I sighed. "Welcome to my world."
* * *
Yeah, there was a language barrier. Talking to an alien over a billion years old though a trans-dimensional relay bridging an interstellar gulf measured in thousands of light-years was a part of the problem.
But the ultimate hemming and hawing had more to do with Al's lack of a coherent plan beyond "showing up."
The old adage "Ninety percent of success is just showing up"—erroneously attributed to Woody Allen—was hardly a working strategy for confronting a squid-headed Elder God and its army of Deep Ones. When pressed, all that Al could come up with was that the unique juxtaposition of my mutated biology and nanite constructed hive-mind made me the one person capable of communication with beings outside of the normal time/space continuum. Too bad none of that communication seemed to offer much in the way of enlightenment. Just lots of annoying distraction.
And a big target painted on my back.
A target big enough to include my unborn son, it seemed.
There were some vague assurances that "other forces" were in play. Emphasis on the "vague." Whereas the Elder Things might be considered extra-terrestrial entities, his protestations to the contrary, the other players were more in the category of home-grown powers-that-be—over-minds—that were attempting to put their own dogs in the hunt. Ganesh/Kankiten and Hanuman were putting their money on someone named Dakkar; the elves had brung Cuchulainn to the dance—or maybe someone (or something) else had brought them. And God (or gods) knew who or what else was being dumped into the mix. Susanowo-no-mikoto had mentioned something about volcanoes and putting multiple pieces on the board but maybe I could chalk all of that up to a sex-induced dream-rave.
All the more reason to leave the big showdown to the willing and better equipped.
Something I was trying to explain to the rutabaga for the sixteenth time when his ghostly form began to dissolve.
"The trans-dimensional hyperlink is growing corrupt," it said. "Communication will become more difficult."
As if we had approached anything close to an exchange of clarity during the past couple of hours, I thought. So, no big. Except . . .
If the trans-dimensional conduit was breaking down, it wasn't just a question of losing our two-way real-time conversation—it meant our so-called "passage to the sea" was growing unstable and that could be a very bad thing if the tunnel'o'water went splat while we were still inside!
I threw myself out of my chair and ran through the dissipating ghost of Al on my way to the front of the boat.
"Brace yourselves!" I yelled, grabbing the edge of the pilot's chair.
Cuch and Zotz turned to stare at me. "Brace for what?" they both asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know but it's about to happen!"
The tunnel collapsed.
* * *
I'm not sure what I expected. Maybe that the tunnel—the trans-dimensional conduit—would turn itself inside-out. And us with it!
Or that it would implode, crushing us like the collapse of an elongated singularity.
Or explode, scattering our dust particles through seven different universes.
Instead, we slid into a patch of fog and stayed there, gliding to a near stop.
"Zotz?" I asked, groping for the instrument panel.
"No discernable current," he answered, "maneuvering power only."
"Where are we?"
"In a fog bank, duh!"
"Turn on the GPS, Cap'n Crunch," I growled.
"Oh. Yeah." There was a sound of switches being toggled and the screen flickered to a dim semblance of life behind a filter of grey mist. "Well, whaddaya know? It woiks!" He fiddled with the settings and I got an impression of the graphics shifting and enlarging. I couldn't make out any details.
"So?" I asked impatiently, "Where are we?"
"Looks like we made it . . ." he murmured, tweaking the settings. "According to this your girlfriend delivered us all the way down to the Big Easy."
"Don't start," I warned. Then looked around at the wall of grey mist that encompassed us all sides. "But how close are we to the harbor? If we're in a shipping lane it could be very bad if one of those tankers comes along in the fog and rams us." Never mind a tanker, a collision with a small tugboat would probably sink us just as effectively.
Zotz continued to fiddle with the settings and abruptly gave the monitor a couple of smacks with the palm of his "hand".
"Whoa there, Chief! Don't break the navigator!"
"That would be redundant," he grumped. "It's already broken. According to this we're in New Orleans."
"Yeah. You just said—"
"No, according to this thing we are in New Orleans. Downtown, just off the Mississippi River, in fact."
"What? You're telling me that we've run aground?"
"Does it feel like we've run aground?" The fog was thinning a bit and I could see the frustration on his half-human features more clearly now as consulted the screen. More than that, I could feel the movement of the deck beneath my feet as the New Moon rode a swell of water, the motion indicating a current and cross motion simultaneously working at our hull.
"This piece o'crap . . . high tech . . . scrap . . . places us just beyond the North bank of the Mississippi River, at the apex of Canal and Common Streets!" His mutterings devolved into creative juxtapositions of profanity and technology reviews.
"Zotz," I said slowly, "turn on the fish finders . . ."
His tirade never lost its rhythm or intensity as he flipped the appropriate switches. At least until the screens lit up. "What's this? Test patterns?"
The fish finder screens were displaying an odd assortment of geometric patterns.
Storm surge, I thought, my blood suddenly running cold. We didn't beat the hurricane, it had arrived first. And, unless we were in the relative and momentary calm of the "eye", it had already passed by. Some flooding would have been inevitable: the Big Muddy would be bigger and a lot muddier.
"It looks like a dump down there," Zotz said as he attempted to fine-tune the transponder settings. "I mean, I've got outlines and silhouettes that are definitely man-made: angles, corners, symmetrical configurations . . ." Looking down he didn't notice that the breeze was starting to tear holes in the fog. "What is that? A car?"
Through one of those tentative gaps I could see the New Orleans' World Trade Center just a block or two behind us—aft—I needed to remember my nautical terms, anything to hold on to a sense of perspective in the face of what was appearing through the vanishing mists.
Because my perspective was all screwed up. By the fog, by the water.
By the dawning realization of our likely position.
Nearly a dozen other "tall" buildings of the downtown and warehouse districts were appearing around us, now, and fanning out northward: The Wyndam at Canal Place, the Mariott, One Shell Plaza, Capitol One Tower, the Riverside Hilton, Place St. Charles, the Plaza Tower, Energy Center, National American Bank, Harrah's Hotel, the Sheraton, LL&E Tower, Pan American Life Building, and Tidewater Place . . . all looking strangely familiar and utterly alien at the same time. Two things were wrong with this picture and I recognized both almost simultaneously. We were drifting farther uptown into the middle of the city's geographical arrangement of its high-rise real estate. And all of these landmarks were shorter than usual.
Their first fifteen stories or more were missing.
Those floors and the rest of the city were gone, hidden beneath an inland sea of grey-green water that stretched from here to the visible horizon.
Louisiana had a brand new coastline somewhere else, many miles to the north.
New Orleans had become the New Atlantis!
Chapter Sixteen
What do you say when you're suddenly confronted with an ocean where a half a million people lived?
And it wasn't just a living population swallowed up and gone but some four centuries of history, culture, and tradition.
The music was hushed now. It didn't matter that Buddy Bolden
, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong were already gone and their recordings would live on. And hopefully the still-living greats had evacuated in time—those that weren't out on the road and already on tour. But there were too many that were old or blind or practically lame, now. Too many too stubborn—or too poor—to leave for just another storm. And what about Preservation Hall? Tipitina's? The Funky Butt at Congo Square, Donna's, the Rock'N'Bowl, the Palm Court, Fritzel's, and Snug Harbor? Hell, forget individual venues, New Orleans was The Source. Say what you will about the Jazz scene in Chicago or Kansas City but that all came later and never had the cultural kaleidoscope of diversity or fresh-off-the-boat inventiveness or aged-in-the-wooden-barrel-house history sounds of New Orleans music.
Go to a hundred towns and cities in Louisiana and you'll find a hundred Mardi gras celebrations, each unique and wonderful in its own right. But each only a pale reflection of the original party to end all parties.
And the food . . .
It wasn't like you wouldn't ever eat jambalaya or gumbo or po'boys again. But only the Café du Monde made beignets and café au lait that people came from all over the world to taste. Nobody had a stand up oyster bar like Felix's. You couldn't get better muffulettas anywhere than at Central Grocery. There was the chicken Clemenceau at Feelings, the Bananas Foster at Brennen's, the crawfish pie at Michaul's on St. Charles, the bread puddings at the Bon Ton, the quenelles of goat crème fraîche at Lilette, and fried green tomatoes, grillades, and grits at Café Atchafalaya. Arnaud's shrimp remoulade would never be duplicated. Oh, and the pompano en papillote, Eggs Sardou, andouille, maque choux, tasso, and courtbouillon of redfish! The pralines, king cakes, sweet potato pie, calas, and pain perdu!
I shook myself, the memories of cafés and restaurants, bars and music halls, buildings and landmarks fading. Yes, those places were gone and I mourned them because I knew them.
But a half million people that I didn't know had just become a lesser statistic to me. And that was just the city's population. One and a half million in the greater New Orleans area and, with water stretching in every direction to the horizon, who knew how far inland the sea had struck?
Or how many coastal cities had suffered similar fates between Pensacola and Galveston?
We were afloat on an alien sea and I just couldn't wrap my mind around the scope of the catastrophe.
Never mind.
I couldn't do anything for them now.
I was beginning to see the emotional advantages to becoming a monster.
My mind would be less cluttered with unhelpful emotion when I needed my wits about me. To revisit Joe Stalin, my family was the tragedy; everyone and everything else were just statistics . . .
For now I would concentrate on the task at hand. I would . . .
I slid down the ladder to the lower deck and promptly began throwing up over the side. Mostly dry heaving as I hadn't put anything solid in my stomach for days.
There had to have been time, I told myself as small dollops of stomach bile plinked into the grey green waves. Time for most of the people to have gotten out, gotten to higher ground . . .
But high enough ground?
And how far away?
This was flooding beyond the anticipated disaster of a failed levee system. The sea had been out there, hungrily nibbling its way through the tidal lands and barrier islands that had provided a natural barrier for millennia. Unfortunately, ninety percent of that protection had disappeared in the last fifty years thanks to pipeline channels for oil development and wetland mismanagement. The weight of an increasing population along an unstable coastline added subsidence at the rate of three feet a century to the mix: the whole gulf coast from Mississippi to Texas was sinking at an unprecedented rate. And, every hurricane, every storm surge returned a portion of the sea to its rightful place in defiance of man's best efforts at architecture and pump technology.
"The future of New Orleans tourism is glass-bottom boats," the more enlightened used to boast only half-jestingly.
But even the worst-case scenarios put the anticipated flood stage at no more than eighteen feet.
This . . . I gazed in stupefaction out over the vast expanse of water broken only by the snaggle-toothed under bite of high-rise buildings—this was far worse! The water had to be more than three times as deep as anything dreamed by the Cassandras of modern misfortunes. This flood was no mere meeting of the Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain, the city of New Orleans caught between their overrun banks. The Gulf of Mexico had redrawn its boundary lines, bringing the coastline a lot closer to Baton Rouge.
And, peering at the invisible horizon, there was no way to know whether Baton Rouge had been subsumed, as well.
How could any storm—even a supernatural one—flood hundreds of miles of land, as far as the eye could see?
As if in answer to my question, the surface of the water began to pattern in miniature ripples, like a coarsely woven fabric, flatting out the grosser waves and wind patterns. Bubbles, ranging from delicate strands of pearl-sized hisses to Volkswagen-sized blasts of trapped air broke the surface, turning the ocean around us into a boiling cauldron. The New Moon pitched and turned and the sound of rumbling grew from a sub-harmonic vibration to a full-throated growl: earthquake!
Or, more correctly, a seaquake!
As I looked up in horror, the Greek cross shaped World Trade Center building canted to the left—presumably toward the submerged channel of the Mississippi River—and sank another eight stories beneath the waters.
New Orleans was gone. Gone deep. The dozen or so remaining buildings still showing above the waves were nothing more than tombstones marking her watery grave. Their glass windows shattered, dark, and empty. Devoid of light, motion, life. Based on the number of stories still showing I figured the French Quarter had to be under ninety feet of water easy, even though it traditionally stood on higher ground.
The Orpheum, I thought. What if Lupé and the others had stayed? Tried to ride out the storm like Mooncloud said? Even if the sealed entrance under the theatre was airtight, was the rest of the underground complex once the sea rolled in? If that last temblor was an aftershock, wouldn't one of the previous sea-quakes have cracked their subterranean bunker like an egg? And, even if they were still alive, courtesy of an enormous amount of luck and a large enough air pocket, how was I going to get to them without drowning them in the process?
I slammed my fist against the railing as Zotz called out from above: "Lady in the water! Two points off the starboard beam!"
I didn't know two points off the starboard beam from "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" but Zotz could point from the upper deck and that was all I needed to know. I kicked off my shoes as I rounded the New Moon to the other side, stepped up on the rail, and launched myself outward, punching off so powerfully that I angled down a good thirty feet through the water before I could stop my descent.
My eyes re-lensed and filtered the available light giving me an astonishing glimpse at the remains of the city down below.
I was suspended above section of the riverfront and, as I turned, I could see the Spanish Plaza off to my right. To my left was Woldenberg Riverfront Park, its sculpture gardens befouled with clots of overturned automobiles and seaweed-like clumps of drowned bodies half-emergent from windows and snagged on the stainless steel hoops and pillars of the Ocean Song monument. More disturbing were the bloated faces pressed to the glass ceiling of the Amazon Rainforest, now flooded like the rest of the Aquarium of the Americas, a giant fishbowl turned upside down with human and animal floaters providing food for the fish who had found their way inward.
A street car was on its side, blocking Canal Street adjacent to the Ferry landing. An inconvenience to none, now. But, as I began my stroke and kick to return to the surface, movement caught my eye. I glanced back. Then looked again.
My head broke the surface and I had to reorient everything: direction, light, sound, target. Liban. As I swam toward her I tried to reconcile what
I thought I had seen.
A crew of Deep Ones, laboring with ropes and jacks, to move the trolley as if it were needed elsewhere.
* * *
Rescuing this elven sea goddess was a little more complicated than I expected.
First of all, she was unconscious so I had to swim for the both of us—though thankfully she was buoyant and not all dead weight. At least until I tried to lift her toward Setanta's waiting hands. Eventually I gave up on that bit of impossible gymnastics and looped a rope under her arms so that the big Celt could haul her up like the catch of the day. It was an appropriate metaphor as Liban had "lost" her legs. The lower half of her orange wetsuit had transformed from neoprene to shimmering, coppery scales, fusing together to form a tapering but unified fishtail, overlaid with a mottled grid work of semicircles and arced patterns reminiscent of a lionfish. From the hips up she was just as hu—er—elvish—as she was before.
But, obviously, there was something to those mermaid stories beyond an overabundance of rum and too much time at sea.
Setanta placed her in my bed and checked her eyes and pulse while I changed into dry clothes.
"I can find no injuries," he said, combing through her dark, wet tresses to examine her scalp. "She seems to be but unconscious. As like the product of exhaustion."
"Yeah," I said, toweling off and grabbing another shirt out of the closet, "opening dimensional gateways always leaves me feeling a bit peaked . . ." I saw the look on his face as he looked back up at me. "Kidding. Just kidding . . ." Anything to keep from thinking too much, too soon.
The lights in the cabin went out.
"Now what?"
There was enough daylight filtering in through the portholes to find my way to the dresser and extract a flashlight from the top drawer. Turning it on, I tossed it to the big Celt. "Stay here and keep an eye on her. I'll go see what the problem is."
I crashed about the lower level as I hopped into a pair of dry chinos and carried my deck shoes up the ladder to the helm and Zotz.
"Yeah," he said as I sat to put on my shoes, "I turned off the generator."
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