by M M Buckner
3:00 PM
CJ broke from a thicket, darted across open ground, and slunk under the dock where the scientists were working. Two feet back from the waterline, she sat on her backpack and coated herself in slimy mud. Clouds of gnats swarmed under the pier, and she’d discovered that mud repelled them better than Deet. Though the mire stank of dead fish and worse, she was too dirty and tired to care. In fact, she was too exhausted even to think. She’d toiled so long to reach this dock, now she had no idea what to do next.
In the sweltering twilight shade under the dock, gray foam melted like remnant snow, and dead leaves floated in ridges of motionless muck. She sensed a listless vacancy. The shockwaves had stopped. The canal felt inert. All through her battle with the vines, she’d been rationalizing how the colloid might survive the EMP. But now, her wishes were faltering.
She could almost see the skim of dead microchips floating in the lagoon. Whatever mysterious influence had held them in sync was surely too fragile to survive the repeated shockwaves. She hated Quimicron, hated Roman, hated Yue. Squeezing gooey mud in her fists, she imagined brutal acts of revenge.
Directly above her head, Yue gave a haughty laugh. Then someone yawned. CJ came alert and listened.
“Why won’t the bastard trust my expertise?” said Yue.
Peter Vaarveen answered in his New York twang, “Let me think. Could it be because our only remaining sample is worthless?”
“Screw the sample. He treats me like a servant,” said Yue.
“I told you, we should have checked for a live skein,” said Peter.
Yue’s footsteps echoed back and forth. “Get me a seltzer. With ice.”
“I loathe Louisiana.” Peter’s long-legged stride moved away.
Then Yue took a phone call. “Yes, yes. It’s dead. I told you.”
Silence followed. CJ heard something clatter across the dock. Yue must have thrown a metal tool. “That’s right, Roman. The new sample is not active. I’m sorry your charming protégée will lose her Nobel.”
Yue snapped her phone shut. “And fuck you very much,” she said, stalking away.
Beneath the dock, CJ crammed her knuckles in her mouth and screamed.
Leak
Wednesday, March 16
7:19 PM
She woke to swells of music. Wind instruments, trumpets, strings. Vibrant trilling reeds. She heard a rippling triple waltz of water lilting over rocks, flowing through cataracts, glutting into whirlpools. She opened her eyes to wet mud splattering in her face. It was raining.
Alarmed, she sat up in the pitch dark and fumbled through her muddy backpack for the flashlight. But it wouldn’t work. The EMP. Yes, she remembered.
A trillion droplets struck the mud with a soft wet babble. Like baby talk. Her eyes grew hot. She remembered everything. The colloid was dead.
She pulled farther under the dock for shelter. Using her pack as a pillow, she curled in a ball and shut her eyes, seeking oblivion. Did death ever come clean and quick? Maybe, if she kept her eyes closed long enough, the world would go away forever. But her young body had finished sleeping. Her limbs no longer needed rest, and her mind would not settle down. She sat up and leaned against a pier.
What now? Mexico? That sunny land had lost its appeal. Every possibility seemed dreary and pointless. She was tired of running—and yet there was no reason to stay here. She didn’t belong anywhere. With a broken laugh, she remembered how she had planned to save third-world orphans by purifying water. She. A nobody.
She could go back to Boston and finish school. As Harriman Reilly’s daughter, she could talk her way back into MIT, but the idea sickened her. It felt too much like losing. She visualized a name written on an envelope: Carolyn Joan Reilly. Her mother probably didn’t use that name anymore. She had never felt so weary.
At length, her eyes adjusted to the dimness, and she pawed through the useless electronic gadgets in her backpack. She found one lone bag of M&M’s and opened it with her teeth. Usually, she ate the brown candies first because they were the least interesting color. Brown, a muddled shade. Harry said it came from mixing all the leftover dyes.
Harry and Carolyn Joan, what a prize set. Parent was too kind a word for them. Begetters? Progenitors? Better to call them doom-mongers. They gave you their worst genes, then blamed you for repeating their blunders—when all you craved was to be different, separate, new. CJ rubbed her eyes.
In the darkness, all the M&M’s felt alike, so she picked one at random and popped it in her mouth. Her saliva dissolved the sugar to a liquid surge of energy, and as it hit her bloodstream, she began to revive. Then another sound pierced through the drizzle, a sharper frequency—a siren. That’s what had awakened her, not the rain.
She scrambled out from under the dock and peeped over the top. The alarm Klaxon rose and fell like a bugle call, and people were running, launching boats. Something serious was going on. In the chaos, no one noticed her muddy figure climbing up onto the rain-lashed dock.
Red beacons flashed through the downpour, making people’s faces look gory. Dan Meir rushed by, followed by Peter Vaarveen and Li Qin Yue. Workers milled like disturbed ants. CJ saw Max hustling equipment across the dock, but she couldn’t catch his attention. A few yards away, Roman was pacing under the floodlights. The rain had slicked his long hair like a pelt, and he was crushing a cell phone to his ear. Even at a distance, CJ heard murder in his voice.
She grabbed a crew worker who was running past, a face she recognized. It was Betty DeCuir.
“What’s going on, Betty?”
The young woman drew back from CJ’s muddy hand, and her eyes went as round as globes. “Laws, the water loa. She done ate right through them gate seals. I tell you what. She leak out before that ray gun ever fire.”
CJ almost forgot to breathe. “The gates are open?”
Betty nodded. “Ain’ nobody hold Yemanja. She got herself free.”
II Evolution
Race
Thursday, March 17
3:01 AM
The Mississippi River is a fast, changeful giant. In the West, it arises along the continental divide, nearly three miles above sea level, while in the Northeast, it links through canals to the Atlantic Ocean. Its upper trunk lies choked and constrained by nearly thirty locks made of heavy steel and concrete, and its lower flanks are poked and prodded by wing dams to keep it running straight. Engorged with spring flows, it will rampage eighteen knots through the heartland, breaking its chains, uprooting trees, and undermining bluffs, leaving angry snags and sandbars, until its Lilliputian jailers recapture and contain it.
By turns, humans have blessed and cursed the great river. Two native tribes argued about who named it first. The Ojibwe called it Messipi, and the Algonquin used the words Missi Sepe. Both mean the same thing: Gathering of Waters. Its first European christening came in 1541 when Hernando de Soto dubbed it Río de Espíritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit.
Big Muddy, El Grand, Old Man River, the Mississippi is not a single entity but a transient, multiplicitous spill. Like America itself, the river slurps, swallows, digests, and regurgitates. Every year, every minute, its contents change. Its banks erode and move. Its channel fills and must be dredged. Even its mighty current shifts direction. Underpinned by the ancient New Madrid Fault, it quaked so violently in 1811 that new waterfalls appeared, and the river flowed backward for eight days to create Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.
In ceaseless flux, without material duration, the river is not an object but an evolution—like music, or a nation, or a life. Yet for all its temporality, it rolls always. While you and I are reading or sleeping or making love, it rolls. Through rain and heat, war and truce, noon and midnight, it courses. In the small hours on a recent St. Paddy’s Day morning, it rolled a shiny blue nanocarbon coffer gate one mile downstream before lodging it against a bridge pier under Highway 190.
Roman Sacony gripped the passenger armrests in his company speedboat. Max Pottevents was driving at top speed. Dan Meir sat sideways
in the rear seat, aiming the spotlight and watching the muddy banks race by. Close behind, Rory Godchaux piloted a second boat with Li Qin Yue, Peter Vaarveen, and a pile of equipment. They were searching for an electromagnetic signature in the Mississippi River.
The rain had tapered off, leaving behind cool misty layers of ground fog. Yue analyzed radio sources, and Peter set up an infrared scanner to spot temperature variations. But as they approached the heavily industrialized waterfront near downtown Baton Rouge, their methods proved useless. Warehouses and factories lined the river, and dozens of freighters lay moored at piers. There were too many heat sources, too many radio waves, too many electromagnetic fields.
Max didn’t understand their science terms, but he knew from their angry growls they were stymied. By the greenish glow of his dashboard dials, he could see Roman Sacony’s face. The man looked hellish.
Twice earlier, when they paused to drop anchor and let the scientists work, Max tried to call CJ on the sly. But her cell phone didn’t answer. Maybe she was sleeping, that’s what he hoped. Most of Baton Rouge lay asleep at this hour. He pictured his daughter, Marie, lying snug in her white gingham bed. His ex-wife’s crackerbox tract home lay close behind the levee in a low-income ward. The ground was so low there that river water sometimes seeped under the levee and boiled up in Sonia’s backyard. It was the best her new husband could afford. Silently, Max prayed that djab dile would pass them over. He didn’t know what the devil water wanted, but after seeing how it ate through steel hulls, Max felt deeply afraid.
Meir clapped Max’s shoulder and startled him. “Stop here, son.”
Max signaled the other boat, then killed the motor and steered briskly to avoid a collision. In mid-river, the dark swollen current ran high and fast, and the two small speedboats fishtailed against their taut anchor lines. Even at this hour, factories operated full steam, cranes moved cargo on and off barges, and fishermen provisioned trawlers and johnboats for the day’s work. A Coast Guard ship cruised upstream, tending buoys. Nearly half a million people lived along this stretch of river. Max scanned the city skyline and picked out his daughter’s neighborhood. Then he closed his eyes and prayed to his gros bon ange.
“We have to go public. There’s too much at stake.” Dan Meir turned the collar up on his windbreaker. “What if that stuff kills a fisherman?”
“Wait,” Yue called from the other boat. “I have an idea.”
She made Rory steer their boat closer till the two gunwales bumped, then she leaned across and spoke confidentially to the CEO. Max couldn’t help but overhear. She said, “We could let it go.”
Roman and Yue searched each other’s faces like a pair of wild beasts. The sound of their breathing made Max’s neck shiver.
“You know what I’m saying,” Yue continued in a undertone. Her boney fingers clutched the gunwale. “We could turn around and go home. Where’s the proof tying this to Quimicron?”
“She’s right. Our company didn’t create this mess.” Dan Meir spoke in a more straightforward voice. “Let’s get on the horn to the Coast Guard, tell them what we know. They’re better equipped to deal with it.”
Max heard Roman gripping his armrest. His Spanish eyes leered at the water as if he wanted to drink up the whole river. Slowly, he shook his head, and when he spoke, his flat timbreless voice grated Max’s ear. “The colloid came from my property. Everyone will sue me, no matter what I say.”
“Cut your losses,” Yue growled low in her throat. “Deny everything. It’s the smart move.”
“We can’t be held liable for something we didn’t do,” said Meir.
“Enough. I will not let this picaro destroy Quimicron.” Roman sat rigid, facing forward in his seat, clenching the armrest as if he were strangling an enemy’s throat. “We’ll use the EMP here, in the river.”
Max edged away from him. The man seemed ready to detonate. But when he spoke next, his flat voice had a stiff, strained calm. “Radio that Coast Guard tender, and report a chemical spill. Tell them it’s inert, and insist on a media blackout. They’ll agree. They won’t want a public outcry.”
Max sucked his teeth while Meir switched on the boat’s satellite radio and called the captain of the nearby Coast Guard tender. Djab dile inert? Max expected Roman Sacony to lie, but Mr. Meir, too? His respect for the plant manager plummeted.
Max couldn’t know how closely Meir’s feelings tracked his own. Dan Meir hated dishonesty, and he was not a good liar. He shifted from one foot to the other as he spoke over the radio to Capt. Marcus Ebbs. A career Coast Guard officer, Captain Ebbs had a gruff military style of speaking that made ex-Marine Meir feel even more like a turncoat.
Captain Ebbs listened and said little. In his nearly twenty years with the Eighth Coast Guard District, Ebbs had patrolled every major river from the Appalachians to the Rockies, and he’d met every shape of prevaricating polecat. He had rescued 752 tomfool civilians, saved over $22 million worth of private property, responded to 1,712 incidents of environmental pollution and conducted a thousand boardings for the purposes of law enforcement. His father had hunted German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II.
Captain Ebbs twisted the waxy tip of his snow-white handlebar mustache as he listened. Though he was pushing mandatory retirement, Ebbs stood as straight as he had at age thirty-five. For the past four years, he’d commanded the Pilgrim, a sixty-five-foot tender assigned to babysit river buoys on the lower Mississippi. Much to his discontent, his current mission did not include law enforcement, but Ebbs was not always careful about crossing lines.
As Meir spun his yarn about a submerged slick of harmless refrigerant, Ebbs’s practiced old ears heard mendacity. “Inert,” Meir said. Ebbs suspected a ruse. When Meir asked if his private corporation could use the nation’s top-secret military satellites to help locate a cold spot in the river, Ebbs raised his bushy eyebrows.
Give these unknown civilians clearance to view America’s most sensitive spy photographs? “You bet I will,” he said. Then he switched off the mike and turned to his first officer. “Stay on ’em like a bluejay on a stinkbug.”
Max listened to the radio conversation with a growing sense of his own failure. He knew he should interrupt and shout a warning. Cramped in the small boat, he shook his leg and thought wildly of jumping in the river, swimming to shore, finding his daughter. While he squirmed and debated, it didn’t help that Roman Sacony was quietly ripping the vinyl armrest with his fingers.
When the Pilgrim glided toward them, everyone in both speedboats stirred uneasily. The buoy tender was a large, blunt-nosed vessel, painted black from stem to stern. The closer it approached, the more Max’s heart thudded. Should he speak up and tell them the truth? He rubbed his sweaty hands on his jeans. Who would believe such a mixed-up tale from a Creole boat driver?
But his chance to speak never came. Sacony told him to stay with the speedboats while the others went aboard the Pilgrim. As soon as they’d gone, Max tried CJ’s cell phone again. Still no answer.
Cool damp vapors moved over the water, carrying aromatic molecules of fish slime, crude oil, and Canadian clay. Max knew that smell as intimately as his own body odor. He’d breathed the Mississippi all his life. As the taste of its fog dissolved on his tongue, he keyed redial.
Suddenly, his phone vibrated with an incoming call.
“Max, I see you. Don’t look around. I’m behind the yellow freighter to your starboard. I’ve turned off the Viper’s running lights.”
“Ceegie—”
“Don’t say my name. Listen, my cell went dead, so I’m sending you a new number. This one’s a satellite phone, okay?”
Max memorized the phone number displayed on his screen. “It’s not safe to be on the river without your lights,” he whispered.
Nervous hilarity rippled through the phone. “Lots of things are not safe, Max. Tell me what’s going on.”
Max bent as if to tie his bootlace, but no one on the tender was watching him. With the phone cup
ped in his palm, he told CJ how Mr. Meir lied to the Coast Guard.
“Good,” she said. “Those military satellites have infrared cameras. They’ll find the cold spot. When they do, call me.”
“They want to fire the EMP,” Max said.
“That’s insane. Not even Roman would fire an EMP this close to the downtown waterfront.”
“But what is it?” Max asked.
CJ deliberated how to explain. “Well, our phones are using EMP right now. Electromagnetic pulses carry our voices back and forth through the air. But the shockwave generator, that’s lethal.” She described how an enormous burst of electrons would shoot through the water at light speed and burn conductive material from the inside out. Copper wires. Microchips. Carotid arteries. She warned Max to be careful.
He glanced across the dark water at the gargantuan yellow freighter with ten-foot-high Chinese characters painted down its side. In the shadow of its towering stern, Max glimpsed the hull of a small speedboat rocking in the current.
“You be careful, lam.”
Pool
Thursday, March 17
5:01 AM
Neon reflections dimpled the river along the Baton Rouge waterfront. Blue, pink, and yellow, they rippled and broke in pieces as boats passed by. Across the river lay the smaller town of Port Allen, and already dockworkers teemed on its wharves. The early morning sang with engine noise, and blue fumes drifted on the breeze like silk scarves. Gentle waves slapped the banks, while in mid-river, the current charged downstream like a megaton explosion.
Li Qin Yue ignored the surrounding cityscape, the same way she ignored Peter Vaarveen’s reverberating snores. While Vaarveen sprawled across the boat’s backseat in semi-hibernation, she glanced across to the other boat, where Roman sat like a vigilant gargoyle. More than once, she had seen him whip people up to extraordinary feats, yet his ability still amazed her. When the Coast Guard refused to let them view satellite scans, he had placed a personal call to a congressman, and in less than an hour, Yue was downloading infrared images from a classified FTP site.
