Watermind

by M M Buckner

  But Max couldn’t hear her prayers. The Watermind’s noise confounded him. Nothing in his multifarious creed of spirits, devils, and saints had prepared him for the colloid’s anguished scream. Max sensed a trapped soul, fighting for its life.

  As the bristling wreckage crashed against the dam, he pounded Rayette’s hood with his bandaged hand and signaled to her through the windshield. “Go!” he shouted over the jangling rattle of water. When her tires spun in the mud, he put his shoulder to her rear bumper and shoved till she gained purchase and fishtailed away. Then he listened to the rage.

  Chunks of floating steel hammered the dam, and spray geysered upward, then fell in a deluge. The nanocarbon gates jolted, and the sandbags behind them moved. Max covered his ears.

  Everyone was running. He saw injured people struggling up the slick bank, and he hurried to lift Betty De-Cuir over his shoulder. Rory Godchaux yelled through a megaphone, “We got a chopper coming. Load the wounded first.” Rory held one elbow at an unnatural angle and grimaced with pain. A rocketing steel bollard had dislocated his shoulder.

  As Max handed Betty to a medic, rotor blades frapped overhead, and Rory signaled to the pilot. But it was not their rescue chopper; it was FOX News. One lone copper-haired reporter was still capturing visuals. Rory shot him a finger.

  Max helped a wounded deputy, but his attention stayed riveted to the water’s tortured howl. The pitch rose to an ear-splitting ache as metallic edges scraped the glassy blue gates. Over and over, the spiky mass rocked against the dam, and with each deafening jolt, more of the sandbags shifted.

  “He’ll break through!” someone shouted.

  Max turned. That was CJ’s voice. He saw her running along the base of the levee, and Roman Sacony was with her. “Ceegie!” Max called, but his voice was lost in the din.

  As the colloid plunged against the gates, each violent boom propagated a bombastic reaction wave that mushroomed outward at tremendous speed and walloped the levees. CJ was standing much too near the waterline. Max hurried toward her. He saw her arguing with Sacony. When Sacony tried to drag her away from the water, she fought him.

  “Ceegie!” Max called again.

  As he drew near, she turned and recognized him. Emotions blew across her face like clouds. Max shuddered. No one had ever looked at him that way.

  “You’re alive.” She took a step toward him.

  Then another reaction wave smacked the levee and gouged the earth beneath their feet. The bank caved, and the three of them slid down the collapsing mud. Cold electric water crashed over them. Sacony clenched CJ’s waist and locked forearms with Max, while Max dug for a hold in the mud. As the receding wave tried to tear them apart, his bandaged hand closed on a lump of broken concrete. He strained to keep his grip on Sacony’s arm. They clung to each other as the water raked over their entangled limbs.

  Another mighty wave was gathering. Quickly, they helped each other climb up the streaming mud. Sacony boosted CJ up to the grassy bank above the cave-in, then laced his fingers and offered a foothold to Max.

  “No arguments. Go,” Sacony barked.

  Max stepped into his hand and bounded upward. The next wave was crashing in. Max reached down and caught Sacony’s hands. The wave hit like a cyclone, but their joined grip held. CJ anchored Max’s legs while he hauled the slender Sacony up through the violent froth. After the wave subsided, they crawled higher through the grass, reeling and knocking heads, side-by-side on their knees.

  Then a new noise made them turn and stare at the water. One sustained harmonic chord rose and fell like the moan of bees. Max felt the G sharp in his teeth. The nanocarbon gates were vibrating. The colloid had found their resonant frequency. Reflections quivered over their glossy blue planes as their molecular bonds oscillated. Max couldn’t speak the scientific language, but he knew the gates were going to blow. He reached over Sacony’s kneeling body and clutched CJ’s arm.

  When the nanocarbon gates shattered, a trillion azure shards sprayed through the air, and the plume shot forward through the breach. Glistening water flushed through the rubble of sandbags with a sound of blasting velocity. The yellow NovaDam barriers parted like tent flaps, and beyond the dam, the plume dropped its tonnage of metal and accelerated downslope in a chain of jubilant standing waves. With a noise like laughter, it gushed toward the ocean.

  CJ’s voice choked. “Max, I—Forgive me. I—”

  “Amou.” He pulled her toward him and kissed her, while Sacony rocked back on his haunches and exhaled a loud sigh through his nose.

  “I need your help,” she finished. Then she sprang up and darted toward the aluminum airboat that was wedged behind the rampart.

  Sacony snorted again, then quirked his eyebrows at Max. They bumped shoulders getting up off the ground.

  “We have to follow the colloid,” CJ shouted. “We can’t risk losing him in the ocean.”

  “I’ll track the picaro by satellite.” Roman glowered at his ruined dam. “I’ll order missiles. I won’t give up.”

  CJ jerked at the airboat and kicked its frame, but it was wedged too tight. “Grab the stern, Max. Please?”

  Max eyed the long silvery plume that was still galloping through the breached dam. “Ceegie, we cain’ launch a boat in that.”

  Roman squeezed Max’s forearm. “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to take Reilly somewhere safe.”

  Max shook him off. “Keep your mauvais largan.”

  CJ threw herself at the airboat and knocked it free. Before anyone could react, the boat slid down the wet bank. CJ raced after it, and when it reached the water’s edge, she made a running jump for the deck. But she missed. She fell into the charging liquid. Both men ran for her. Roman found a broken tree branch and sprinted along the bank, thrusting it out for her to grab. Max dove.

  CJ watched them through white whirling foam. She stretched out her hands, but the current ripped her away. Eyes wide, she saw the world brimming past. Deep under the water she plunged, where everything grew quiet. Air bubbles leaked from her nose. She clutched her vulnerable abdomen and thought of the embryo quickening in her womb.

  What have I done?

  This was a mistake. She didn’t mean to fall in. She fought for the surface, but the current pulled her down. The colloid’s electric field tingled her scalp, and a kind of clarity spread through the current. Water teased her lips apart. It seeped under her eyelids and osmosed her pores. She felt invaded, borderless, soaked. Here was the oblivion she’d longed for. All questions revoked. All decisions moot. She had only to open her mouth and breathe.

  She shut her lips tight. No, Harry. I will not follow you. She kicked harder for the surface. And waves of urgency rippled down through her flesh and blood to her water-nested child. Stay alive.

  When her shoulder bumped something hard, she spun to fend it away. Then a powerful force lifted her out of the water into the bright sharp air. She lay choking and sputtering on the corrugated aluminum deck of the airboat. And there was Max.

  “Hold to me,” he said.

  In the burning sunlight, she clung to his forearm and fought for breath, and in seconds, she felt happier than she’d ever been in her life.

  Snow

  Sunday, March 20

  2:09 PM

  Through the broken dam they plowed, down the bottle-green tongue of standing waves. Up up up the airboat soared, skyward, into the blue. A foamy crest broke across the deck and drenched them in white. Then down they fell into the trough, only to rise again, up up up through another crest.

  Finally, they spun out of the wave train into the chuting rapids below. As the flood gushed downslope, glistening green spindrift lashed around road signs and lifted concrete barriers. Gloriously it leaped in fissioning white froth. Rabbits shivered in treetops. Beavers clutched at driftwood.

  Spinning, dipping, rinsing clean, CJ and Max rode in the lap of the Watermind. The colloid grew calmer as it rushed unfettered toward the lake and the sea. Currents washed the airboat far out from sho
re, and when Max tried the engine, the ignition clicked uselessly.

  “The electronics are dead,” CJ told him.

  He rifled through the storage bins but found no oars. He massaged his bandaged hand.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Glucose esters saturated the breeze, and spray flew up in curling wisps. Sugar molecules collected in Max’s curly hair like rosary beads. His amber eyes searched her face.

  “I mean it,” she said.

  She knelt on the deck and smiled at him. Then she beat a tentative 3/4 rhythm with her fist. Max smiled and nodded. He took off a work boot and drummed the corrugated metal with his sole, while his good right hand whispered over the deck, rasping a syncopated backbeat.

  She remembered the castanets in her bag and got them out. “Play them,” she said.

  He held up his bandaged left hand. “You do it, lamie.”

  She lay flat on the deck, stuck her arms in the current and clapped the wooden shells underwater, while Max scat-sang an accompaniment in his powerful baritone.

  Abruptly, the air turned chill, and their boat came to a thudding halt. Quickly, Max pulled her back from the water. She didn’t understand until she heard the ringing crack. The water around them was icing.

  With a reverberant snap, ice solidified across the marsh, coating stems and grasses, hardening over every surface in a frosty sheathe of white. Birds took to the air. Insects froze in place. Except for one helicopter circling overhead, a cottony silence fell. Then a low tone boomed through the ice. With rising hope, she recognized the rhythm.

  Max cocked his ear. “It’s a waltz.”

  They listened. It was not a simple waltz. Stresses shifted unexpectedly and landed on offbeats. The rhythm grew richer, more nuanced. Again and again, the tempo leaped out of time, then beautifully recovered. It was like Max’s syncopation, with a different accent.

  “He heard us,” she said.

  Max grinned. “Oh yeah. He jammin’.”

  Soon, the booming music whispered to nothing, and opaque white silence stilled the air, as if the waltz had been a sublime dream. Miles away on the lake, boat sirens cried.

  “Why did he stop?” she said.

  Max’s golden eyes flashed. “He giving us our turn.”

  Of course. The Watermind wanted a reply. She could sense the bated expectation. But she had no idea how to answer.

  “Like this,” Max said.

  With his good hand, he clutched her fingers and rubbed them over the corrugated deck. Their joined fingers moved quickly under Max’s motive guidance, wet skin against dry metal, a friction of edges. Their floating frottior rasped a subtle refrain, piquant in the bridge.

  Unnoticed around them, a layer of ice sublimated in a fine sparkling mist. When CJ saw it, her breath caught. The cloud of infinitesimal ice crystals sifted together in loose molecular motion, catching the sunlight in brilliant tiny winks. Like faceted diamonds. Like microchips. She rolled on her back to watch the fog rise against the bright cloudless sky.

  “Bèl.” Max waved his hand, and fractal patterns spiraled through his fingers.

  Then, to her exquisite joy, the fog refracted a fan of color. The apparition of light and water shimmered across the marsh. Six clear prismatic bands. The rainbow doubled, then tripled. Its fleeting hues dyed the air.

  “He heard,” she whispered again.

  “Oui. He make a painting.”

  “A painting of water.” She grinned at Max’s notion.

  The ice fog massed thicker. Downy white, scintillating with flashes, it hovered over the frozen marsh and filtered the sunlight. Caught between solid ice and icy mist, CJ felt transported to winterland. Something feathery and wet tickled her eyelash. Then another wet feather kissed her cheek. She held out her hand and caught one.

  “Snowflakes.” Max laughed. “First I ever see.”

  He lay down beside her as the lacy crystals dallied through the air, gusting in veils too well patterned to be accidental.

  “They’re moving in alignment with the field,” she said while Max caught snowflakes on his tongue.

  Soon the rainbow faded, and the fog dissolved. Its residue precipitated back to the ice and hardened in a smooth glaze. Again, the sky burned blue, and the Louisiana sun singed their unprotected skin. The airboat shifted, then dipped and swung free in the rapidly melting slush. Liquefied, the colloid surged on toward Lake Pontchartrain.

  “He heard,” CJ whispered. “He knows we’re here.”

  Max tightened his grip on her hand. “We gotta ride it out.”

  Fall

  Sunday, March 20

  2:48 PM

  “Madre de Cristo. Idiot girl.” Roman jolted along the access road, careening around parked cars and skidding through the mire. He’d commandeered Michael Creque’s flatbed truck, and its cumbersome four-wheel-drive gearing fought him at every turn. It drove like a tank.

  Closer he steered to the rampaging stream. When he caught sight of Reilly in the boat with Max Pottevents, he let out a groan of relief. Down the slope he churned, through brush and willows. Shallow ditches caught at his wheels, and sumps tried to snare him. When mud splattered his windshield, he switched on the wiper blades. He could just make out CJ’s red windbreaker in the distance, the jacket he’d lent her days ago.

  A hundred yards from his truck, the colloid rushed downstream, answering the call of gravity. No longer silver, it had reverted to the rusty mossy brownish black of swamp water. But Roman knew the violador had not changed. He saw through his adversary’s disguise.

  CJ Reilly had recognized the truth before him. The colloid could think and plan. How an unholy brew of pollution had spawned a sentient computer network, he still couldn’t grasp. Its processes were too manifold and eclectic. Scientists would sift though the data for years. But Roman understood its motives. He knew that if this enemy survived, it would compete for resources and seek dominion over the Earth. There would be no conversation. No music. No rational exchange. There would be only war.

  Here in this place, in this North American river, the colloid had defeated him. He had not come to terms with that yet. The word, failure, waited like a thorn in his mind. Already his logic was thickening around it, sealing out the pain. There would be time later, to regroup, to raise new funds, to plan an expedition at sea. Roman would not give up.

  For now, he focused only on Reilly’s red jacket. Foolish querida. So intelligent, and yet so reckless. For the first time, he genuinely wanted to comprehend her vagaries. As the truck jolted along, he caught quick glimpses of the Creole boat man. The boyfriend.

  The aluminum airboat flashed sunlight as it spun through the unbridled flood. He wrestled the truck’s steering wheel to keep her in sight. The truck was laboring over a rooty hummock when sun struck his windshield and blinded him. He opened the door and stood on the runningboard in time to watch the airboat smack a weir pin.

  “Reilly!” He slammed his door and mashed the accelerator. Did the boat overturn? He couldn’t see. The truck labored through a thicket of broken saplings, and he calculated. A hundred yards to reach the streambank. A fifty-foot rope in the back. The current moving at two thousand cubic feet per second. He pumped the accelerator.

  “Swim, you idiot girl.”

  Ahead, the ground slanted into a sinkhole, and he had to detour. Trees blocked his view. He swerved to miss a running deer, and he thought of her hair, the silly way it stuck out from her head like chicken feathers. His breath rose and fell in a prayerful chant.

  “Gallinita, swim.”

  Steam

  Sunday, March 20

  2:53 PM

  High in the sky, Hal Butler circled the wreckage. Where the spillway emptied into Lake Pontchartrain, a huge midden of trash and mud had collected—tree limbs, weir pins, Styrofoam coolers. Hal saw dead bodies. “There,” he ordered his chopper pilot down.

  When they dropped lower to catch some footage, Hal noticed one of the bodies reaching toward the other. Fascinated, he zoomed his
lens for a close-up as the two people slid together and embraced. Survivors. A poignant scene. Hal knew at once it had Pulitzer quality.

  Then he recognized CJ Reilly. The chick who refused his interview. He’d been watching her for days through various camera viewfinders. He almost felt he knew her. As she wrapped her legs around the dark man beside her, Hal’s finger toyed with the “record” button. But as they kissed and clung to each other, he hesitated.

  Somewhere deep in his vestigial heart, Hal Butler recognized a private moment. He surprised himself. He let the shot slip by. With a perplexed frown, he told the pilot there was nothing to see. “We need carnage,” he said. Then they whirred up the spillway, seeking the color red.

  Far below, half-buried in mud, CJ lay with Max. Her hands ached from clinging to the airboat fin, and she stared straight up at the moon. In broad hazy daylight, it shimmered like a dime.

  “You awright?” he asked.

  She wiggled her toes. “Yes. You?”

  “I guess.”

  She covered her face with her arm. The ordeal had left her numb. Some dim part of her brain urged her to seek another boat and follow the Watermind across the lake, but she couldn’t move. The warm silt cradled her, and soupy water lapped at her skin. There was no noise, no birdsong or insect whine, no thundering flood. She and Max lay together in the shallows, half in, half out of the brackish water, holding hands.

  Minutes passed. Mindless peace. She drifted. The guttural blare of an engine woke her. Something heavy and loud was breaking through the trees along the streambank. It sounded like a charging elephant. She saw branches splitting and leaves flying apart. Then the metal truck grill emerged. The door opened, and Roman splashed through the water toward her.