by M M Buckner
From her net bag, she unrolled one of Max’s leather belts and strapped it around her waist. Then she carabinered her field finder and a few other necessary items to the belt. The canal exhaled a frosty fust of petroleum and rot. She squatted at the water’s edge, scooped up a vial full, and used a simple field test of litmus paper to check the pH. Her flashlight’s beam showed the pH was low, slightly more acidic than vinegar. A short exposure wouldn’t hurt her.
She dipped her hand into the frigid water, and slimy cold ribbons tickled her wrist. In the darkness, she couldn’t see if they were blades of grass, strands of algae, or Asian water flukes, the parasitic flatworms that were just beginning to infest Louisiana streams. She yanked her hand back.
Sitting on a flat rock, she tugged on the awkward boots. The cold rubber gave her gooseflesh. Then she psyched herself to step into the water. “You won’t hurt me,” she murmured, “will you?”
The canal’s mucid bank sloped down sharply, and she hadn’t expected that. On her first step, her boot slid, and she went deep. Only by batting wildly at the water did she keep upright. Her splashes drew a chorus of crickets, like a hundred chainsaws starting up.
Wet to her midriff, both boots full of freezing cold water, she realized there would be no possibility of wading far enough out to get a clear reading. The canal was too deep, and the collar floated fifty yards away. She would have to swim. “But I won’t put my head under,” she said, inciting another explosion of cricket song.
If Max were here, he would stop her. Longing for Max, she struggled out of her heavy boots and slung them onto the bank. Then, she drew a deep breath, kicked off from the bottom and dog-paddled, holding her head erect and keeping her mouth closed tight. The water smelled like a toilet, and the gear swinging from her belt created drag. Harry seemed to be standing on her shoulders, weighing her down. “Daughter, if it’s death you want, this is a clumsy choice.”
Her arms pulled at the cold water until her shoulders burned, and yet the collar seemed as far away as ever. Finally, she rolled on her back and floated, letting the corrosive water sluice through her hair. What am I doing here? The thought washed through her. What the hell am I doing?
Overhead, gray clouds streaked the rose-colored dawn like smoke signals, and a flock of egrets flew low over the water. As CJ floated on her back, an irrational but comforting certainty flooded over her that she and the colloid shared a mutual understanding. He would not hurt her. She kicked her feet and backstroked for the collar.
At last, she made a grab for the PVC boom and hung on, panting. For several minutes, she dangled there, catching her breath and easing her muscles. The air smelled—good. By now the collar had puckered inward to a fraction of its former size. Only a few hundred gallons of liquid still sloshed inside, and as she trailed one arm through its fresh pure clarity, she didn’t notice at first that her hand was stinging.
Acid? She shrieked and yanked her hand back. In the dawn light, her skin looked red, but it wasn’t blistered from acid. It was simply cold.
Cautiously, she dipped her fingers into the water again—and gasped. The water inside the collar felt icy. Frigid waves welled up like an artesian spring tapping straight down to Antarctica. It smelled clean. What a contrast to the rank stew of the canal. She let the droplets spill down her arm like shavings of frost.
As she heaved her chest up onto the boom, the collar sank under her weight, and for an instant, she went completely under. Pure water enfolded her. It rinsed through her hair and tingled her skin, and the sharp cold both hurt and soothed her. When the collar buoyed her up again, she drew a watery breath and tasted perfume. As the rarefied liquid stirred and aroused her, she drifted into a odd reverie. For no clear reason, she felt convinced the colloid recognized her. She straddled the boom.
Beneath the salmon-colored sky, she rocked to and fro, mashing down the collar and letting foamy bubbles spill all around her. The cold intoxicating water entwined her in achy sweetness. She lost track of where she was. Back and forth she rocked, squeezing the boom between thighs. Her crotch grew creamy. As her pleasure increased, more and more of the milky emulsion seeped out over her thighs. Pangs of orgasm made her grit her teeth as the liquid ice swept her through multiple bucking waves of carnal heat.
After the sharpest peak had passed, she rested, lying on the collar like a hammock and letting cool water bathe her face. She barely noticed the sudsy white emulsion drifting down the canal.
All at once she sat up and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. She’d never behaved that way in public before. She felt ashamed and frightened. Perhaps she’d imagined the whole episode. When she checked her field finder, she found herself at the edge of a powerful energy field that was slowly moving away to the West. She thought the magnetism must be affecting her brain.
With a little shake to clear her mind, she unclipped another piece of gear, a small water-resistant MP3 player made for use in the shower. She’d already cued it to play Max’s zydeco. When she slipped on the headset to make sure it was working, the romping beat surrounded her, and Max’s sonorous baritone lilted loud and merry.
“Max,” she whispered.
She lowered the player on a fishing line into the collar, and as music propagated through the water, she watched her field finder for a response. This was a crazy idea. Harry would have taunted her for days. But hadn’t the pond mimicked the zydeco rhythms before?
Music was a kind of a numeric code, she reasoned, like computer language. It made sense that an active neural net would try to interact. If she got any response at all, it would prove the microelectronic trash was active. Her experiment wasn’t so loony. It might yield results.
In fact, she was hoping for an epiphany, a sudden blinding flash of revelation. The colloid had to be more than a fluke accident. She wanted it to pulse a deliberate answer to her zydeco, to prove it was capable of intelligent exchange. CJ craved the big leap, the huge discovery. She wanted her watery chameleon to say hello.
“Harry, don’t give me that look,” she muttered.
Half-submerged on the sunken boom, she gripped her field finder and waited for a sign—until the night watchman spotted her with his flashlight and she had to bail.
Mist
Monday, March 14
8:12 AM
A storm front moved through the heartland, drenching Arkansas’s red clay and soaking Kentucky’s black coal fields. Along the Gulf Coast, misty rain hung suspended, refusing to fall. People breathed it. Birds caught it in their wings. Unseen above this hazy floating impossible rain, the moon waxed toward full.
But CJ didn’t notice the weather. Hunkered on the floor of her Roach Motel bedroom, naked except for a towel, with the drapes drawn, with the glow of her laptop illuminating her astonished face, CJ read about an evil new life-form called the “Watermind.”
She’d been researching definitions of life, and two standards had popped up: 1) any system capable of eating, metabolizing, excreting, moving, reproducing, and responding to stimuli; and 2) any system containing reproducible code that evolved through natural selection. Then she found another, from Carl Sagan of all people. Sagan called life “a localized region where order constantly increased”—in contrast to the universe as a whole, which was moving steadily toward chaos.
She was surfing for more definitions when she came across a memo describing a new sentient life-form made of water and electronic trash. Her flesh went cold. Her shoulders locked up. Her stiff fingers could barely scroll the mouse as she read her own report, published online for all the world to see.
Buzz about the stolen memo was streaming all over the Internet. The more she looked, the more she found, although no one seemed to know who came up with the name, “Watermind.” The anonymous memo—thank God they’d deleted her name—had first emerged in a Catholic discussion forum, and numerous bloggers had “annotated” its contents. One pundit described how a shape-shifting liquid robot was stalking through a Louisiana swamp, throwing off s
parks, pissing clear water, and freeze-drying any humans in its way.
CJ pounded the floor with her fist. She laughed to keep from bawling. She barely recognized the twisted mutations of her report. Her goal had always been to publish her findings and make the colloidal process free to all. Open source—she had faith in that principle. But now someone had published for her, and the only people who cared were lunatics!
She got up and drank a handful of water from the bathroom tap. Traces of mud still daubed the side of her neck, leftover from her hasty shower. When she’d straggled in from the swamp, she’d been too sleepy for a thorough scrub, but too wired for sleep. Now she moistened a washcloth and washed her neck, wishing she’d never looked at her laptop. When her cell phone rang, she jerked like a live wire.
The caller’s ID was blocked. She answered the fifth ring.
A male voice said, “I read your report about the liquid computer in Devil’s Swamp.”
“You have the wrong number,” she stammered. The coincidence of timing shocked her. The online report had not included her name. How did he find her?
“Yeah, Roman Sacony invented a water-based artificial intelligence, didn’t he?”
“Roman Sacony has nothing to do with this,” she blurted. “It’s a natural occurrence. Nobody built it. And it certainly doesn’t belong to Quimicron.”
“Then you admit you’ve seen the Watermind.”
CJ dropped the wet washcloth in the sink. “Tell me who you are.”
“I’m a friend you can trust. My name is Hal Butler, with the Baton Rouge Eye.”
A reporter. CJ lowered herself to the bathroom floor.
The man seemed to take her silence as encouragement. “You believe the Watermind has virtuous qualities, am I right? Something like that, an intelligent liquid, it’s gotta be worth millions.”
“It’s not about the money.” She jerked a comb through her hair. “It’s about a cheap way to purify water.”
“Exactly. And the Watermind can do that?”
She clenched her comb. “Do you realize one child dies every eight seconds from drinking polluted water?” Her eyes teared when the comb snagged in a tangle. “Check me on that. The numbers may have changed.”
“How does the Watermind work?”
CJ laid her comb down. She’d signed Quimicron’s nondisclosure agreement four days ago—had it been that long? A mere slip of paper, she had too little experience with lawsuits to be worried. On the other hand, Roman’s warning about public panic made her hesitate.
“Miss Reilly, let’s be frank,” said Hal Butler. “What I need is the human angle. Like dying children, that’s emotional. My readers eat that up. So toss me a bone, eh? How can the Watermind save dying children?”
CJ disliked the reporter’s tone, but she also recognized a chance to publish the truth. She rummaged for her toothpaste and, finding none, rubbed the motel’s bar soap on her toothbrush. “When will my story go to press?”
“Tomorrow, if it’s good,” Hal said.
Squall
Monday, March 14
6:10 PM
Scattered showers wafted through Baton Rouge, and the sky changed color every minute. The Pickle Barrel Tavern filled up early. Bob Ed Lafleur wiped his bar and set out fresh baskets of popcorn. He turned down the thermostat, turned up the TV, and stuck his head through the kitchen door to look for his helper. “Get out here, son, and bring more beer mugs.”
People from the Quimicron plant had already staked out their usual corner and pushed three tables together. They had a bigger group than normal. They ordered half a dozen pitchers of Bud and two platters of boulettes, deep-fried crawdaddy meatballs. Bob Ed could tell something weighed on their minds because the Braves were playing the Devil Rays on TV, and no one was watching. Outside, the sky rumbled, and a few big drops splattered the sidewalk. Bob Ed kept an ear cocked, but nobody said anything interesting till after the second round of beer.
As usual, Merton Voinché started things off. He leaned back in the squeaking wooden chair and crossed his brawny arms behind his head. In his dark face, his green eyes glinted with unsettling light. He kept his voice low, yet he had a way of drawing everyone’s attention. “Eh la, djab dile, he dodge them sucker pumps. He ain’t be pushed through no pipe.”
“Oh yeah, he slip loose outta that collar. He sly awright.” People at the three tables murmured and studied their beer foam. They seemed jumpy, scared. Someone whispered low, “Djab dile know how to hide.”
Bob Ed Lafleur leaned closer. Djab dile. Devil milk? What on earth were they mumbling about? Outside, more raindrops fell.
“Djab dile ain’ no he. She a female,” said Betty DeCuir. “She’s Yemanja, the water loa. Ask me how I know.” Betty DeCuir was always mouthing off.
“Be careful, babe. You signed the disclose pledge,” said a plump young woman with peanut-butter skin. Everyone at Quimicron had signed the nondisclosure agreement.
“Piss on the disclose pledge,” said Betty.
Merton indulged her. “Tell us, baby girl. How you recognize Yemanja?”
“Okay, I tell you, boy. Yemanja always wear a white dress and a pearl crown, and she live under the waves. You think about what we saw, and tell me that ain’ Yemanja.” Betty crossed her arms.
Rain fell steadily. It drilled in the gutters and danced down the street. The squall echoed like a crowd of people clapping. Bob Ed rubbed his damp hands on his apron and moved nearer to Merton. He pretended to check a lightbulb.
These Creole swamp workers always had to bring up their Voudon spirits. Bob Ed shrugged. Loa, they called them—as if the swamp wasn’t hainted enough with good Christian ghosts. There was that little girl, Anna Fortunata, got lost a few years back, and people to this day saw her drifting around in Devil’s Swamp. White as snow, just at twilight, always sort of hovering over the ground. And that other one, that murdered woman tied to the tree with her hair burned off. That incident made the papers. People said that tree still oozed red when the moon was full.
“Naw, girl.” A small, wiry black man shook Betty DeCuir’s arm. “Yemanja is mother of life. She give birth to the orishas. Djab dile done kill that boy Manuel. No kind of mother do that.”
“Could be Agoué. Sea spirit. He keep the fishes,” said Johnny Poydras, a pimply kid with merry brown eyes.
“That devil milk belong to Baron Samedi.” Merton’s sinister tone quieted everyone. Heads nodded. Few people made eye contact. Outside, the rain crashed like tin cans.
Bob Ed had never seen Merton in such an edgy mood. He’d heard of Baron Samedi, the all-powerful voodoo lord of death. Foolishness. They said Baron Samedi kept the gate keys to the underworld. Believers painted him as a black man in top hat and sunshades, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of rum steeped with twenty-one hot peppers.
Merton kept speaking. “Baron Samedi guard the souls buried in that swamp. Could be thousands.”
“Yeah, red people live there ten thousand years before the Christ child,” said Johnny Poydras.
“You right, boy.” Merton narrowed his green eyes. “Ancient mounds in there full of dead injuns. You know they is ghosts in there.”
“Lord, yes.”
“He’s right.”
“Amen, Brother Merton.”
“My people. Houmas,” said a brick-colored man. “Maker of Breath protects my fathers.” The man spoke with strong feeling, but he spoke too low for anyone to hear. All eyes centered on Merton.
“Spaniards and French trappers got lost in there. One wrong step, got swallowed up in that mud. You know they runaway slaves buried in that quicksand, alongside the slave hunters trying to catch ’em.”
“Yeah, they plenty black men buried in there,” the group agreed.
“They had lynchings,” said Merton.
“They burned witches in there one time,” said Betty DeCuir.
All at once, as if someone had flipped a switch, the rain stopped. The sudden silence caused everyone to stir and glance ar
ound. Merton leaned on the table and cracked his knuckles. His dark brow furrowed as he looked from one face to another. He spoke low, and Bob Ed Lafleur had to lean close to understand him.
“All kinda blood mixing in them swamp graves. Now we go in there and dig around. Pour in the trash, take out oil. I’m telling you, we messin’ with Baron Samedi.”
Sweat
Monday, March 14
9:57 PM
After the squall line passed over southern Louisiana, Devil’s Swamp simmered. Black ripples chuffed against the canal bank and bounced backward, setting up a complex moiré pattern of wave interference. Two woodpeckers watched from a hollow oak. Snakes undulated away, and a muskrat fled to its hole. Obscured by clouds, the waxing moon sank toward the horizon.
On the floodlit Gulf-Pac dock, CJ angled her plastic badge into the beam of the guard’s flashlight. “Science team, second shift,” she said. “They sent us down here to babysit the equipment.” With a nod, she indicated Max, who stood behind her, shouldering a heavy duffel.
“Take care, miss. This canal gives me the heebie-jeebies.” The guard’s voice sounded young. In fact, his name was Timothy Bojorian, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Baton Rouge Community College. This job was financing his first apartment away from home.
When young Timothy paced to the far end of the Gulf-Pac dock, Max repeated a warning he’d given earlier. “They’ll put you in jail if you talk to that reporter.”
CJ blotted sweat from the back of her neck. “I didn’t talk to him yet. I’m trying to decide if I should. Help me pull off this tarp.”
Underneath the heavy tarp, Yue and Vaarveen had wrapped their equipment in clear plastic sheeting to fend off the mist and dew. CJ cut the plastic away with her Swiss Army knife.
