Watermind

by M M Buckner

  He lay still, not ready to wake her, not sure how he wanted this to play out. His swollen member felt sore and raw—they must have made love five times during the night. This wasn’t like him. He took his pleasures discreetly, far from the office, with long-limbed Cuban putas whose skin gleamed as brown as molasses. It wasn’t like him to choose a white girl. It certainly wasn’t like him to forget his work.

  Gallinita, he had called her. Little chicken, because her hair stuck out like feathers. She thought he was calling her by another girl’s name until he translated. Now he eased his arm out from under her head—and felt her come awake. With a faint cry, she sat up, looked at the room, at the sheets, at him. Her first tender words were, “Oh my God.”

  The regret in her voice galled him. Spoiled Anglo brat. When she covered her breasts with a pillow, he wanted to slap her. Their mingled pheromones wafted from the sheets, and his hand moved involuntarily to her cheek. But his touch was gentle. His fingertips slid down her throat, along her collarbone, and under the pillow to her breast. He pushed the pillow aside to toy with her nipple. Its pink areola tightened like an unopened bud.

  “Roman, I should go.”

  Her words incensed him. He covered her mouth with his hand. Women did not reject him. They pursued him. Only one girl, long ago, one brown-skinned querida in Buenos Aires, the city of beautiful air. She took his soul and squeezed it like a lemon.

  Corrienta. A bitter taste welled in his mouth at the thought of her name. Tall, dark, rich, a year ahead of him at the universidad. She teased him with promises, made him believe—then blithely married a German. In the days and nights before her wedding, he stalked her through the streets and pleaded, till her father hired bodyguards to force him away. Even after Corrienta moved into her husband’s new brick mansion, Roman wrote her eloquent letters. He paced under her window. He left gifts with the servants. One bleak night, he broke into her rose garden and poisoned the ground with salt.

  But that was decades ago. Since then, he’d married Quimicron, and soon he would consummate his brightest desires. He would not be defeated again. Certainly, this blanca would not reject him today. The smell of her body in the sheets tantalized him. He snatched the pillow away and squeezed her breasts.

  “No,” she whimpered, but he did not believe her.

  He turned her on her stomach, nibbled her neck, and murmured in Spanish, “You seduced me, yes? This must be what you wanted.”

  Then he pushed her head down in the pillow and entered her hard.

  Later in the shower, he heard her leaving and regretted that he’d played so rough. He would have to call later and smooth her feathers. But there would be time. She wouldn’t bolt from his science team again. He had seen her hunger to learn about the thing he’d caught in his lagoon.

  Shaving, he observed a face in the mirror that had weathered and aged. Had he always set his mouth in such a grim line? His eyes had not always been so hollow. He tried to smile, and for an instant, he caught a glimpse of the man he had been before Quimicron fell on him like a wolf and swallowed his life. Gallinita. Funny little thing. But she was very young.

  Drain

  Tuesday, March 15

  7:30 AM

  Max sat on the sidewalk outside his ex-wife Sonia’s modest frame house. He still wore the same crusted jeans and T-shirt he’d worn throughout the previous day and night, and the same faded paryaka still covered his head. The morning was cold, so he’d pulled on a sweatshirt for warmth. Melted sleet left the asphalt damp and glistening, and his breath came out in puffs. His boots rested in the gutter, where threads of gray water eddied around his heels and branched like roads on a map.

  A dog’s wet nose nudged his armpit, but he didn’t move. He listened to the sweet ringing sound of water trickling down the storm drain. The soughing of traffic and wind lulled him till he caught himself nodding off. On the sidewalk beside him sat a crumpled brown bag that, at first glance, might have held a pint of whisky. This bag, though, held a clever little pink plastic jewel box with a hinged lid. And inside the box, on a bed of white cotton, lay his daughter’s silver necklace. He was waiting to catch a glimpse of her, maybe walk her to school, though this wasn’t his allotted visiting day. Still, the sight of little Marie always made him glad.

  Max had known from the beginning that Ceegie’s affection wouldn’t last. Amou, he called her in his heart. She was so wise about facts and numbers and science. In truth, Max believed she might be a genius. But about living in the world? She was a timoun, a child. And worse, she didn’t know it.

  Himself, he was good only for physical labor and for playing the frottior, but that was nothing—so he believed. The songs he wrote, the somber elegies set to pulsing zydeco percussion, he counted them as scribbles and jokes, of no value. So naturally, he had expected every day that his Ceegie would leave him. Still, that didn’t make it easier.

  He never said he loved her because those words would sound bigheaded. Yet each time he saw the bright scary shine in her river-colored eyes, he wanted to shield her in his arms. Her pale fingernails chewed to the quick caused Max a crushing pain of fondness. He adored her feverish heat as she lay curled next to him in bed, maybe snoring a little, like a small cat. Sometimes he toyed with her hair while she slept.

  Most of all, he loved her lespir, her soul wind. Ceegie had a symphony welling inside her. It troubled him to see how she fought against her lespir and blocked its flow till it raged and stormed in her chest. Often when she talked about numbers and facts, he could hear the fluent strains of her lespir trying to get free. But she dammed her soul wind behind a wall of resentful memories.

  Max didn’t understand her grievance against her popa, but he knew that grievance kept her thinking like a child. What he loved was the woman who waited inside her like an unopened bud. And as he listened to the water tinkling down the gutter drain, he knew he’d lost his chance to witness her flowering.

  At the street corner, Marie hopped and squealed, and Max shot to his feet. He saw her climb into a van full of children. “Timoun!” He waved and called her name. He had missed hearing her step on the sidewalk. He caught only the swish of her pink cotton coat as the van door slammed.

  After the van drove away, Max stood gripping his little paper bag and questioning the choices he’d made. He glanced at his watch. Mr. Godchaux would be short-handed today. Mr. Godchaux was offering double wages. Max sucked his teeth. Then he stuffed Marie’s gift in his pocket and headed back to work.

  Run

  Tuesday, March 15

  9:14 AM

  CJ sat on the floor of her motel room staring into the desolate black mouth of her open suitcase. The dawn sleet had vaporized, and its mist hung in the air like a presence, blurring the edges of things. A Web site offering cheap tickets to Mexico glimmered on her laptop, and her trusty Boston banker had pumped fresh liquid assets into her checking account. Cozumel. Ixtapa. Cabo San Lucas. She could fly to any of those places in time for cocktails. Today was the anniversary of her father’s death.

  Four times, she had jammed all her underwear into the side pocket of her suitcase, smashing the cotton lace with her fist and forcing the zipper closed. Four times, she had pulled it out again. Now her bras and panties, dirty and clean, lay scattered over the bed, and she sat on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. On the nightstand lay a pair of wooden castanets. She couldn’t look at them. She hated Roman Sacony. She couldn’t face Max. She felt dirty. She had to run.

  “So why don’t you pack?” Harry laughed.

  She gripped her hair in her fists. “You’re dead.”

  Her swollen breasts still hurt from Roman’s roughness. She shivered, feeling his hands all over her. His semen still leaked from her crevices and made damp stains in her underpants.

  Harry chortled aloud. “Have we engaged in a bit of procreation?”

  “Leave me alone,” she growled at the empty room.

  But his smug whisper rattled her brain. “Did we make a wee babe to carr
y on our line?”

  CJ kneaded her belly. No way could that be true. Roman wore condoms last night. Every time . . . didn’t he? And Max. Cautious Max always wore condoms . . . except . . . except for that one day in the pirogue.

  She felt between her legs. What if? Somewhere amid the ruddy gel in her womb, what if a sperm and egg had coalesced? She pinched her belly till it bruised. What if a tiny sack, as fragile as a droplet, were clinging to her uterine wall?

  “Get out.” She punched her abdomen hard. “Abort!”

  That’s easy, Harry purred.

  Then the image that haunted her dreams flared awake. The open door, the lamp knocked to one side, the spray of blood slowly darkening on the sea-green wall. One year ago today, she found Harry lying facedown across his desk.

  She seized the wooden castanets to fling at the wall, but instead, she pressed them to her lips. They clattered under her touch like someone speaking. The room lights went dim. The walls closed in on her. Everything seemed to funnel down and down until, like a cry from another world, her cell phone rang. And the Long Island accent of Peter Vaarveen yammered in her ear.

  “This is your wake-up call. In five minutes, the Queen Bitch will start blasting your swamp creature with sound waves. Sacony said it was your idea.”

  She tossed the castanets aside. “Where are you?”

  Peter gave directions to the holding lagoon where they had isolated a shred of the colloid. She pulled on running shoes without bothering to tie the laces. The forgotten suitcase tumbled off the bed. Minutes later, she was racing down Highway 61, nearly sideswiping a Chevy Tahoe.

  Splash

  Tuesday, March 15

  10:08 AM

  Inside Quimicron’s fenced grounds, the holding lagoon rose like a small volcanic caldera. Its oval bowl lay within a thick earthen embankment, reinforced with concrete and lined with clay. Concrete steps led up to a steel catwalk that circled the rim, and half a dozen security lights cast a fading brilliance in the morning sunlight.

  The black conduit that Captain Creque had used to pump the canal water still drooped over one side like an abandoned snakeskin. An enormous blue plastic swimming pool cover floated over the lagoon, and a stack of computer equipment leaned against the catwalk rail. Every surface shimmered with heat. Yue and Vaarveen were absorbed in their work.

  “Stop!” CJ ran up the steps, waving her arms.

  Yue looked at her watch. Her eyes were hidden behind opaque black sunglasses, but her sallow skin mottled to lavender. Peter sat behind her, smirking.

  When CJ spotted the Lubell speakers glinting in the sunlight, she slowed to catch her breath. She wasn’t too late. They hadn’t lowered the speakers into the water yet. She knelt by the audio amp. The hot concrete burned her knees.

  “We need to start at low volume, then check for feedback,” she said. “If we start too loud, we might antagonize it, and that’s just the opposite of what we—”

  Yue’s long shadow fell across the amp, and CJ squinted up to see the woman’s skeletal silhouette haloed against the sun. Yue’s voice rippled with tiny tremolos of irritation. “Roman says you have another new hypothesis.”

  Heat wavered around Yue like a solar flare, making CJ’s eyes water. The woman’s voice echoed like all the black-clad MIT pedagogues who had stood in judgment of CJ’s intellect. She remembered twisting herself inside-out to win their praise, because anything less drew Harry’s verdict that she was flighty, ungrateful, and capricious—like her mother.

  CJ realized she was kneeling before Yue like a menial, so she got to her feet and brushed off her dirty knees. “It’s about language,” she said, coughing to clear her throat. Then in the disciplined academic style Harry had taught her, she defended the theory she’d been piecing together in her mind.

  It had probably taken years, she said, for the fragmented microchips in the pond to assemble their first embryonic neural net. The proplastid algae goo must have sealed the chips and kept their circuits intact. And though each individual chip had limited capabilities, once they began passing signals through the water, their pooled code must have evolved along complex new lines. Now, the neural net was seeking to interact with its environment. Hence the response to music.

  “That 4/4 beat from my iPod was probably the closest thing to computer language he has encountered since his—birth.”

  When CJ said “birth,” Yue tightened her grip on her elbows, but Peter Vaarveen grinned. Non compos mentis, CJ could read the judgment in their eyes. So when they actually began setting up the equipment to test her theory, she thought the heat was making her hallucinate. She didn’t realize Roman had ordered them to assist her.

  Yue said to Peter, “Show her the new data.”

  “Yes, my queen.”

  Peter bent over his workstation and opened a file for CJ to browse. “You’re right about the coating of plant sap. It protects their electronics. Keeps them from shorting out. But there’s too much proplastid. Even in a swamp choked with algae, you would never expect to find so much.”

  “So you investigated?” CJ crossed her arms and waited.

  Peter batted his pale eyelashes. “Gen mod,” he announced, meaning “genetic modification.” Embedded in the algae bloom, he’d found numerous commercially engineered plant cells dating from as far back as the 1990s. He showed her the list: corn cells laced with pest toxins, wheat germ spliced with reptile genes, tobacco fiber secreting human proteins. The proplastid had digested them all.

  “This juice is a bad boy,” Peter said with admiration.

  The lagoon sample held a warehouse of other particles even more exotic than those Yue found earlier: Jerky little motorized ratchets only a few molecules in size. Asynchronous semiconductors designed to speed up local coordination in massive computer circuits. Neuromorphic nanochips copied after the human optic nerve for use in robotic eyes.

  CJ laughed and clapped her hands.

  “It gets better.” Peter called up a graphic file showing the pair of microchip chains they’d found drifting at the center of the EM field. To the naked eye, the thready conglomerate appeared invisible, or at best a milky blur. He said the structure polarized and refracted light, camouflaging its position. But once Yue lit up the mass with isotope marker dyes, it resembled a loose drifting braid of yarn. CJ gazed at the image with an open mouth. Yue had been the first to call the structure a skein.

  Finally, Peter showed CJ their real breakthrough. Nested inside the paired chains, they found a working mote computer.

  “Working?” CJ’s breath caught.

  “Yeah, a live mote. It’s emitting radio waves.” Peter spoke as if he could hardly believe it himself. His sunburned skin was peeling, and his hair stood up in greasy white shocks. He showed her the image on screen, then compared it to a schematic downloaded from a Canadian manufacturer’s Web site. The image showed a layered cube, smaller than a pinhead, laced with complex circuitry and packing its own miniscule solar battery. “It’s got waterproof sensors, a processor. It’s designed to take weather readings and send bursts of radio code.”

  The discovery went to CJ’s head like a drug. When Yue acknowledged that some of the microchips were actively echoing the mote’s signals, CJ felt like crowing.

  She rushed to the lagoon rim, pealed back the plastic cover and stuck her arm in elbow deep. The water wasn’t frigid, it felt warm and tingly. You’re real. She felt ready to burst with gladness. She bounced up and spun Peter Vaarveen in a circle. Yue sneered, but Peter didn’t seem to mind.

  Yue insisted the microchip skein was an accidental arrangement with no permanent form, like a splash or a rainbow. She even played a time-exposure sequence showing how it repeatedly dissolved and reformed, always in a slightly different shape.

  “So what? We’re all accidents.” CJ felt too elated to get mad. “You could say the whole universe is a fricking accident.”

  “Oh brother.” Peter tried to get the women on another subject. He told them the particles were circulating
in synchronized patterns, and he downloaded a flocking “boid” simulation to show what he meant. On his screen, a cluster of computer-generated green spheres wheeled and shifted like schooling fish. CJ found the graphic eerie and hypnotic, but Yue called it a kid’s video game.

  Yue stood clutching her elbows with her long spiny fingers. “I have business at the canal. Someone let our captive out of its collar yesterday, and I have to catch it again. So unless you have more brilliant theories, Ms. Reilly, let’s get this farce over with.”

  Hormonal heat flushed CJ’s cheeks and robbed her of the sharp comeback she longed to hurl. She couldn’t have guessed that the older woman’s emotions were as muddled as her own. At that moment, Yue wanted to drown CJ in the river. Yue had seen her leaving Roman’s hotel room.

  For a moment, Yue stared at her rival. Then she marched away to the end of the dock, refastening her braid. Roman had slept with this trashy little tart? Insufferable. But Yue had been through this before, and she knew Roman’s affairs didn’t last. Inwardly, she scolded herself for letting feelings interfere with her work. But she had sacrificed so much. Her bones ached. Her skin felt too tight.

  She clawed through her pocket for the red-and-black capsule, then swallowed it without water. There was much to do. Creque was repositioning the collar this morning, trying to enclose the colloid again. She needed to be there, but Roman insisted that she help this stupid girl. She rubbed her hands to hide the trembling. Then, with a bitter cough, she returned and set to work.

  Peter lowered the speakers into the water. “Shall we begin our little broadcast?”

  For the next hour, Yue, Peter, and CJ bounced rhythmic tones through the lagoon. They tried binary code, prime numbers, logarithms. Sometimes, the water rippled and hazed, but Yue demonstrated beyond a doubt that these so-called “responses” were merely currents of heat convection.