The Farpool (43 page)

Angie sniffed at that. “Have I interrupted
something between you two…I can go away…maybe even find my way back
to the kip’t—“

“Angie—“

She scooted off. “Don’t ‘Angie’me, Chase
Meyer.” She headed off and Chase decided he’d better follow. It
wasn’t hard to get lost beneath the wavemaker. Though the Sound was
now muffled and occasionally even vanished, there were still small
whirlpools and vortexes, if you weren’t careful.

Chase shrugged. “Sorry—“ He headed off after
Angie.

They finally made it back to the kip’t and
found Kloosee outside loading some gear.

Kloosee clucked in ways the echobulb couldn’t
translate. Chase figured it was some kind of expletive.

“I was just about to come looking for you
two.”

Chase said, “Angie kind of wandered off…and I
went looking for her.”

“I did not just
wander
off. I was…like, inspecting the shield.”
Even as she said that, Angie knew how lame it sounded. But she
decided defiance was her best defense. Fortunately, Chase let it
drop. She’d have it out with Chase later.

Kloosee didn’t pursue the matter,
though it was easy to pulse that both
eekoti
were nervous, anxious…something was
clearly bothering them. Perhaps, an argument…they had a lot to
learn about
shoo’kel
…he’d
have to spend some time teaching to keep their insides under
control, like any good Seomish.

“The expedition is preparing to move out,”
Kloosee announced. “There are last minute inspections going on…as
soon as those are completed, we’ll depart. It’s a long trip back to
Omt’or…or in some cases, to Ponk’et.”

So Chase and Angie helped out, gathering
equipment and loading it aboard their kip’t. For good measure, he
and Kloosee roamed a few beats up and down their side of the
shield, which hung in a billowing wave below the vast Uman
machine.

“It seems to be holding,” Kloosee explained.
He nosed along the woven seams, picking and checking knots and
seams every few beats. “I’d never be able to get this close to the
wavemaker without the shield. There are many more whirlpools…get
too close and you vanish forever. It almost happened to
Habloo.”

Chase was intrigued. “You told me this big
mother is some kind of weapon for the Umans.”

Kloosee acknowledged that. “They say they are
fighting an enemy far beyond the Notwater…another world. I don’t
know that much about it.”

Chase wanted badly to surface…just to see the
sky and land once. “Can I go up? To the surface…I kind of miss
it.”

Kloosee pulsed that the
eekoti
male was being truthful.
“Only for a moment. I’ll continue checking along this weave. When I
come back, be here. We have to leave soon.”

“You got a deal.” With that, Chase kicked his
way upward, toward the light. Clearly, it was daytime and he was
heartened as the light brightened with each stroke. But the surface
was further away than he realized.

He breached at last and found himself pounded
about in rough surf, rolling waves crashing and frothing over his
head as he bobbed about, kicking just enough to stay up. He was
exhilarated at the sound and the spray and, for no good, reason,
yelled out at the top of his voice. There was a light fog but the
sun shone through it…Sigma Albeth B’s warmth apparent even this far
north. He could see the curve of the great dome that was the Uman
machine, the wavemaker, arcing into the mist above, disappearing
like a planet of its own. Beyond the curve of the dome, a brown
spit of land was barely visible. Kinlok Island, he figured.

They had been there only a short time ago and
he wondered if the Umans were even aware of the big shield that had
been secured to their machine. He saw no boats, no aircraft, no
hoverships or skimmers, no activity that would indicate awareness.
It was like the wavemaker existed for its own purposes.

Chase bobbed and stroked around at the
surface for awhile longer. He’d always loved the sea. As a very
young child, his father had often taken him surfing and boarding
out in the Gulf; it was one of his earliest memories.

But he decided he’d better get back. When he
submerged and began stroking and pulling his way toward the kip’t,
his ears were suddenly pounded by a loud booming pulse of
sound.

The wavemaker…
something had happened
…the shield—

He was momentarily stunned, losing all sense
of where he was. The sound was a painful throb, a blast wave that
knocked him sideways, then cartwheeling end for end, like a giant
hand slap. It pulsed and boomed and throbbed and droned.

What the hell--?

Gradually, with effort, Chase stabilized
himself and recovered enough to claw his way through the water back
to the kip’t. There was chaos everywhere, bodies and kip’ts
thrashing about, colliding, entangling.

Through it all, he could see that just ahead
of them, the shield was slowly unraveling, unspooling from the
wavemaker. It was coming apart, splitting along its seams, as if
some giant scissors were cutting the fibers.

Kloosee shouted over the din.
“
Get in the kip’t!
Angie’s
already inside! We’ve got to get away from here, put some distance
between us and the machine!”

Chase did as he was told. The booming
pulses were painful, needles driving into his ears. Once, when he
was ten years old, Chase had been swimming in the Gulf alongside
his father’s boat and decided to investigate some odd and colorful
coral banks on the seabed. They were deeper than he realized. When
he reached them, his head and ears felt like they were going to
explode. He nearly passed out. His father had nearly killed him
after that. “You were damned lucky, kid, you didn’t burst an
eardrum. You have to
prepare
before you pull something like that…don’t ever do that
again.”

The boom of the wavemaker, now becoming
uncovered, was a hundred times worse than that.

Chase squeezed into the kip’t, behind Angie,
and Kloosee secured the bubble cover and fired up the jets. Other
kip’ts were nearby and as a single formation, they cruised deeper
and south from the wavemaker, until twenty or thirty beats had
passed by. Kloosee found a small iceberg, just calved off the ice
pack, which had drifted south. He nosed around its jagged
underwater stalactites of ice and parked the kip’t in a broad
crevice opposite the wavemaker, so that the berg partially blocked
the throbbing din and crash of the sound.

“The shield is rupturing,” Kloosee said
grimly. “It’s separating from the machine…we’ve got to get back
there and fix it.” He got on the
kipkeeor
, the comm circuit, and talked with
Longsee, who was in a nearby kip’t.

Longsee’s voice came back strained,
almost hoarse. “It’s too dangerous. With the shield coming down,
the whirlpools are back, many
opuh’te
, too many. You could be caught in a
vortex. Maybe the Umans have done something.”

The next hour was chaotic and
confusing, as Omtorish and Ponkti accused each other of failing in
their duties. Several kip’ts bumped and collided and Kloosee
wondered if the collisions were really accidents. Most of the
expedition had gathered in the lee of the iceberg. Taunts and
threats and warnings flew back and forth, across
kipkeeor
, even in person, as workers
tussled and fought each other. Loptoheen, tukmaster of Ponk’et, had
to intervene several times.

Longsee was the expedition leader and he
struggled for a long time to regain order among the expedition
crews, finally separating Omtorish and Ponkti members completely.
It seemed the only way.

“Their natural suspicions are coming out,”
Kloosee told Chase and Angie. “This is bad. Ponkti and Omtorish
don’t need much to start a fight.”

“Why do they fight so much?” Chase asked.

“Enmity goes back a long way,” Kloosee told
them. He had anchored their kip’t to the iceberg by wedging the
nose into a small crevice. The stern of the sled waggled in the
currents. “The kels argue over territory, origins, food and
resources, access to currents, everything. It seldom breaks down
into actual combat…we’re too much alike for that, but still they
argue. I just wonder what happened to the shield…why did it
rupture?”

Chase remembered that he and Angie had come
across Tulcheah and a Ponkti weaver at the netting a short time
ago. He mentioned this to Kloosee, who was instantly intrigued.

“What were they doing?”

Chase said, “I don’t really know…I was just
looking for Angie, she—“ but he felt a kick in his rear and changed
the story –“anyway, Tulcheah was there with another Ponkti guy—I
didn’t know him—and they were putting something, some kind of black
jelly-like substance, on several knots of the netting.”

Kloosee questioned Chase closely. “Describe
exactly what you saw.”

Chase did. Kloosee considered what Chase had
said. “I’d better let Longsee know what you saw. There were
inspections going on at several sites around the shield, but this
doesn’t sound like an inspection to me.”

So Kloosee used another
kipkeeor
channel, a different
frequency, to discuss the matter with Longsee. Presently, Longsee’s
kip’t hove into view, having quietly maneuvered closer to them. It
was clear from the sound of his voice that Longsee considered the
news very grave.

Longsee left his own kip’t and came over.
Kloosee opened the bubble cockpit. “This is a serious matter. I
want to inspect the shield the best way we can, while we’re still
here. You’ll head one of the teams. Ocynth and Kepmet will head
teams of Ponkti weavers. We’ve got to find out what happened, see
if it can be repaired. The sound’s worse than ever. If this goes
on, everything, all the kels will suffer, even Ponk’et.”

Chase and Angie were firmly ordered to
stay in the kip’t. Kloosee left with Longsee. They were gone for
what seemed like forever. Chase could tell the passage of time
roughly by the shifting shadows on the side of the iceberg. By the
time Kloosee returned, the shadows at moved to the opposite
side.
Must be late in the
day
, Chase told Angie. They had both napped lightly in
the time before Kloosee and Longsee returned. When they did, Chase
could tell immediately that both were grim and
determined.

Longsee said nothing and left for his own
kip’t.

“There will be a meeting,” Kloosee said
finally. “We found
ter’poh
residue on several knots of the shield. It ate through the
knots, dissolved them. It had to be put there deliberately.
Ter’poh
isn’t found in these
waters—too cold.”

“So what are you saying?” Chase asked.

“It was sabotage,” Kloosee said. “A
deliberate action. Someone wanted the shield to fail. It was
inevitable once the
ter’poh
was in place. They secrete a solvent, very thick, black in
color.
Ter’poh
are often used
as solvents in our work.”

“That’s what Tulcheah was putting on the
shield netting,” Chase said. “It was black, like a jelly.”

“So it would seem,” Kloosee agreed.
“Longsee’s meeting now with the Ponkti leaders, with Ocynth and
Loptoheen and the others, to decide what to do.”

“Why would anyone do this?” Angie asked.
“Everybody suffers with this sound. It affects everybody. Why would
anyone want the shield to fail?”

Kloosee said, “I don’t know. Tulcheah,
if she’s involved, is Omtorish by birth. She is of our kel. But
she’s also half Ponkti…she’s always been different. Independent.
Strong-willed. Her
shoo’kel’s
different, she pulses not like most Omtorish. She doesn’t go
on
vishtu
—“

“Vishtu
…you
mean the great roams?”

“Exactly. She used to roam with the kel but
she always got pushed to the rear and she didn’t like that. Now—“
Kloosee took a deep breath, a sad breath Angie thought, “now, she
won’t go. She stays behind in her berth, sniffing scentbulbs.
Tulcheah’s sad, caught halfway between being Omtorish and Ponkti…I
feel sorry for her.”

Chase was thinking of his own encounters…all
the ways Tulcheah had tried to seduce him, making Angie jealous. “A
gold-digger…that’s what we call females like that.”

Angie smacked him. “Chase, really—“

“It’s true,” he argued.

Kloosee seemed sad, but resolute.
“Longsee and the Ponkti are setting up a kind of hearing…we call
it
kel’em.
It means
representatives of all the em’kels here get together. They’ll look
at the evidence, question Tulcheah. I can go, since I’m with the
em’kel, Putektu, back in Omsh’pont. But you two can’t. You’ll have
to stay here.”

Angie said, “What will happen?”

Kloosee wasn’t sure. “I don’t know. I
heard that several people died when the shield ruptured. If
Tulcheah did something to cause that…she
is
Omtorish. She’ll have to face justice in
Omt’or. The Ponkti won’t like that. But your own kel determines
what will happen to you.”

Kloosee made sure his
eekoti
guests were relatively
comfortable, had food and promised to stay inside the kip’t. “Many
opuh’te around…whirlpools. It’s too dangerous for you to leave. You
must stay here.”

They promised. But Angie knew that somewhere
not far away was the Farpool. She began to imagine ways of locating
it. But she said nothing of this to Chase. After Kloosee left, they
napped and cuddled.