by M M Buckner
He said, “Merton, go give the scholar yo’ hand truck.”
While Merton Voinché and Betty DeCuir packed up the science machinery and loaded it onto a waiting Quimicron barge, Rory sat on an iron bollard, cocked up one knee, and worked a toothpick around his left incisor. People were scared, that’s why they wouldn’t work. Some said a devil was moving in the water. Loa spirits. Djab dile. He’d heard them talking. He fished a shred of shrimp meat from his teeth and rolled it with his tongue. Yesterday, young Alonzo burned his hands in the water, but Mr. Meir hushed that up. Rory touched the cross he wore under his shirt and whispered to the Virgin. “Mother of God, pray for us sinners. . . .”
A few yards away, Li Qin Yue closed her eyes and listened to the canal. She was lying flat on her back on the Quimicron barge, supervising the transfer of her equipment and letting the deck’s residual heat penetrate her bones. Wind ruffled the canal, altering its surface from silk to velvet and rolling the barge in a shallow tide of compression waves. Plash. Plash. Plash. The barge rocked with the same rhythm that soothed Cleopatra once on another river, an ocean away in time.
In the distance, the Refuerzo repositioned its collar. Its engine whined. Li Qin was very tired. She never slept well, but since coming to Baton Rouge, she’d barely slept at all. Today was her birthday. She was fifty-nine years old, but no one knew that. Fifty-nine years old, and still just a glorified lab tech.
Plash, plash, the warm deck rocked like a hammock, lulling her, while the last glow of sunset deepened to purple. For just one moment, Yue wanted to forget her age, to forget her fading career, to forget her empty apartment—bereft of even houseplants because she was never home to water them. Roman Sacony paid her two hundred thousand a year to answer at his beck and call. For a paltry two hundred thousand, she’d bargained away her life, her soul, her chances. She was almost old enough to be his mother. Why did she slave for him year after year, when he never looked at her anymore, not like he once did.
And yet, she had found his heat. The heat that obsessed him. How did the colloid form ice? What was absorbing the heat? Finally she could answer him, in concept at least. The heat was in the bubbles.
Suspended throughout the colloidal mass, she’d found microscopic bubbles of CFCs. Chlorofluorocarbons—notorious destroyers of the planetary ozone layer. Better known by their trade name, Freon. When Freon absorbed heat, it formed gas bubbles. When it released heat, it liquefied. It was the perfect liquid cooling system.
People had been dumping old refrigerators and AC units in the river since the early 1930s, and hundreds of them must have washed up in Devil’s Swamp. Now, by random chance or twisted fate, the ubiquitous proplastid goo was saturated with microbubbles of Freon. And the electrostatic currents were cycling heat to and from this Freon foam—apparently, at will.
At will. Yue pondered those words. She blotted her cheek with her hand. Soon she would call and give Roman the news, and possibly win his fleeting approval. Hot perspiration coated her body like a second skin. The barge deck sweated, and her damp limbs seemed to glide on a film of condensation. So much wetness had pooled under her eyes that she couldn’t tell if the stinging came from perspiration or tears.
Patter
Tuesday, March 15
11:14 PM
Unseen in the darkness of Devil’s Swamp, a bleak drizzle fell. Each drop carried gases from the upper atmosphere, sulfur dioxide from Texas power plants and ozone from Los Angeles freeways. There were also Honduran fruitfly eggs, orchid pollen from the Congo, and lunar dust. In the surfaces of a thousand green pools, the hot teeming drops gouged craters as round as pennies—evanescent craters of liquid, as ephemeral as notes of music.
CJ and Max were too engaged in their experiment to worry about rain. In their circle of floodlight by the lagoon, they hardly noticed the drizzle that drummed on the tarp sheltering their work area. And though CJ made wisecracks about camping, she bounced and twitched with too much adrenaline to mind the weather. Since Max taught her how to hear the colloid, her weariness had vanished, and her logic had sharpened to lambent intensity.
“Molecular music,” she dubbed the rhythms in the skein’s material substance. Standing waves of polarization, pulsing isotopes, shifting temperature inversions, seesawing pH—and always, steady upwelling streams of pure clean water. The more she searched at the molecular level, the more material rhythms she found. All this time, the colloid had been echoing her attempts at communication, but until Max showed her, she didn’t know how to listen.
“He’ll learn to compose, I know it. Soon, soon, he’ll talk to us.” She couldn’t keep still. “Oh Max, I love you!”
She was too keyed up to know what she meant by those words. Max smiled and nodded, but her careless affection cut him like a machete. Tonight, they could pretend a little, sheltered under their cozy tarp, but tomorrow, he knew she would become a famous scientist, and he would go back to the cleanup crew.
“Gosh, the skein is growing.” Her voice sounded anxious.
Max laid down his keyboard and stood behind her. The computer screen reflected her shining face, but the graphs meant nothing to him. She played a rapid tattoo on her keyboard and jiggled the mouse. Sometimes he envied the gadgets that absorbed her attention. He massaged her shoulders, feeling useless and already forgotten.
She pushed up from her chair and rushed to the water’s edge. In seconds, the rain soaked her shirt. “We need a sample quick. Help me roll back the cover.” She pointed to a spot at the lagoon’s center.
Max appraised the water-laden plastic cover, the frenzied girl, the rain. He sucked his teeth. Ceegie was getting too excited, almost hectic. Her lespir were stirring up a wind devil in her chest. He’d seen her like this before. With a shake of his head, he hustled through the downpour and helped her unsnap half a dozen grommets. When they tugged the cover open, a puff of steam rolled out and dispersed in the rain. Max saw she was about to dive in for a sample, so he got hold of her waist.
“Lamie girl, haven’t you learned nothing about this water?”
“We’re losing time.” She struggled, and they fell together on the slick catwalk.
When she grew calmer, he released her, and they lay panting in the rain. Max let his own aggravation cool. Then he curled around her and tentatively stroked her back. She rolled to face him. Water sparkled in her eyes—raindrops? She slipped her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his sodden T-shirt. “I’m sorry.”
He held her gratefully, but already he could sense her attention shifting. She rolled away and sat up, and her voice sounded small amid the patter of rain. “We need something to dip a sample.”
Max wiped his face. He pointed toward a muddle of gear near the lagoon’s edge. “There’s a pole over there, got a cup fixed to the end. Tha’s what they used before.”
“Of course.” CJ gathered sample jars while Max lifted the rain-slick, twelve-foot pole. She knelt at the lagoon rim and twisted off the jar lids. “There’s a big floral clump of plant sap, see?”
Rain drilled the lagoon surface, obscuring the view of what lay beneath. She pointed to a spongy mass the size of a fist budding on the lagoon floor. Yue’s marker dye had stained it vivid blue.
“I see it.” Max balanced on the rim and lowered the pole.
“We want a tiny piece.” Water rilled through her hair, and she batted loose strands away. “Its volume has doubled in the last two hours. God, that’s fast. Peter said its specific gravity changes. That must mean—”
“Slow down, lamie. Speak English.” Max swept a cup of cloudy water from the lagoon, bracing the long limber pole against his belly.
She steadied the pole and guided the cup to her sample jar. Rain dripped down her arm and mixed with the sample.
“Specific gravity is a measure of density,” she said. He could tell she was making an effort to simplify her words for him. “Since the colloid is mostly water, its density should be about one gram per cubic centimeter.”
“I believe
you.” Max nudged the cup gently against the floral mass for another sample. It was hard to see through the rain.
“But Peter says its density changes, and now I realize that makes sense. See, that’s why sometimes it floats on the surface, and sometimes it sinks. But could that explain why its volume doubled? I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“Tha’s for sure.” Max could hear the manic exhilaration straining her voice. He balanced the quivering pole against his thigh and lifted another cup of water.
“Fine. We have enough.” She carried the two full jars through the rain to the tarp-sheltered workbench, where Peter had set up Quimicron’s SE microscope. Though she hated to see such a beautiful instrument damaged by weather, she had to admire Peter’s reckless disregard of Quimicron property. Sometimes it was good to have an asshole on your team.
After preparing a dozen slides, she examined a specimen through the SE scope. “Play him some more music, okay?”
Max’s fingers were cramping from holding the pole so long. He wanted to rest a while and enjoy the sound of the rain thrumming on their tarp, but CJ’s mood alarmed him. He took off his dripping T-shirt and wrung it out. “Ceegie, why you care so much about djab dile?”
“Why?”
CJ glimpsed Max’s bare chest and shoulders. His chest hairs coiled in tight round curls, and rain dribbled down his dark muscled belly. She felt an urge to run her fingers over his skin, and his distracting beauty made her almost forget the question he’d asked.
“Pure water, tha’s a good thing,” Max went on, “but that don’ seem like enough reason for all you do.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you were dying of cholera.” Immediately, she regretted her rude tone. Max looked away.
The chimera structures in her microscope shifted and rearranged, but she didn’t notice. She watched Max pull his wet shirt back on. His question confounded her. How could she explain what, to her, seemed obvious. A cheap way to purify water could save thousands of lives.
Still, something rang false in that answer. Maybe she had mixed motives. Were anyone’s reasons ever pure? “I want to know,” she said at last.
Max glanced up and waited to hear more.
“I want to find out about the colloid. How he emerged, what he can do.” She adjusted the eyepiece back and forth, bringing her slide in and out of focus. “I have to know.”
Rumble
Tuesday, March 15
11:37 PM
Roman saw Max Pottevents touching Reilly’s knee. As he stood in the shadows, watching them from a distance, he wondered, not for the first time, about their relationship. The drizzle was tapering off, and a veil of fog hung over the lagoon. Water puddled on the concrete rim. Quietly, Roman approached the tarp-covered work area to hear what the boat driver was saying.
“All these songs in the key of G, sa very important to play them in this order. Sa progression, you sav?” The young man arranged a small stack of CDs. He handled them fondly, squaring up the corners and placing them neatly in a cardboard box. “Do you have a paper? I write the names down.”
“Read them out. I’ll make a file.” Reilly opened a Word file on her laptop.
The young man grinned. “Paper don’ need a battery.” He pulled a damp, dog-eared notepad from his hip pocket and leafed through the pages. Dense music notation covered most of the sheets. When he found a clean page, he ripped it out and wrote down the titles with a stub of pencil, then read them aloud.
Roman had taught himself many languages, but these titles sounded like babble—a distorted blend of French, English, and Spanish, suffused with some ancient primal tongue. Creole, he realized, the patois of mixed races. Once in a college essay, he had described Latin America as a voracious mouth, chewing up Old World languages, then spewing them out as a brave new polyglot. He stepped closer to listen.
“When I get home, I splice the best parts together, make djab dile a good lesson,” the young man said. “Le’s go home now, Ceegie. Sleep a while, work tomorrow.”
Reilly looked at her watch and shoved a strand of wet hair behind her ear. “Ten more minutes, okay. I really think we’re close.”
“Close to what?” Roman said.
His words made them flinch like guilty children. Reilly knocked her soda bottle over. The young Creole recovered first. He got to his feet and spoke with appropriate respect. “Good evenin’, Mr. Sacony.”
Roman nodded and moved under the dripping tarp toward the monitors that were still recording temperature, ionization, and pH. What he wanted most was a solid lock on his enemy. He needed to find its Achilles’ heel fast. Two more neighboring companies had filed lawsuits.
All night, he’d tossed in his hotel bed, thinking of ways to trap the elusive colloid. Finally, giving up on sleep, he’d returned to the canal—and cursed Michael Creque for needing rest while the enemy still roamed loose. Roman wanted to talk strategy, and when he found Reilly working, his hopes rebounded. But then he realized this wouldn’t be a simple talk about work.
Complications. Complexities. He felt enmeshed in them. Reilly needed soothing, her furious silence made that clear. How tightly she crossed her arms over her breasts. He recalled the sweaty sweetness of her nipples, felt himself wanting her again, and cursed his own weakness. The nuances of flattery and courtship required a leisure he didn’t possess. Yes, her feathers were ruffled, and—maldiciónes!—he would have to smooth them before they could discuss the task at hand.
He addressed Pottevents first. “We should inspect the canal. Get the boat ready.”
Max answered promptly. “Yes, sir.”
Reilly sprang from her seat. “I’ll go with you, Max.” She would have fled down the steps, but Roman caught her arm.
Max took a step toward him, eyeing his hand on the girl’s arm. “Sir, I don’ have the boat key.”
Without letting go, Roman drew his phone from his pocket and tossed it one-handed to Max. “Call whoever has the key. I want to check that canal.”
Max palmed the phone, but he didn’t move. Roman held the girl. They stood together, three figures caught in floodlight.
“Gallinita,” Roman whispered.
The girl jerked free of his grip. “Go on, Max. I’ll be along in a minute. First, I have to tell this guy a few things.”
Max gave her a lingering glance, and again, Roman wondered what was between them. After a few seconds, the young man departed, leaving them alone.
“You’re a swine,” Reilly said, when Max was out of earshot.
“Yes, little hen, we’re both animals.” His voice came out low and gravelly.
When he tried to embrace her, she pulled free and darted several paces along the slippery catwalk. Rainwater pooled in the lagoon cover and made it sag like a bowl.
“Chica. You pretend not to like me? This isn’t how you behaved before.” He moved beside her and stroked her back. “Tell me what has changed.”
She gave him a sour glance. He felt the warmth radiating from her body. Damp strands of red hair curled at the back of her neck, and her wet shirt outlined her narrow torso. He wanted to open her clothes and take her there, standing against the rail.
She flicked wet hair from her face. “We work together. Let’s leave it at that.”
Roman’s chin jutted up. This spoiled American princess had turned his own reasoning against him. Of course she was right. He should take her at her word and put an end to this awkward affair. His enemy was still growing. He needed to check the data. But the smell of her hair gave him an erection. Her body exuded sexual chemistry like a fine vaporous code.
“We’ve been teaching him chords,” she said. “He learns fast. He can play G and B flat. We were just starting on F.”
“What? He?” The non sequitur distracted him. “Who can play?”
“Let me show you.”
She lit up the computers, talking rapidly and growing more excited as she explained their findings. Her oscilloscope program painted a prismatic wave form undulating in 4/4
time. Roman studied the rhythmic pulses of ions, heat, and acidity, and when she showed him how they replicated Max’s keyboard tunes, he had to go over the data twice before he could accept the truth. The colloid responded to sound at the molecular level. He dropped into a folding chair, astonished.
“We can use this as a basis to build a language,” she said. “He’s just learning now, but once he begins to compose—”
“Slow down. You’re leaping too far. Are you suggesting this vichyssoise of river trash is an artificial intelligence?”
“I didn’t say artificial. He’s more complex than that.”
“Please stop gracing this thing with a gender.”
Roman got up and paced the wet catwalk, running his hand along the dripping rail and staring fitfully at the lagoon. “Chemical response to sound. Not intelligence, certainly. It’s probably just an echo, but it’s fascinating.”
CJ nearly jerked her mouse off its cord. “It’s more than an echo. He’ll learn to compose.”
Roman caught her wrists and pulled her away from his valuable equipment. “How long have you been going without sleep?”
Her made her sit down and drink some bottled water. She submitted like a petulant schoolgirl, but he could see the exhaustion in her glassy hazel eyes. He checked his watch. Yue and Vaarveen were due back soon.
“Go home and sleep. You’ve done well. I’ll give you a bonus.”
“Bonus!” She spat the word like poison.
“I’ll give you a back rub. A sports car. What do you want, Reilly? Tell me, and I’ll give it to you.”
“Sir.” Max Pottevents was standing on the steps below, tugging a leather glove on with his teeth. His baritone rumbled thicker than usual. “The boat’s ready.”
