The Farpool (74 page)

The flashback came like a slap in the face.
Joe came down too and stood next to her, saying something, talking
about some kind territorial dispute among porpoises, but Angela
barely heard him…

She was just seventeen, just a rising senior
at Apalachee High and his name had been Chase…Chase Meyer. They
often made love in his canoe, not here, but further north. Half
Moon Cove. Then one day, while they were pretty much naked in the
canoe, they had seen…

“Seen what?” Joe was saying. “What were you
about to say?”

Angela bit her lip. “I didn’t realize I was
talking, Joe…I was just remembering something.”

“So I gathered. This Chase guy…an old
flame?”

Angela smiled in spite of herself. “You might
say that. Maybe a little more than an old flame. We talked about
getting married.”

“So what happened? The dirtbag run out on
you?”

Now it was Angela’s turn to wear a broad
grin. “Well, you might say we had some adventures. Then…he just
kind of disappeared—“

“Yeah,” Joe was chewing on a piece of straw
he’d picked up from a deck chair, “boys are like that.”

“Oh, not this one—“ but she stopped in
mid-sentence. One of the creatures had now come fully to the
surface and was staring right at her. It bobbed in the surf, a
blade-shaped head with two black, fathomless eyes, and seemingly
two arms with fins on the ends of them. Angela shuddered in spite
of herself. The eyes regarded her with something she would describe
later as a special kind of curiosity, almost warm, kind eyes.

Damn, she’d seen those eyes before. She was
sure of it. She went to her knees and stretched out a hand…the
creature was not more than two meters away.

“Angela, don’t---I wouldn’t do that…you don’t
know what it might do. What the hell kind of dolphin is that
anyway?” Now, Joe stepped back and grabbed for a long aluminum pole
he sometimes used when maneuvering around the wharf. He brought it
over to the railing.

“No, Joe, don’t do that. You’ll scare it…it’s
friendly…look at those eyes. I know those eyes. I’ve seen those
eyes. It’s…he’s just curious.”

For a long moment, Angela wrestled with a
thought that kept popping insistently into her mind and she brushed
it away and tried to bury it and shoo it off just as insistently.
There was no way. It simply could not be. It wasn’t possible…not
now. Not after eighty years….

But the memory of her and Chase in that canoe
in Half Moon Cove, the memory of seeing creatures very much like
this, and the waterspout that danced offshore for much of the
afternoon that hot June day off Scotland Beach…the memory would not
go away and would not be swept into some closet in the back of her
mind.

She could see Chase’s blond brown hair in her
mind’s eye, with the wave on top, short on the sides, and the lock
that he combed down over his right eye. She could see the faint
blond beard and the faint moustache, the blue eyes, the scar above
his right eye due to a fishing accident, the chin dimple he tried
to hide, the big ears, the broad shoulders. She called him Flip and
he called her Cookie, for reasons she could no longer recall.

She could see all of that as if were right in
front of her right now, but when the memory faded, all she saw was
the alligator-face of this creature staring back at her with
obvious interest and curiosity.

In spite of a shiver, she felt a strong flood
of rapturous joy washing over her. In some way she couldn’t
explain, in some way Joe would never believe, she knew she had
found Chase Meyer. She didn’t know how. She couldn’t explain
it.

But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

“Angela, I don’t like the looks of those
clouds out there.” Joe pointed out to sea. Dark thunderstorm clouds
were boiling away on the horizon. Flickers of lightning strobed
behind the clouds. Several clouds dipped closer to the surface of
sea. A slow rotation had started up and from up in the pilothouse,
as he started up the engines, Joe said something about a
waterspout. She didn’t see one. But she wouldn’t have been
surprised.

The
Simple
Sturgeon
left the scene, turned about and headed back
to The Landings wharf, seeking Slip Number Twelve and the relative
safety of the marina. A stronger gusty wind fetched up across the
marina, and boat masts clanked and clinked around them as they put
in for the night. Joe wasn’t sure what had happened to Angela. She
looked like she’d seen a ghost. Her face was almost pale but she
had a broad smile on her lips, stuck on her lips like a video
freeze-frame.

“Come on, old lady…you’ve had too much, of
everything today. Let’s get you home and tucked into a warm
bed.”

Then hiked back to A Building and Jean Gable
was waiting for them at the door when they came in.

Angela Gilliam Watson was firmly put to bed,
after taking all her meds and brushing her teeth. The Gables said
an uneasy good night and locked the front door behind them.

Up in her single bedroom—her husband Ken had
gone ahead to be with the Lord ten years before and she’d moved his
bed to another part of the unit, Angela was still smiling. A great
feeling of warmth washed over her and her face became flushed and
red.

It had to be
Chase
.

Sometime the next morning, when Jean Gable
came calling and no one answered the door, a great flurry of
commotion erupted outside A-6 at The Landings. Duncan County EMS
showed up. Scotland Beach Police sent a cruiser too. Even a fire
truck came by to offer help. The paramedics checked her wristpad.
The biomonitor lights were all dark.

Angela Gilliam Watson had died in her
sleep overnight, in her bed, clothed in lavender chiffon pajamas
and clutching a strange bulb-like object, with buttons along one
side, clutching it with both hands. When the paramedics bent to
check for a pulse along her neck, they could hear sounds emanating
from the object, voices, squeaks, honks, clicks and grunts.
Some kind of strange recording
device
, one medic surmised.

Angela still had a broad smile on her face
when they discovered her.

Epilogue

Scotland Beach

August 14, 2199

6:45 p.m.

Joe Gable brought the
Simple Sturgeon
to a full stop, some
two kilometers off shore, near Half Moon Cove, and dropped anchor
so the swells wouldn’t drive them back toward the rocks that lined
the seabed and the sides of the inlet. Dr. Michael Skellar, senior
pastor of Grove Street Community Church, clutched a small Bible and
walked a bit unsteadily down from the pilothouse, with Joe right
behind him.

Sam and Dana Watson, Angela’s son and
daughter in law, met Skellar’s eyes with a tight, meaningful smile.
Sam showed Skellar Angela’s wristpad. He’d kept it in his pocket
since the night his mother had died.

“She always wanted to be buried at sea,” Sam
told the pastor. “Not cremated, just buried at sea, right here off
the Cove. It’s even in her own words on this pad. We all listened
to it.”

Reverend Skellar was somewhat perplexed. “I’m
surprised she didn’t want to be buried with her husband. He’s
interred at our Grove Street columbarium, you know.”

“Those were her wishes.”

The body of Angela Gilliam Watson had
been enclosed in a canvas shroud. A gurney with a tilting top had
been borrowed from Wilson’s Funeral Home. The shroud was strapped
to the top of the gurney. Once the
Sturgeon
reached the site, just a few hundred
meters to seaward of Half Moon Cove, the straps were
released.

It was late evening offshore and the swells
were picking up, rocking the boat, slapping the hull with sharp
cracks. The flag stanchion and antennas clanked in the breeze.
Thunderstorm clouds were boiling on the horizon and the seas were
building. Lightning veined the still-blue skies between the
clouds.

Sam re-fastened the wristpad to Angela’s
wrist and cinched up the shroud.

They were all there: Reverend Skellar,
Angela’s son Sam and his wife Dana, the grandkids Jake and Riley,
sniffling and sobbing, each bearing a wicker basket of rose petals
Dana had bought for them. Joe and Jean Gable stood to one side.

“Reverend,” Sam said solemnly, “I think we’re
ready.”

Skellar pulled out a small Bible, its pages
well thumbed, and crammed with scraps of paper. He intoned
grimly:

“Unto Almighty
God we commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her
body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto
eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in
glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her
dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be
changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the
mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto
himself
. Ashes to ashes, dust
to dust—“

Skellar nodded
to Joe Gable and Sam Watson. As one, they tilted the
gur
ney top up and the canvas
shroud bearing Angela’s body slid off into the water. It made
almost no splash and sank quickly.

“Okay, kids…go
ahead,” Dana prodded.

Jake and Riley took
their baskets to the railing and scattered rose petals on to the
water.

Waves continued building and the seas were
getting noticeably rougher.

Joe Gable muttered, “Looks like quite a blow
coming up. That cloud out there worries me—“ He indicated a
low-hanging dark cloud, its bottom layers dipping nearly to the sea
surface several kilometers away, its boiling girth clearly rotating
slowly. “Could be a ‘spout coming.”

A few solemn moments passed. At a
silent nod from Sam and Dana, Joe climbed up into the pilothouse
and restarted
Sturgeon’s
twin
diesels. They rumbled to life and he turned the boat around
smartly, heading out of the Cove, back along the coastline, past
Turtle Key and Apalachee Point, to the marina at The
Landings.

Back at Half Moon Cove, or just a few hundred
meters beyond, the canvas shroud containing the mortal remains of
Angela Gilliam Watson thudded end first into the sandy seabed.
Tricky cross-currents carried the shroud out toward open sea over
the next few hours, rolling the canvas over and over again, until
it came to rest in a shallow hollow…not far from some rusting car
hulks. One of the rusting frames was an old Chevy. It had been
dumped into the ocean decades before and was now cloaked with the
faint white and lavender of a growing nest of brain coral.

A day later, Kloosee and Chase came up to the
burial shroud. The seas above them were rough and stormy. Vortex
fields had developed over the last few hours and the Farpool had
re-appeared, this time in a new location, closer to shore than ever
before. It danced and corkscrewed liked a drunken sailor, as
Kloosee sniffed and nosed about the shroud. He compared the scents
to a scentbulb he had brought along.

“It’s her,” he announced.

“It
has
to be her,” Chase decided. He was sad at the passing of
Angela Gilliam (now Watson), but resigned to try what they had come
to do.

Kloosee used his beak to tear two small slits
in the side seams of the shroud. This would give him and Chase a
better grip to tow the body to the kip’t, which was parked a few
beats away, inside the vortex fields, not far from the spinning
froth of the Farpool.

“Where’s Loptoheen?” Chase asked. He got a
firm grip on the shroud through the slit. Kloosee was on the other
side. They hoisted the shroud up and began pulling and kicking,
stroking with their load through the turbulence of the vortexes.
Neither of them saw Angela’s hand and wrist, wristpad still
attached, fall dangling out the slit opening. It trailed behind,
bobbing along with the shroud.

“Loptoheen’s gone,” Kloosee replied.
“Probably looking for Habloo and the others. He may even stay here.
He’s injured, I know that much. I don’t know what that prod did to
him. Come on—the Farpool’s not stable. We’ve got to hurry.”

They had to twist and swerve to avoid being
sucked into the smaller vortexes, each whirling column a little
spinoff of twisted spacetime, each daughters of the Farpool, which
even now churned and throbbed with foam and froth and bubbles ahead
of them.

The kip’t was just below and they dove with
the shroud between them, angling down toward the seabed. As they
did so, the bottom end of the shroud sliced through the corner of a
narrow vortex stream, a column writhing and snaking and flexing in
the currents like it was a thing possessed. The vortex nearly
snatched the shroud out of their hands and they wrestled with it
until it could be pulled free. They continued their descent down to
the kip’t on the seabed.

Neither of them saw the wristpad on Angela’s
dangling hand and wrist come to life. Its biomonitor lights cycled
on, winking one after another…red to green, red to green, red to
green.

End

Appendix

(downloaded from Angie’s Echopod Journal)

The Language

Seomish is designed phonetically to carry
well in a water medium. Hard, clicking consonants are common. The
‘p’ or ‘puh’ sound, made by violent expulsion of air is also
common. Modulation of the voice stream, particularly at high
frequencies (sounding much like a human whistle) produces the
characteristic “wheeee” sound, which is a root of many words.
Translation from Seomish to human languages like English requires
some inspired speculation, since so many Seomish phrases seem to be
little more than grunts or groans, modulated in frequency and
duration.