing to see. “We need carnage,” he said. Then they whirred up the spillway, seeking the color red.

Far below, half-buried in mud, CJ lay with Max. Her hands ached from clinging to the airboat fin, and she stared straight up at the moon. In broad hazy daylight, it shimmered like a dime.

“You awright?” he asked.

She wiggled her toes. “Yes. You?”

“I guess.”

She covered her face with her arm. The ordeal had left her numb. Some dim part of her brain urged her to seek another boat and follow the Watermind across the lake, but she couldn't move. The warm silt cradled her, and soupy water lapped at her skin. There was no noise, no birdsong or insect whine, no thundering flood. She and Max lay together in the shallows, half in, half out of the brackish water, holding hands.

Minutes passed. Mindless peace. She drifted. The guttural blare of an engine woke her. Something heavy and loud was breaking through the trees along the streambank. It sounded like a charging elephant. She saw branches splitting and leaves flying apart. Then the metal truck grill emerged. The door opened, and Roman splashed through the water toward her.

“I thought you were gone.” He lifted her and squeezed her to his chest.

“The Watermind painted a rainbow,” she said.

“You're raving mad.” He kissed her hair.

“Put me down.” She twisted and elbowed. “I want to see the lake.”

He dropped her and smiled. “Little brat. You're not hurt.”

Roman noticed the boyfriend squatting in the stream, washing mud off his arms and legs. The bandage around
his left hand was sodden and bloodstained. CJ had bleeding cuts and bruises. They needed medical attention. He glanced at his truck, calculating the distance to a clinic.

When CJ crabwalked over the matted rubbish toward the lake, he and Max followed. A rustling sizzle gusted on the breeze. Roman thought at first it was gnats or mosquitoes, but when they topped the rubbish mound, he knew it was coming from the colloid.

Fanning out from shore, the water crackled with heat, and a million tiny curls of steam fumed over the surface. Weak sparks flickered underwater, and patchy spumes of lather flocculated upward. In a matter of minutes, the lather clumped into glittery solids.

“Something's crystallizing out of the water,” CJ said.

The small flecks glinted like mica, but soon, large glassy plates bobbed up. Square, hexagonal, the plates jostled and clinked like porcelain saucers in a vat.

“What's happening?” CJ pushed her hair back. The steam reeked of burnt sugar. “This isn't good.”

More solid plates rose to the surface. For a thousand yards out from shore, the lake glittered like a broken mirror. She checked for her Ranger Joe, but there was only a lash mark around her wrist where the magnetic field had ripped it away. She had a bad feeling. She jumped off the rubbish heap and bounded into the water.

“Estúpida!”
Roman sprang in after her, but Max reached her first.

“What's happening?” she said again. Knee deep, she scooped up handfuls of the broken plates that were rapidly flocculating out of the water. They fell apart in her hands. The water was growing hotter.

“Owh!
Souplé!
” Max grappled her waist with his good hand.

Roman helped them both back to shore, high-stepping out of the hot water.

Max made her sit in the mud so he could examine her legs. Her pale skin had gone bright red. She rolled up his
jeans. His brown ankles swelled like ripe plums. They both had first-degree burns.

“I'm sorry.” Her hands hovered over his ankles, but she was afraid to touch the angry skin.

Max sighed. “Ceegie, you gotta stop this shit.”

Roman grunted. He sat alone on a log, sullenly examining his own livid shins and counting his grievances against Max Pottevents—until a whiff of burning salt drew his attention. The edge of the lake was boiling. He stood and shouted, “Another heat release! Run for the truck!”