Watermind (19 page)

“You have the wrong number,” she stammered. The coincidence of timing shocked her. The online report had not included her name. How did he find her?

“Yeah, Roman Sacony invented a water-based artificial intelligence, didn't he?”

“Roman Sacony has nothing to do with this,” she blurted. “It's a natural occurrence. Nobody built it. And it certainly doesn't belong to Quimicron.”

“Then you admit you've seen the Watermind.”

CJ dropped the wet washcloth in the sink. “Tell me who you are.”

“I'm a friend you can trust. My name is Hal Butler, with the
Baton Rouge Eye
.”

A reporter. CJ lowered herself to the bathroom floor.

The man seemed to take her silence as encouragement. “You believe the Watermind has virtuous qualities, am I right? Something like that, an intelligent liquid, it's gotta be worth millions.”

“It's not about the money.” She jerked a comb through her hair. “It's about a cheap way to purify water.”

“Exactly. And the Watermind can do that?”

She clenched her comb. “Do you realize one child dies every eight seconds from drinking polluted water?” Her eyes teared when the comb snagged in a tangle. “Check me on that. The numbers may have changed.”

“How does the Watermind work?”

CJ laid her comb down. She'd signed Quimicron's nondisclosure agreement four days ago—had it been that long? A mere slip of paper, she had too little experience with lawsuits to be worried. On the other hand, Roman's warning about public panic made her hesitate.

“Miss Reilly, let's be frank,” said Hal Butler. “What I need is the human angle. Like dying children, that's emotional. My readers eat that up. So toss me a bone, eh? How can the Watermind save dying children?”

CJ disliked the reporter's tone, but she also recognized a chance to publish the truth. She rummaged for her toothpaste and, finding none, rubbed the motel's bar soap on her toothbrush. “When will my story go to press?”

“Tomorrow, if it's good,” Hal said.

 

Monday, March 14

6:10
PM

 

Scattered showers wafted through Baton Rouge, and the sky changed color every minute. The Pickle Barrel Tavern filled up early. Bob Ed Lafleur wiped his bar and set out fresh baskets of popcorn. He turned down the thermostat, turned up the TV, and stuck his head through the kitchen door to look for his helper. “Get out here, son, and bring more beer mugs.”

People from the Quimicron plant had already staked out their usual corner and pushed three tables together. They had a bigger group than normal. They ordered half a dozen pitchers of Bud and two platters of
boulettes,
deep-fried crawdaddy meatballs. Bob Ed could tell something weighed on their minds because the Braves were playing the Devil Rays on TV, and no one was watching. Outside, the sky rumbled, and a few big drops splattered the sidewalk. Bob Ed kept an ear cocked, but nobody said anything interesting till after the second round of beer.

As usual, Merton Voinché started things off. He leaned back in the squeaking wooden chair and crossed his brawny arms behind his head. In his dark face, his green eyes glinted with unsettling light. He kept his voice low, yet he had a way of drawing everyone's attention. “Eh la,
djab dile,
he dodge them sucker pumps. He ain't be pushed through no pipe.”

“Oh yeah, he slip loose outta that collar. He sly awright.” People at the three tables murmured and studied their beer foam. They seemed jumpy, scared. Someone whispered low, “
Djab dile
know how to hide.”

Bob Ed Lafleur leaned closer.
Djab dile.
Devil milk? What on earth were they mumbling about? Outside, more raindrops fell.

“
Djab dile
ain' no he. She a female,” said Betty DeCuir.
“She's
Yemanja,
the water
loa.
Ask me how I know.” Betty DeCuir was always mouthing off.

“Be careful, babe. You signed the disclose pledge,” said a plump young woman with peanut-butter skin. Everyone at Quimicron had signed the nondisclosure agreement.

“Piss on the disclose pledge,” said Betty.

Merton indulged her. “Tell us, baby girl. How you recognize
Yemanja
?”

“Okay, I tell you, boy.
Yemanja
always wear a white dress and a pearl crown, and she live under the waves. You think about what we saw, and tell me that ain'
Yemanja
.” Betty crossed her arms.

Rain fell steadily. It drilled in the gutters and danced down the street. The squall echoed like a crowd of people clapping. Bob Ed rubbed his damp hands on his apron and moved nearer to Merton. He pretended to check a lightbulb.

These Creole swamp workers always had to bring up their
Voudon
spirits. Bob Ed shrugged.
Loa,
they called them—as if the swamp wasn't hainted enough with good Christian ghosts. There was that little girl, Anna Fortunata, got lost a few years back, and people to this day saw her drifting around in Devil's Swamp. White as snow, just at twilight, always sort of hovering over the ground. And that other one, that murdered woman tied to the tree with her hair burned off. That incident made the papers. People said that tree still oozed red when the moon was full.

“Naw, girl.” A small, wiry black man shook Betty DeCuir's arm. “
Yemanja
is mother of life. She give birth to the
orishas
.
Djab dile
done kill that boy Manuel. No kind of mother do that.”

“Could be
Agoué
. Sea spirit. He keep the fishes,” said Johnny Poydras, a pimply kid with merry brown eyes.

“That devil milk belong to
Baron Samedi
.” Merton's sinister tone quieted everyone. Heads nodded. Few people made eye contact. Outside, the rain crashed like tin cans.

Bob Ed had never seen Merton in such an edgy mood.
He'd heard of
Baron Samedi
, the all-powerful voodoo lord of death. Foolishness. They said
Baron Samedi
kept the gate keys to the underworld. Believers painted him as a black man in top hat and sunshades, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of rum steeped with twenty-one hot peppers.

Merton kept speaking. “
Baron Samedi
guard the souls buried in that swamp. Could be thousands.”

“Yeah, red people live there ten thousand years before the Christ child,” said Johnny Poydras.

“You right, boy.” Merton narrowed his green eyes. “Ancient mounds in there full of dead injuns. You know they is ghosts in there.”

“Lord, yes.”

“He's right.”

“Amen, Brother Merton.”

“My people. Houmas,” said a brick-colored man. “Maker of Breath protects my fathers.” The man spoke with strong feeling, but he spoke too low for anyone to hear. All eyes centered on Merton.

“Spaniards and French trappers got lost in there. One wrong step, got swallowed up in that mud. You know they runaway slaves buried in that quicksand, alongside the slave hunters trying to catch 'em.”

“Yeah, they plenty black men buried in there,” the group agreed.

“They had lynchings,” said Merton.

“They burned witches in there one time,” said Betty DeCuir.

All at once, as if someone had flipped a switch, the rain stopped. The sudden silence caused everyone to stir and glance around. Merton leaned on the table and cracked his knuckles. His dark brow furrowed as he looked from one face to another. He spoke low, and Bob Ed Lafleur had to lean close to understand him.

“All kinda blood mixing in them swamp graves. Now we go in there and dig around. Pour in the trash, take out oil. I'm telling you, we messin' with
Baron Samedi
.”

 

Monday, March 14

9:57
PM

 

After the squall line passed over southern Louisiana, Devil's Swamp simmered. Black ripples chuffed against the canal bank and bounced backward, setting up a complex moiré pattern of wave interference. Two woodpeckers watched from a hollow oak. Snakes undulated away, and a muskrat fled to its hole. Obscured by clouds, the waxing moon sank toward the horizon.

On the floodlit Gulf-Pac dock, CJ angled her plastic badge into the beam of the guard's flashlight. “Science team, second shift,” she said. “They sent us down here to babysit the equipment.” With a nod, she indicated Max, who stood behind her, shouldering a heavy duffel.

“Take care, miss. This canal gives me the heebie-jeebies.” The guard's voice sounded young. In fact, his name was Timothy Bojorian, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Baton Rouge Community College. This job was financing his first apartment away from home.

When young Timothy paced to the far end of the Gulf-Pac dock, Max repeated a warning he'd given earlier. “They'll put you in jail if you talk to that reporter.”

CJ blotted sweat from the back of her neck. “I didn't talk to him yet. I'm trying to decide if I should. Help me pull off this tarp.”

Underneath the heavy tarp, Yue and Vaarveen had wrapped their equipment in clear plastic sheeting to fend off the mist and dew. CJ cut the plastic away with her Swiss Army knife.

“You signed the disclose pledge,” Max reminded her. “That's like word of honor. You gotta stick by that.”

“Well, he promised not to use my name.” Max's warning troubled her. She should never have told him about
Hal Butler's request for an interview. She was feeling ambivalent enough without an ethics lecture. “Here, plug in this cable.”

She handed him the power cord to Yue's multichannel analyzer. When he found the outlet, she connected all the units and booted up Yue's computers. An image of the EM field blinked on the screen.

“Oh,” she whispered. “It's outside the collar.”

“Sa?”

Max leaned over her shoulder while she tapped the keyboard, searching for a history of previous maps. She wanted to compare the images over time, to discover how and when the colloid breached its trap. A lurking memory made her shiver and hurry, but she didn't know how to launch the software.

“Damn this thing.” She savaged the keys.

“You're probably looking for the image archive,” said a familiar voice.

They turned and saw Roman Sacony stalking up the dock. Even in running pants and a T-shirt, he looked stylish. CJ wondered how long he'd been prowling in the shadows.

“I ran the query earlier.” He reached across her and keyed a command, which brought up a line graph with a hyperbolic curve.

CJ gawked at the image. “He's growing,” she breathed.

“Yue estimates 10.4 liquid tons. That's a thirty percent expansion since yesterday.” He checked his watch. “I'd like to know how the damn thing escaped the collar. Yue found it drifting a quarter mile down the canal. Now we'll have to trap it again.”

“Show me the data,” she said, forgetting who was boss and who was junior employee.

Roman's jaw sliced sideways. “You have five seconds to persuade me not to fire you.”

“I have a theory about language,” she blurted. Half-formed ideas tumbled in her head. She wasn't prepared to
verbalize a hypothesis, but neither was she ready to be fired. “I know how to communicate with the colloid.”

“You know?”

“I have to test it,” she hedged.

“The hell you do.” He shoved his long hair back off his forehead and glared at her. “Were you testing it this morning? We found your MP3 player. Didn't I warn you not to go in that water again? With the Feds breathing down our necks, all we need is another accident.”

“How kindhearted,” she snapped back. “You need what I know. So listen.”

She reached for the duffel Max carried over his shoulder. It held underwater audio equipment Max had found in someone's basement. She jerked the duffel open to reveal two disk-shaped Lubell speakers. The piezoelectric devices looked like hubcaps welded together, and each one was rated to project underwater sound through a fluid volume up to twenty acres in size. The speakers were battered and mud-streaked, but in perfect working order. She and Max had tested them in his friend's catfish pond.

“We'll play mathematical sequences through the water, then track the response,” she said.

Roman lifted one eyebrow. “What will that prove?”

“The Watermind responded to rhythm at the pond, so I intend to—”

“Watermind?” Roman's expression turned feral. His eyes widened ferociously, and his voice blasted her like a wind. “Did you invent that name?”

“No, I—I saw it online,” she stammered.

He took a step toward her. “When I saw your report on the Web, I wanted to wring your neck.”

CJ blanched and faltered backward, knocking over a stack of surge protectors. “I didn't—”

Max hustled to cover her confusion. He began setting up the audio equipment. Roman watched the young Creole's hands adjust the jacks and speaker cables with quiet familiarity. The warm night closed around them, and for a
moment, the faint clicks of Max's gear were the only sounds on the dock.

When Roman spoke next, his voice was low and contained. “You wouldn't be that stupid. Someone must have hacked our e-mail server.” He dropped to one knee to help CJ collect the spilled gear. “At least they deleted our company name.”

She swept up a double handful of surge strips, unable to meet his eye.

“You guessed a lot of things right, Reilly. That's the reason I'm not firing you.” Roman stacked the gear on the workbench. “You make intuitive leaps. It's a gift I admire. Just be careful while you're gazing off in the distance not to miss something obvious right in front of you.”

 

Monday, March 14

10:11
PM