The Farpool (41 page)

“Angie, we really need to talk about
this.”

But such a talk would not come now.
Chase found that no matter what he said or did, Angie wouldn’t
change her mind. He sensed that their relationship had changed, in
some important, even fundamental way. Maybe it was Tulcheah and
Shoneeohnay. Maybe she was jealous…there were times when Angie
could be really bitchy and she even admitted that, in her quieter
moments. Chase figured what she was asking was suicide. That made
him sad, even depressed. Kloosee and Pakma both had implied that
‘going back,’ going back through the
em’took
would be difficult. Nothing was
impossible but it was risky.

Chase didn’t want to turn around. He
didn’t want to look into Angie’s eyes; he could feel them cutting
into his back like daggers as it was. He was sorry for what had
happened to their relationship…maybe it
had
been his fault. They had even talked of
marriage once… but now—

But Chase wanted to see the shield
installation through and he knew Kloosee needed him. The Metah had
approved them being part of the expedition.

In some way he couldn’t quite
verbalize, Chase felt he belonged here. He belonged on Seome. No,
he wasn’t Seomish. He would never be Seomish. He was from
Earth…
eekoti,
Kloosee called
them. But he wasn’t quite that either.

He and Angie were hybrids now, almost
mutants… caught between worlds. Not Seomish, not human. Something
in between. Angie was having a hard time with that. Chase was more
focused on the task at hand.

“You always live for the moment, don’t you?”
she had once asked of him, one night when they were parking and
necking in the lot behind the Citrus Grove Shopping Center, behind
the Piggly Wiggly. “No thought for the future…for what you might
want to be. What you might want to do ten years from now. Doesn’t
that bother you at all, Chase?”

“No,” he had told her. “It doesn’t bother me
‘cause I like to be surprised by each day. Every day, a different
adventure, a different mystery, something new and unexpected.”

“Chase, life isn’t just one adventure after
another…it can’t be. It’s responsibility. It’s growing up. Getting
a job. Raising a family. Going to church.”

But life, on Seome,
was
an adventure. And then, in that moment,
Chase knew for sure that he would not be following Angie back
through the Farpool…at least, not right away.

And that brought something like a tear
to his eye. Even after the
em’took
, tears were still possible.

He was glad Angie couldn’t see them.

Kloosee had piloted the convoy of kip’ts for
two days when the first direct pulses of the wavemaker and Kinlok
Island came back, jumbled, mixed with the current and the scores of
whirlpools that the wavemaker always spawned, but there
nonetheless, higher pitched than the death beat of the Sound
itself, but unmistakable. He planed upward, ascending toward the
first faint tendrils of light of the Notwater and tried to sound
ahead, sounding to discern their position and their rate of
approach.

By the time they had risen some twenty beats,
the shifting bottom currents had given way to a steady, brisk flow
of warmer water from the surface—the first effects of the
wavemaker. Here, the kip’t pilots carrying the shield found that
the shield wanted to sag badly and in order to avoid tearing it,
Kloosee directed that the kip’ts arrange themselves so as to
approach the huge machine edge on. This was harder than he expected
for the strong currents made maneuvering tricky—any movements were
enormously magnified by it—and only the most cautious adjustments
could be made.

After some discussion, they adopted a
strategy that had Kloosee and Habloo carrying the high side of the
shield, with Ocynth and Yaktu at the rear. Kloosee slacked off a
bit and let the center of the shield drop down, to even out the
top, then cut back the kip’t jets to let Habloo do most of the
lifting. The dangerous oscillations began to dampen out once they
had settled into this attitude.

Kipkeeor
was
live between them and Kloosee listened to some of the comments on
the communication channel, translating occasionally for Chase and
Angie.

“I hope this kip’t is well sealed.
Something’s crinkling behind me.” That was Habloo; an accomplished
pilot, he’d never been anywhere near the surface.

Another voice came: “Throttle up a bit,
Habloo. You’re dropping behind.”

“Kloosee, I’ve got it on my sounder,”
Habloo said. There were a few muttered exclamations, then
“
Kah, ket’alpe
. It’s a huge
beast, isn’t it?”

“And all metal,” said Kloosee, recalling his
own pulses.

“It’s deafening,” said Ocynth. “A constant
explosion.”

“Whirlpools around the edges,” Kloosee
explained. He had to find a new comm channel to be heard over the
thumping. “Don’t get too close to those.”

“Imagine what the sound would be like in the
Ponk’el Sea.”

“You’re right about that,” said the Ponkti
pilot Ocynth. “Ponk’el is so cold and dense that it would be
magnified many times. How have you stood it for so long?”

“Ponkti aren’t the only ones with
courage.”

“Look!” cried Habloo. “Look above!”

The waters had lightened considerably, from a
dark brown to a pallid gray-green and the surface was now visible
as a hazy film above them. A large school of wing-walkers skittered
across their view, thousands of silvery darts slicing first one
way, then another. The buffeting of the wavemaker had picked up as
well and the turbulence rocked the fleet of kip’ts as they
approached.

“Incredible,” someone breathed.

“Beautiful,” whispered Chase. “In its own
way. Now I see what you meant, Kloosee. I was too scared to
appreciate this when we ran into that seamother herd. Almost like a
vision. And the light—“

“Is the Farpool nearby?” asked Angie.

“It is. My first impression, too,” Kloosee
replied. Their kip’t shuddered for a moment, as another wave washed
through the formation; he steadied the craft with a careful but
firm hand. “Notice there aren’t any luminescent creatures around.
That was the theory, that the light of day came from swarms of
organisms at the surface and when they slept, night came.”

“Haven’t you heard about suns and stars?”
Chase asked.

“Some still believe the light comes from
creatures in the Notwater,” Kloosee admitted.

The school of wing-walkers shot up out of the
water in unison right in front of them and then re-entered in a
cloud of bubbles. Several times they did this, each time in perfect
formation, and when they splashed back into the water, it was like
a giant hand plunging into the sea.

“Majestic,” came Yaktu’s voice. “I thought I
had pulsed everything.”

They were within fifty beats of the surface
now and moving inexorably toward the wavemaker. The curvature of
its vast surface was becoming apparent from the sounder echoes.
Swift cross-currents brushed them and the shield reacted by
bunching up its slack parts like a pleated hide. Kloosee had them
stop the ascent and start cruising in a wide circle toward the
machine. They pounded through several fronts of waves.

Conversation fell off as the thumping grew
stronger and became a reverberating boom. They entered a realm of
bubbles, of cascading froth and lost sight of each other. Kloosee
had planned an approach from the side of the Shookengkloo Trench,
to avoid being sucked into the whirlpools before they could emplace
the shield. He hoped to come upon the wavemaker from the side,
almost at the surface, before descending again to get into
position. In that way, they would expose themselves to the
hazardous whirlpools…and Uman suppressor fire…for the briefest
period of time.

For the truth was, no one knew how the Umans,
the Tailless People of the Notwater, would react.

Tense moments crawled by, with the
thunder broken only by an occasional burst of static from
kipkeeor.
The sounders had become
unreliable as they neared the surface and leveled out—the water was
too turbulent for consistent pulses. Kloosee waited for what felt
like an eternity, while the noise grew ever more rattling,
strengthening, gaining with each passing second, as if it were a
living thing, a beast clawing, taking over, filling every space of
the world, even taking hold of the mind and the heart and
magnifying each tremble across a thousand beats of sea. He was
waiting for a feeling, a notion that the wavemaker was just ahead,
and when that feeling came, they would drop quickly and dart into
the midst of the whirlpools, ready to throttle the machine for
good.

“There it is!” someone cried.

And, sure enough, through a curtain of white
foam, the bare face of the bowl loomed, its hard gray outlines
softened by wave after wave of bubbles. Beyond and below, the
whirlpools whirled madly, including the Farpool somewhere out
there, black tubes twinkling with faint flashes of red and blue
light. “Gateways to chaos,” Kloosee mumbled to himself. Curious, he
trained a sounder on the region. No echo at all. Somehow, the
whirlpools or whatever they were, absorbed every pulse. Yet they
sparkled like the nightmarish beasts of the deepest sea, hypnotic
and deadly.

Kloosee heard murmurs of awe from Chase
and Angie but tore his attention from the whirlpools long enough to
notice that the platform seemed bigger than on their first visit.
Riding lower in the water, as if it had gained weight. An appalling
thought occurred to him: was it possible the Tailless People had
the power to consume all the water of the ocean? Longsee himself
had long theorized about the machine, though the Tailless insisted
it was a defensive weapon.
No, of course
not
, he told himself. Nothing could consume the ocean.
That was the kind of thought you had after eating too much gisu. It
was absurd. The world was the world.
Shoo’kel
could not be flaunted, not even by the
Tailless. The currents were unchanging.

It was the sound, it had to be. Now it was
affecting his thinking. He had noticed it before, the last time
they had approached the wavemaker. Odd little specks of thought,
transient flashes that made no sense. The whirlpools distorted his
ideas of time and space but he could fight that. Otherwise, the
wavemaker had changed little; there was the same sense of massive
bulk, of brutal forces at work, heedless, devastating and
relentless.

“Let’s go down,” Kloosee told the others.

They eased the shield through a bank of
turbulence, giving it enough slack to keep it from tearing. As they
descended again, Kloosee kept a close watch on the guide cables
connecting him to the shield. He didn’t want the kip’t to become
entangled.

They found a level about thirty beats below
the lowest of the whirlpools, where the kip’ts could hover in
control. The shield was stretched to smooth out any folds. Only by
running the jets at full power and keeping a good angle on their
bow planes could they maintain their position in the powerful
suction field.

Kloosee detached his own craft from the guide
cable and maneuvered around the edges of the shield, checking the
adhesive pads by which he planned to attach the sides to the
wavemaker. If all went well, the force of the suction would help
keep the netting in place and if the pads held, the machine would
be crippled.

Everything seemed in order. Kloosee talked by
hand signal with each pilot, making sure they knew what to do.
Timing was critical; each pilot had to hold his end of the shield
in place long enough for Kloosee to get around and press the pad
down. Any slippage and the whole shield might be lost, dragged into
one of the whirlpools and them with it. Kloosee had refused to
describe the experience to any of them; only Longsee knew the story
and he didn’t fully believe all of it. That was just as well. If
any of them really knew what the whirlpools could do, Longsee might
never have convinced them to risk the attempt.

Kloosee gave the order to rise. He
stationed himself beneath the shield, ready to move when first
contact came. Even through the
tchin’ting
mesh, he could feel the suction
pulling them upward and he knew that each pilot must be running his
jets hard by now, just trying to keep the whole thing stable.
Seeing the shield stretched by the suction for the first time, he
wondered if the mesh would hold. The Ponkti had been adamant about
doing the knitting in secret. He had no way of knowing if their
methods, or even their motives, were sufficient.

The strain of the mission was telling
on him and Kloosee winced as a sharp pain stabbed in his side. A
faint taste of
mah’jeet
water
startled him. There weren’t any of the creatures around that he
could pulse; they couldn’t have survived among the whirlpools, so
close to the wavemaker, anyway. Still, he intended to check the
circulator when they got back to Omsh’pont. There did seem to be an
oily taste to the water in the cockpit, though Chase and Angie had
said nothing.

From time to time, Kloosee would slip out
underneath the shield, checking the accuracy of their approach.
Only minor corrections were needed. There wasn’t much chance they
would stray from their course anyway—the whirlpools would make sure
of that.

Their rate of ascent picked up steadily—they
couldn’t be more than ten beats below the first of the whirlpools.
This was the trickiest part. Somehow, they had to maneuver the
shield past the vortexes, without losing anyone, and put the
corners in exactly the right spot, so that the netting would hang
suspended beneath the wavemaker, stopping the intake of water and
deadening the sound.