by M M Buckner
“I don’t think he’s saving up for retirement. Damn, what I’d give for another sample.” Peter thumped the screen with his knuckle.
Then he took off his glasses. His injured eyes still leaked water. He wiped the greasy lenses on his sweatshirt. “River traffic’s thick through here, have you noticed? Oil tankers. Chemical freighters. We’re getting close to New Orleans. If that thing creates another oscillation wave, we’ll see a hell of a lot more casualties.”
CJ glanced out the porthole at the heavy shipping traffic. The yacht and the buoy tender were tracking close behind the submerged plume, and to get ahead, both vessels were preparing to cross over it. Peter’s thoughts coincided with hers. “Yeah, this’ll be our chance to drop a bucket.”
Froth
Saturday, March 19
5:47 PM
The Pilgrim’s bridge heaters fogged the windows. The room felt steamy with human breath. Near the helm, Roman murmured steadily to his ear loop. In a level voice, he told lies, offered bribes, made threats, promised miracles. Veins throbbed on his forehead, and he stalked back and forth like a man in a cell. He was still trying to persuade a chain of bureaucrats to open the spillway weir. And everyone on the bridge was privately relieved to see him back to his old self.
Through the blurry windows, a smear of brown, gray, and green swept by. Towboats, fishing trawlers, and giant petroleum tankers lay at anchor against the riprap, giving them way. The radio band chattered with rancorous complaints. And overhead, news helicopters circled like brooding vultures.
On the Pilgrim’s bridge, Rick Jarmond fidgeted like a kid going to his first baseball game—they were actually planning to open the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Beside him, Captain Ebbs trained his binoculars along the levee roads at the sightseers. An elderly couple wielded a camcorder. A carload of teenagers drank beer. A fat blond man stared back at him through the scope of a high-powered deer rifle. The grooves in Ebbs’ weathered face deepened.
“Lookee there,” said the officer manning the helm.
“Reverse speed. Full stop,” Ebbs boomed.
Three hundred yards ahead, the Mississippi’s color changed abruptly from rust brown to—
“Radiant,” CJ exclaimed. The colloid had surfaced.
As the Chausseur shuddered to a halt, CJ ran to the bow. What she saw made her cover her mouth with both hands. The emerald-platinum slick blazed across the full width of the river. As far downstream as she could see, it sloshed and flared like iridescent foil, brightening the banks. But it wasn’t moving. The Mississippi’s brown current charged under its trailing edge with a noise like gargling giant, yet the colloid rested on top of the rushing current, as still as a lake.
“It’s resisting gravity. How can it do that?” Peter asked at her elbow.
“Magnetism,” she whispered. “He uses his EM field as an anchor.”
“Sure, I can see that.” Peter rolled his eyes.
“He’s beautiful,” she breathed.
Thin surface fog haloed its inner light, and though the sky glowed with the first rosy hues of sunset, the river gleamed brighter. It made the world seem upside down.
Alien, CJ thought. He’s not of this Earth.
Yet he is, Harry. We did this. Our technology. Our waste stream. We produced this—monster. No, she couldn’t call him that. Even though he’d killed Max and though with every beat of her blood, she resolved more firmly to stop his rampage, she still couldn’t judge him a monster. Out of trash and poison, he had made himself radically new. He was the first sentient life to evolve on Earth since homo sapiens.
“Smell it?” Peter sniffed noisily. “Photosynthesis gone berserk. It must have surfaced to make more sugar.”
She took a deep breath. Sweet fruity perfume saturated the air—esters from the colloid’s dense carbohydrate syrup. CJ gripped the rail, ignoring the frost that was rapidly forming on every metal surface. “But why did he stop moving?”
“He got the munchies again.” Peter smirked and pointed toward the municipal dock at the town of Gypsy, where the colloid’s luminous foil churned among a line of moored barges. “Hungry freakin’ devil.”
CJ was trying to figure out what the barges contained when Peter yelled in her ear, “Jesus, what are they doing?”
A dozen people were pushing off from the Gypsy boat ramp in small johnboats and aluminum canoes. They were scooping up the silvery emerald water with coolers and tackle boxes. Taking souvenirs.
“Get those people out of the water!” Roman yelled from the Pilgrim. “Fools! Get out of there!”
He waved his arms and shouted, but the people were too far away to hear. Ebbs boomed a warning through the ship’s loudspeaker. Then the Pilgrim’s sirens blared, and the engines powered up. The tender drove straight for the boat ramp, churning a swath through the platinum green slick. When the Chausseur followed, CJ ran along the rail, watching the luminous river cascade against their hull. Their wake left a lathery froth that burned like foxfire.
Peter tied a bucket on a rope and heaved it overboard to scoop up a sample, and CJ helped him haul in their catch. Sweet frigid spray doused them both. Eagerly, they checked their sample, but as soon as they looked, the foam lost its glow. They hovered over the bucket, bumping heads, watching the lather dissolve to clear liquid. CJ scooped up a handful.
“Christ!” Peter tried to slap her hand away, but he was too late.
She tasted the water. “Pure H2O. Analyze it.”
He backed away from her. “Reilly, you could be a decent scientist if you weren’t such a mental case.” Nevertheless, Peter filled a stoppered tube from the bucket.
Chill
Saturday, March 19
6:34 PM
In the fading light, Roman stood at the Pilgrim’s bow, snarling and cursing as more souvenir hunters launched from the Gypsy boat ramp. Ebbs was using the Pilgrim’s loudspeaker to order the people out of the water, but they weren’t listening. As CJ approached, Roman barely glanced her way. She had left Peter onboard the Chausseur trying to catch a better sample, while she crossed to the Pilgrim to enlist Roman’s help.
But Roman seemed different from the man she remembered. The skin around his mouth was pinched and white, and he’d lost his elegant composure. He looked brutish.
“Roman, listen,” she said. “I have a plan.”
“Find your gas mask. Now.” Roman didn’t look at her. His own mask hung loose around his neck.
She stood beside him, frowning sidelong at his gaunt face. Then she followed his gaze and watched the locals filling their boats with silver water. At once, she comprehended the gravity. The boaters were harassing the colloid. At any moment, he might retaliate.
Near the bank, the eerie water shimmered like pearls. When CJ looked straight down, she saw sheer illuminated films gliding across each other, streaked with fractal veins as bright as fire opal. In the gathering dusk, the river blazed.
Eventually, most of the people submitted to the Coast Guard’s instructions and returned to the ramp, but two young boys in a fiberglass johnboat veered around the Pilgrim’s square bow. Roman ran forward, bellowing at them. He hurdled a winch in one bound, then sprinted on, yelling in Spanish. CJ followed.
Then a strange soft blast distorted the air, and the water around the johnboat sheeted from green to white. “He’s phase-shifting,” CJ gasped.
In an instant, ice solidified around the johnboat and brought it to a crashing stop, while momentum tumbled the two boys forward. Legs splayed, they flew headlong onto the ice, then broke through the surface and plummeted into the subfreezing liquid.
Roman climbed onto the rail to dive for them.
“You’ll die in that water.” CJ grabbed his knees. When he tried to kick her away, she hung on tight. “I won’t let you do it.”
The Coast Guard crew tossed four white ring buoys into the water where the boys had submerged, and a rescuer in an orange survival suit jumped feet first through the brilliant ice. Roman balanced on the rail, poised to f
ollow, but CJ clung to his calves.
Yet even as the orange-suited crewman splashed into the river, the two boys bobbled up, spluttering and thrashing, their faces scarlet with cold. They grabbed the ring buoys and fought to stay afloat. In less than a minute, the crew hauled all three swimmers safe aboard the Pilgrim, and EMTs broke out first-aid kits to treat the boys’ frostbite. As Roman watched from his tightrope balance on the rail, CJ kept a death grip on his legs.
With a vicious pop, the ice compressed around the johnboat and crushed its fiberglass hull to splinters. CJ watched petals of ice rise and shatter around the wreckage. Shards flew up, sparkling like leaded crystal. She barely noticed the cries of panic from the people at the boat ramp. She didn’t see them fleeing up the levee toward their vehicles. All she could do was hang on to Roman’s legs and watch the fiberglass johnboat sink into the spewing ice.
I have to stop you. But she couldn’t move. She could only watch the ice liquefy from iridescent white to neon green. I will stop you.
Overhead, a solitary helicopter droned through the darkening sky. When it swooped down over the patch of melting ice, Roman saw the camera lights. Then he glimpsed the smirking newscaster with copper hair. “Cerdo!” Roman shook his fist.
But Hal Butler was too absorbed in his thrilling new role as FOX eyewitness reporter to notice much of anything. Hal was moving up in the world. He had traded the Bonnet Carré Spillway story to FOX News in exchange for this gig in the helicopter. Already he was recording his voice-over for the johnboat incident. Honoring his two favorite gurus, Kurt Vonnegut and Ed Wood, he labeled it: “Ice-Nine from Outer Space.”
Roman snarled. “Let me go, Reilly.” He pried CJ’s arms loose.
When he dropped to the deck, he accidentally knocked her into the winch housing. Emotion stretched his eyelids and flattened the skin across his cheeks. She expected him to yell, but his words came out mute and hoarse. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
After that, he seemed to shut down, like a computer going on stand-by. He slid to the deck, sat cross-legged, and swayed back and forth. The Pilgrim’s floodlights cast him in stark profile. His face looked ashen.
CJ rubbed her collarbone where he’d knocked against her. It felt sore. She would have a bruise. Roman closed his eyes and rocked. When his silence continued, she, too, sat on the cold deck. Facing the water, she leaned against Roman’s back, and she could feel his chest fill with air. After a while, they began to breathe in unison.
Along the underlit river, mist rose in slow burgeoning spirals. Dense clouds hid the moon and stars. Only floodlights and the spinning red strobe of an ambulance illuminated the Gypsy boat ramp. The boys were shaken and hurt, but they would recover.
CJ’s tongue tingled. What an idiotic prank, tasting that river sample. She gathered saliva in her mouth and swallowed. From the rhythm of Roman’s breath, she could tell he had nodded off.
“I’m pregnant,” she said aloud, knowing he wouldn’t hear.
She stroked her belly. Could Roman be the father? DNA testing would tell her for sure. But DNA was not destiny. A person could change. She rested her forehead against the rail and peered down at the platinum films in the river. They were pixelating like diamonds.
A shape caught her notice. Something wiggled ten inches under the surface. She leaned farther out and met the bewildered gaze of a bass. Gray stripes dotted its silver flanks. It wallowed on its side, trapped between cold glassy layers. She could see it clearly in the colloid’s glow. Its gills sucked furiously, and its open mouth churned. She didn’t need a degree in ichthyology to understand that it was terrified.
Engine vibrations shook the hull, and very slowly the Pilgrim steered downstream toward the spillway, leaving the trapped fish behind. Unsettled, she squinted ahead into the river’s bright reflections. As the ship gathered speed, radiant green ripples winged out on either side of its blunt bow, and St. Elmo’s Fire crackled along the hull. She felt the static charge build. The EM field made her skin prickle.
What if I can’t stop you?
She peered at the flickering green water as if it could read her thoughts. A liquid mind, the first sentient life since humans. She envisioned its exotic neural net spreading through the oceans, raining on the land, entering the human water supply. . . .
How fast will you change everything? Faster than we did?
Around the speeding ship, emeralds blazed.
Fog
Saturday, March 19
7:09 PM
A hundred yards upstream of the Gypsy boat ramp, Rayette Batiste cajoled her Ford Escort into reverse. Traffic was thick on the levee road, and her backup lights offered little help in the darkness. Plus, it was cold. Her car heater fogged her windows, and she had to wipe them with a Kleenex to see out. With great caution, she eased backward onto the soft shoulder and turned her car around. The man beside her groaned.
He was fondling a small chain and mouthing a chant. Rayette felt sure he was praying. For what, she couldn’t guess. She kept peeking at his hand as she drove watchfully along the crowded narrow road. He’d wrapped his bloody hand in his T-shirt.
It wasn’t easy, going against traffic. Rayette’s pale hair fell in her eyes as she dodged through potholes and slid in the mud. Scores of cars were pouring downstream, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacle blaring through their TVs. Rayette guessed she must be the only driver to turn back. In the flare of headlights, she stole another peek at her strange passenger.
She knew his name. She’d seen him before, many times, but never like this. Without the bandana covering his head, he seemed younger. Mud caked the curly black hair on his chest and stained his jeans. He looked as if he’d been swimming in the Mississippi for days. But his face carried a virile dignity that Rayette had always admired. Her glance lingered on his mouth, then glided down his muscular bare chest to his hand, bound in the bloody T-shirt.
“ ‘A certain Samaritan,’ ” she recited in her mind, “ ‘came where he was, and when she saw him, she had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine. And set him on her own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.’ ”
She skidded around another oncoming ambulance, and mud splattered her windshield. Its blinking red lights scared her worse than its siren. Someone must be hurt really bad, she thought, and no wonder. The parade along the levee was a lawless bedlam. Pedestrians meandered through traffic waving open whiskey bottles. Gunshots popped like firecrackers. Someone rammed her rear bumper. It was worse than Mardi Gras. Again and again, she had questioned what she was doing in this caravan of sinners. She prayed and whimpered and tried to keep her car between the ditches.
Jeremiah Destiny was the one who sent her on this mad Saturday afternoon pilgrimage. He said, “Follow the Behemoth, and keep me apprised.” So, for the first time in her life, on Jeremiah’s advice, Rayette had committed crimes. She’d pilfered an office BlackBerry and deserted her network servers, leaving Quimicron’s LAN to the vagaries of identity thieves, cyberterrorists, and spam. It was the Lord’s work, Jeremiah said.
And then, out of the dusk, the wounded hitchhiker materialized beside her car. His bloody hand thumped her hood. His familiar face loomed at her window. Joy to the world, the Lord had sent a True Sign.
“Dangerous road, Miz Batiste. You don’ need to be out here alone.” Those were the first words Max Pottevents spoke when he tumbled wearily into her passenger seat.
He told her how a fiery wave hit his boat and launched him out like a missile. He said he landed in soft mud on the riverbank, but Rayette knew it was the Hand of God that broke his fall. When he asked to borrow her cell phone, she showed him the stolen BlackBerry hidden in her glovebox. His first call was to his little daughter, Marie. Rayette smiled as his manly baritone morphed to baby talk.
Next, he called Rory Godchaux. He asked a question or two, but mostly he listened. Then, very mildly, he said, “Rory, I’m through. Tell them I ain’ coming back.”
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After that conversation, he sat rubbing his injured hand, occasionally wiping the window and peering out. “That mess downriver don’ concern us, Miz Batiste. Leave it to the outsiders. They don’ need us mixing in.”
“Yes oh yes.” She wept a little with blessed relief as she steered her Ford off the levee road. This was a message from the Redeemer, surely.
Max kept talking, mostly to himself. He’d had enough of Quimicron SA. He didn’t need their money, their mauvais largan. He’d find another way to make a living. From now on, he just wanted to spend time with his daughter and play music.
But when Rayette stopped at the junction of Highway 48, he rested his hand on her gearshift. She wanted to turn North toward home, yet she waited for him to speak. After a while, he rolled the window down and leaned his head out. Rayette sensed her True Sign slipping away.
“There’s a clinic in LaPlace I could take you,” she said, “for that hand.”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “Your daughter’s up in Baton Rouge, isn’t she?”
When he opened the car door, Rayette reached across his lap and jerked it shut. “Listen here, Mr. Pottevents.”
She wanted to tell him he’d been SENT by Providence to rescue her from the Maelstrom. “Like you said, they don’t need us mixing in.”
A tractor-trailer truck roared up Highway 48, and suddenly, Rayette heard the Lord speaking. His Voice came like the thunder of steel-belted tires on wet asphalt. “ ‘For ye have been called unto liberty; only use not your liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love, serve one another.’ ”
Rayette knew that passage. Galatians 5:13. She shut her eyes, and horrible visions danced around her head like dragons. She feared what obligation the Lord’s Word might lay upon her. She whimpered a little.
Max didn’t notice. He sat listening to the night, massaging his injured hand and gazing South.
