Watermind (26 page)

“Why do you question my work? The EM field is gone.” Li Qin Yue stood planted in front of her instruments, as gaunt and fleshless as a stick figure. She pointed at one particular screen. “Do you see any trace of it? No!”

“But the pH and thermoclines.” Roman swiveled the monitor away from the sun's glare. “Look at this data. Part of the formation is still in place.”

Yue tossed her head, dislodging pins in her braid. “A vestige. Wait a few minutes. You'll see it disintegrate.”

Peter Vaarveen sat in the shade of the pulse generator, flicking his penknife opened and closed, watching the two of them bicker. This fight was mild. On previous job sites, he'd seen them go at each other like sharks. Vaarveen often wondered what sick dynamic kept them working together.

Their last EM pulse had blown the power and knocked the whole Quimicron plant offline. Meir was off somewhere talking to the Dixie Electric Membership Corporation, trying to get their service restored. Meanwhile, Roman wanted them to tap the auxiliary generators and fire another shockwave. But Yue couldn't abide the fact that Roman doubted her word. They didn't need another shockwave. She staked her reputation that the energy field was already dead.

Dead.
Peter Vaarveen pondered that word. It implied the blur of dissolved trash had once been alive. Reilly thought so, but Reilly was a mess. A total emotion-head. The worst kind of female. And yet, she'd discovered things about the colloid that he might have overlooked. His respect for her had inched upward of late. It didn't hurt that she was a babe.

Alive?
He wondered.

What force made something alive? He pictured a dog stretched on his dissection table. One instant it was kicking and fighting, or maybe just wagging its tail. The next instant, Peter's needle plunged in. How could life and death change places so fast? “You're either quick or you're dead,” he snickered.

Still, he seriously regretted Yue's rush to scorch the colloid without first checking the new sample they'd captured. With no collar to hold their target still, they might not have caught an active skein. Yue insisted she had no time to doublecheck, but Peter knew she didn't really want a live sample. She didn't want anything that might help CJ Reilly.

Women. Peter leaned against the generator housing and crossed his arms behind his head. Everybody could have gotten decent publishable articles out of this computerized soup if the females would just get along. But hell, it wasn't his fight. He closed his eyes for a quick nap.

“Stay on it,” Roman snarled at Yue. “If anything changes, you fire that EMP again, understand?”

She turned her narrow back on him. Then Roman noticed Vaarveen snoozing in the shade. “Wake up.” He kicked Vaarveen in the ribs. “You slept last night. Work now.”

“Christ.” Peter rubbed his side and sat up to protest, but Roman was already running up the steps toward the levee.

 

Wednesday, March 16

3:00
PM

 

CJ broke from a thicket, darted across open ground, and slunk under the dock where the scientists were working. Two feet back from the waterline, she sat on her backpack and coated herself in slimy mud. Clouds of gnats swarmed under the pier, and she'd discovered that mud repelled them better than Deet. Though the mire stank of dead fish and worse, she was too dirty and tired to care. In fact, she was too exhausted even to think. She'd toiled so long to reach this dock, now she had no idea what to do next.

In the sweltering twilight shade under the dock, gray foam melted like remnant snow, and dead leaves floated in ridges of motionless muck. She sensed a listless vacancy. The shockwaves had stopped. The canal felt inert. All through her battle with the vines, she'd been rationalizing how the colloid might survive the EMP. But now, her wishes were faltering.

She could almost see the skim of dead microchips floating in the lagoon. Whatever mysterious influence had held them in sync was surely too fragile to survive the repeated shockwaves. She hated Quimicron, hated Roman, hated Yue. Squeezing gooey mud in her fists, she imagined brutal acts of revenge.

Directly above her head, Yue gave a haughty laugh. Then someone yawned. CJ came alert and listened.

“Why won't the bastard trust my expertise?” said Yue.

Peter Vaarveen answered in his New York twang, “Let me think. Could it be because our only remaining sample is worthless?”

“Screw the sample. He treats me like a servant,” said Yue.

“I told you, we should have checked for a live skein,” said Peter.

Yue's footsteps echoed back and forth. “Get me a seltzer. With ice.”

“I loathe Louisiana.” Peter's long-legged stride moved away.

Then Yue took a phone call. “Yes, yes. It's dead. I told you.”

Silence followed. CJ heard something clatter across the dock. Yue must have thrown a metal tool. “That's right, Roman. The new sample is not active. I'm sorry your charming protégée will lose her Nobel.”

Yue snapped her phone shut. “And fuck you very much,” she said, stalking away.

Beneath the dock, CJ crammed her knuckles in her mouth and screamed.

 

Wednesday, March 16

7:19
PM

 

She woke to swells of music. Wind instruments, trumpets, strings. Vibrant trilling reeds. She heard a rippling triple waltz of water lilting over rocks, flowing through cataracts, glutting into whirlpools. She opened her eyes to wet mud splattering in her face. It was raining.

Alarmed, she sat up in the pitch dark and fumbled through her muddy backpack for the flashlight. But it wouldn't work. The EMP. Yes, she remembered.

A trillion droplets struck the mud with a soft wet babble. Like baby talk. Her eyes grew hot. She remembered everything. The colloid was dead.

She pulled farther under the dock for shelter. Using her pack as a pillow, she curled in a ball and shut her eyes, seeking oblivion. Did death ever come clean and quick? Maybe, if she kept her eyes closed long enough, the world would go away forever. But her young body had finished sleeping. Her limbs no longer needed rest, and her mind would not settle down. She sat up and leaned against a pier.

What now? Mexico? That sunny land had lost its appeal. Every possibility seemed dreary and pointless. She was tired of running—and yet there was no reason to stay here. She didn't belong anywhere. With a broken laugh, she remembered how she had planned to save third-world orphans by purifying water. She. A nobody.

She could go back to Boston and finish school. As Harriman Reilly's daughter, she could talk her way back into MIT, but the idea sickened her. It felt too much like losing. She visualized a name written on an envelope: Carolyn Joan Reilly. Her mother probably didn't use that name anymore. She had never felt so weary.

At length, her eyes adjusted to the dimness, and she pawed through the useless electronic gadgets in her backpack. She found one lone bag of M&M's and opened it with her teeth. Usually, she ate the brown candies first because they were the least interesting color. Brown, a muddled shade. Harry said it came from mixing all the leftover dyes.

Harry and Carolyn Joan, what a prize set. Parent was too kind a word for them. Begetters? Progenitors? Better to call them doom-mongers. They gave you their worst genes, then blamed you for repeating their blunders—when all you craved was to be different, separate, new. CJ rubbed her eyes.

In the darkness, all the M&M's felt alike, so she picked one at random and popped it in her mouth. Her saliva dissolved
the sugar to a liquid surge of energy, and as it hit her bloodstream, she began to revive. Then another sound pierced through the drizzle, a sharper frequency—a siren. That's what had awakened her, not the rain.

She scrambled out from under the dock and peeped over the top. The alarm Klaxon rose and fell like a bugle call, and people were running, launching boats. Something serious was going on. In the chaos, no one noticed her muddy figure climbing up onto the rain-lashed dock.

Red beacons flashed through the downpour, making people's faces look gory. Dan Meir rushed by, followed by Peter Vaarveen and Li Qin Yue. Workers milled like disturbed ants. CJ saw Max hustling equipment across the dock, but she couldn't catch his attention. A few yards away, Roman was pacing under the floodlights. The rain had slicked his long hair like a pelt, and he was crushing a cell phone to his ear. Even at a distance, CJ heard murder in his voice.

She grabbed a crew worker who was running past, a face she recognized. It was Betty DeCuir.

“What's going on, Betty?”

The young woman drew back from CJ's muddy hand, and her eyes went as round as globes. “Laws, the water
loa.
She done ate right through them gate seals. I tell you what. She leak out before that ray gun ever fire.”

CJ almost forgot to breathe. “The gates are open?”

Betty nodded. “Ain' nobody hold
Yemanja
. She got herself free.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, March 17

3:01
AM

 

The Mississippi River is a fast, changeful giant. In the West, it arises along the continental divide, nearly three miles above sea level, while in the Northeast, it links through canals to the Atlantic Ocean. Its upper trunk lies choked and constrained by nearly thirty locks made of heavy steel and concrete, and its lower flanks are poked and prodded by wing dams to keep it running straight. Engorged with spring flows, it will rampage eighteen knots through the heartland, breaking its chains, uprooting trees, and undermining bluffs, leaving angry snags and sandbars, until its Lilliputian jailers recapture and contain it.

By turns, humans have blessed and cursed the great river. Two native tribes argued about who named it first. The Ojibwe called it
Messipi,
and the Algonquin used the words
Missi Sepe.
Both mean the same thing: Gathering of Waters. Its first European christening came in 1541 when Hernando de Soto dubbed it
Río de Espíritu Santo
, River of the Holy Spirit.

Big Muddy, El Grand, Old Man River, the Mississippi is not a single entity but a transient, multiplicitous spill. Like America itself, the river slurps, swallows, digests, and regurgitates. Every year, every minute, its contents change. Its banks erode and move. Its channel fills and must be dredged. Even its mighty current shifts direction. Underpinned by the ancient New Madrid Fault, it quaked so
violently in 1811 that new waterfalls appeared, and the river flowed backward for eight days to create Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.

In ceaseless flux, without material duration, the river is not an object but an evolution—like music, or a nation, or a life. Yet for all its temporality, it rolls always. While you and I are reading or sleeping or making love, it rolls. Through rain and heat, war and truce, noon and midnight, it courses. In the small hours on a recent St. Paddy's Day morning, it rolled a shiny blue nanocarbon coffer gate one mile downstream before lodging it against a bridge pier under Highway 190.

Roman Sacony gripped the passenger armrests in his company speedboat. Max Pottevents was driving at top speed. Dan Meir sat sideways in the rear seat, aiming the spotlight and watching the muddy banks race by. Close behind, Rory Godchaux piloted a second boat with Li Qin Yue, Peter Vaarveen, and a pile of equipment. They were searching for an electromagnetic signature in the Mississippi River.

The rain had tapered off, leaving behind cool misty layers of ground fog. Yue analyzed radio sources, and Peter set up an infrared scanner to spot temperature variations. But as they approached the heavily industrialized waterfront near downtown Baton Rouge, their methods proved useless. Warehouses and factories lined the river, and dozens of freighters lay moored at piers. There were too many heat sources, too many radio waves, too many electromagnetic fields.

Max didn't understand their science terms, but he knew from their angry growls they were stymied. By the greenish glow of his dashboard dials, he could see Roman Sacony's face. The man looked hellish.

Twice earlier, when they paused to drop anchor and let the scientists work, Max tried to call CJ on the sly. But her cell phone didn't answer. Maybe she was sleeping, that's what he hoped. Most of Baton Rouge lay asleep at this hour. He pictured his daughter, Marie, lying snug in
her white gingham bed. His ex-wife's crackerbox tract home lay close behind the levee in a low-income ward. The ground was so low there that river water sometimes seeped under the levee and boiled up in Sonia's backyard. It was the best her new husband could afford. Silently, Max prayed that
djab dile
would pass them over. He didn't know what the devil water wanted, but after seeing how it ate through steel hulls, Max felt deeply afraid.