Watermind (38 page)

Éléphant and people don' mix. They hurt each other.

CJ beat her bare heels against the deck. Would she spend the rest of her life apologizing to dead men?

Suddenly, she sprang to her feet. She ran along the deck, dropped down the gangway, and barged into the galley, where Peter Vaarveen sat humped over his SE microscope. His sunburned face looked like a ripe strawberry. He glanced up and smirked. “The Princess awakens.”

“I wanna help.” She moved toward him. “Show me everything.”

Peter leaned back in his chair and scratched himself.

“This time, I mean it,” she said. “I want to stop the colloid.”

 

Saturday, March 19

3:26
PM

 

With an indolent shrug, Peter showed CJ his laptop. He'd programmed the latest series of satellite scans to run in quick motion. “Brace yourself. It's changing again.”

Another split had occurred. Now eighty liquid comets
raced under the water, and since the attack at Manchac Point, their combined mass had quadrupled. But they were no longer schooling in an organized pattern. They were bucking and wriggling, clashing and colliding. They brawled as if they wanted to tear each other apart.

CJ tried to push Peter aside, but he wouldn't budge. They ended up sharing the one chair in front of the small galley table. Every time a new scan downloaded, Peter added it to his movie. The plumes writhed like worms.

“That's a free-for-all,” CJ said. “They're fighting some kind of internal war.”

Peter snickered. “If I didn't know better, I'd say your little pal just hit puberty.” He elbowed her to reach the mouse. He stank of unwashed maleness. “The joke is, people along the river won't see anything but a little turbulence.”

CJ shoved him with her hip. “Can't those satellites work any faster?”

The next download silenced them. The plumes had ruptured. All eighty masses were exploding. In false infrared colors, the deep blue sprays burst through the yellow river in a wild splatter of droplets. CJ bit her thumb and tasted blood.

The scan after that caused them to jolt forward in unison and nearly overturn the laptop. It showed yet another change. The masses were coalescing. In mere seconds, the explosion had reversed. The sprays were falling inward, darkening at the center, reconverging. CJ pulled at her hair. Through unbearably slow beats of time, she and Peter waited for another scan. It showed the plumes had reunited as one. The titanic blue mass pooled along the riverbed, half a mile long.

“Yee-ha! That mother has
evolved.
” Peter calculated the slick's new liquid volume and displayed the number on screen. CJ fell off the chair.

He tapped keys to bring up the EM sensors, then scooted a few centimeters to make more room on the seat. “I'll lay odds that hombre has a whole new electronic structure.”

CJ got up and wedged her butt onto the small seat, then studied the screen. Sure enough, its EM field swelled exponentially larger and stronger than before the attack at Manchac Point. Invisible force lines bubbled out from the river and swept along both banks, an unseen cone of live energy. Its size stunned them.

Peter checked the temperature. “It's gone supercool again, twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It's sucking up a shitload of heat.”

CJ savaged her thumbnail. “Could he be planning another heat release?”

“I don't think he's saving up for retirement. Damn, what I'd give for another sample.” Peter thumped the screen with his knuckle.

Then he took off his glasses. His injured eyes still leaked water. He wiped the greasy lenses on his sweatshirt. “River traffic's thick through here, have you noticed? Oil tankers. Chemical freighters. We're getting close to New Orleans. If that thing creates another oscillation wave, we'll see a hell of a lot more casualties.”

CJ glanced out the porthole at the heavy shipping traffic. The yacht and the buoy tender were tracking close behind the submerged plume, and to get ahead, both vessels were preparing to cross over it. Peter's thoughts coincided with hers. “Yeah, this'll be our chance to drop a bucket.”

 

Saturday, March 19

5:47
PM

 

The
Pilgrim
's bridge heaters fogged the windows. The room felt steamy with human breath. Near the helm, Roman murmured steadily to his ear loop. In a level voice, he told lies, offered bribes, made threats, promised miracles.
Veins throbbed on his forehead, and he stalked back and forth like a man in a cell. He was still trying to persuade a chain of bureaucrats to open the spillway weir. And everyone on the bridge was privately relieved to see him back to his old self.

Through the blurry windows, a smear of brown, gray, and green swept by. Towboats, fishing trawlers, and giant petroleum tankers lay at anchor against the riprap, giving them way. The radio band chattered with rancorous complaints. And overhead, news helicopters circled like brooding vultures.

On the
Pilgrim
's bridge, Rick Jarmond fidgeted like a kid going to his first baseball game—they were actually planning to open the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Beside him, Captain Ebbs trained his binoculars along the levee roads at the sightseers. An elderly couple wielded a camcorder. A carload of teenagers drank beer. A fat blond man stared back at him through the scope of a high-powered deer rifle. The grooves in Ebbs' weathered face deepened.

“Lookee there,” said the officer manning the helm.

“Reverse speed. Full stop,” Ebbs boomed.

Three hundred yards ahead, the Mississippi's color changed abruptly from rust brown to—

“Radiant,” CJ exclaimed. The colloid had surfaced.

As the
Chausseur
shuddered to a halt, CJ ran to the bow. What she saw made her cover her mouth with both hands. The emerald-platinum slick blazed across the full width of the river. As far downstream as she could see, it sloshed and flared like iridescent foil, brightening the banks. But it wasn't moving. The Mississippi's brown current charged under its trailing edge with a noise like gargling giant, yet the colloid rested on top of the rushing current, as still as a lake.

“It's resisting gravity. How can it do that?” Peter asked at her elbow.

“Magnetism,” she whispered. “He uses his EM field as an anchor.”

“Sure, I can see that.” Peter rolled his eyes.

“He's beautiful,” she breathed.

Thin surface fog haloed its inner light, and though the sky glowed with the first rosy hues of sunset, the river gleamed brighter. It made the world seem upside down.

Alien
, CJ thought. He's not of this Earth.

Yet he
is,
Harry. We did this. Our technology. Our waste stream. We produced this—monster. No, she couldn't call him that. Even though he'd killed Max and though with every beat of her blood, she resolved more firmly to stop his rampage, she still couldn't judge him a monster. Out of trash and poison, he had made himself radically new. He was the first sentient life to evolve on Earth since
homo sapiens
.

“Smell it?” Peter sniffed noisily. “Photosynthesis gone berserk. It must have surfaced to make more sugar.”

She took a deep breath. Sweet fruity perfume saturated the air—esters from the colloid's dense carbohydrate syrup. CJ gripped the rail, ignoring the frost that was rapidly forming on every metal surface. “But why did he stop moving?”

“He got the munchies again.” Peter smirked and pointed toward the municipal dock at the town of Gypsy, where the colloid's luminous foil churned among a line of moored barges. “Hungry freakin' devil.”

CJ was trying to figure out what the barges contained when Peter yelled in her ear, “Jesus, what are they doing?”

A dozen people were pushing off from the Gypsy boat ramp in small johnboats and aluminum canoes. They were scooping up the silvery emerald water with coolers and tackle boxes. Taking souvenirs.

“Get those people out of the water!” Roman yelled from the
Pilgrim.
“Fools! Get out of there!”

He waved his arms and shouted, but the people were too far away to hear. Ebbs boomed a warning through the ship's loudspeaker. Then the
Pilgrim
's sirens blared, and the engines powered up. The tender drove straight for the
boat ramp, churning a swath through the platinum green slick. When the
Chausseur
followed, CJ ran along the rail, watching the luminous river cascade against their hull. Their wake left a lathery froth that burned like foxfire.

Peter tied a bucket on a rope and heaved it overboard to scoop up a sample, and CJ helped him haul in their catch. Sweet frigid spray doused them both. Eagerly, they checked their sample, but as soon as they looked, the foam lost its glow. They hovered over the bucket, bumping heads, watching the lather dissolve to clear liquid. CJ scooped up a handful.

“Christ!” Peter tried to slap her hand away, but he was too late.

She tasted the water. “Pure H
₂
O. Analyze it.”

He backed away from her. “Reilly, you could be a decent scientist if you weren't such a mental case.” Nevertheless, Peter filled a stoppered tube from the bucket.

 

Saturday, March 19

6:34
PM

 

In the fading light, Roman stood at the
Pilgrim
's bow, snarling and cursing as more souvenir hunters launched from the Gypsy boat ramp. Ebbs was using the
Pilgrim
's loudspeaker to order the people out of the water, but they weren't listening. As CJ approached, Roman barely glanced her way. She had left Peter onboard the
Chausseur
trying to catch a better sample, while she crossed to the
Pilgrim
to enlist Roman's help.

But Roman seemed different from the man she remembered. The skin around his mouth was pinched and white, and he'd lost his elegant composure. He looked brutish.

“Roman, listen,” she said. “I have a plan.”

“Find your gas mask. Now.” Roman didn't look at her. His own mask hung loose around his neck.

She stood beside him, frowning sidelong at his gaunt face. Then she followed his gaze and watched the locals filling their boats with silver water. At once, she comprehended the gravity. The boaters were harassing the colloid. At any moment, he might retaliate.

Near the bank, the eerie water shimmered like pearls. When CJ looked straight down, she saw sheer illuminated films gliding across each other, streaked with fractal veins as bright as fire opal. In the gathering dusk, the river blazed.

Eventually, most of the people submitted to the Coast Guard's instructions and returned to the ramp, but two young boys in a fiberglass johnboat veered around the
Pilgrim
's square bow. Roman ran forward, bellowing at them. He hurdled a winch in one bound, then sprinted on, yelling in Spanish. CJ followed.

Then a strange soft blast distorted the air, and the water around the johnboat sheeted from green to white. “He's phase-shifting,” CJ gasped.

In an instant, ice solidified around the johnboat and brought it to a crashing stop, while momentum tumbled the two boys forward. Legs splayed, they flew headlong onto the ice, then broke through the surface and plummeted into the subfreezing liquid.

Roman climbed onto the rail to dive for them.

“You'll die in that water.” CJ grabbed his knees. When he tried to kick her away, she hung on tight. “I won't let you do it.”

The Coast Guard crew tossed four white ring buoys into the water where the boys had submerged, and a rescuer in an orange survival suit jumped feet first through the brilliant ice. Roman balanced on the rail, poised to follow, but CJ clung to his calves.

Yet even as the orange-suited crewman splashed into the river, the two boys bobbled up, spluttering and thrashing, their faces scarlet with cold. They grabbed the ring
buoys and fought to stay afloat. In less than a minute, the crew hauled all three swimmers safe aboard the
Pilgrim
, and EMTs broke out first-aid kits to treat the boys' frostbite. As Roman watched from his tightrope balance on the rail, CJ kept a death grip on his legs.

With a vicious pop, the ice compressed around the johnboat and crushed its fiberglass hull to splinters. CJ watched petals of ice rise and shatter around the wreckage. Shards flew up, sparkling like leaded crystal. She barely noticed the cries of panic from the people at the boat ramp. She didn't see them fleeing up the levee toward their vehicles. All she could do was hang on to Roman's legs and watch the fiberglass johnboat sink into the spewing ice.

I have to stop you.
But she couldn't move. She could only watch the ice liquefy from iridescent white to neon green.
I will stop you.

Overhead, a solitary helicopter droned through the darkening sky. When it swooped down over the patch of melting ice, Roman saw the camera lights. Then he glimpsed the smirking newscaster with copper hair.
“Cerdo!”
Roman shook his fist.

But Hal Butler was too absorbed in his thrilling new role as FOX eyewitness reporter to notice much of anything. Hal was moving up in the world. He had traded the Bonnet Carré Spillway story to FOX News in exchange for this gig in the helicopter. Already he was recording his voice-over for the johnboat incident. Honoring his two favorite gurus, Kurt Vonnegut and Ed Wood, he labeled it: “Ice-Nine from Outer Space.”

Roman snarled. “Let me go, Reilly.” He pried CJ's arms loose.

When he dropped to the deck, he accidentally knocked her into the winch housing. Emotion stretched his eyelids and flattened the skin across his cheeks. She expected him to yell, but his words came out mute and hoarse. “I didn't mean to hurt you.”

After that, he seemed to shut down, like a computer going on stand-by. He slid to the deck, sat cross-legged, and swayed back and forth. The
Pilgrim
's floodlights cast him in stark profile. His face looked ashen.