Watermind by M. M. Buckner

Author:M. M. Buckner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765359902
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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Tuesday, March 15

7:07 PM

At the Gulf-Pac dock, Peter Vaarveen grumbled under his breath, “Fuckin’ boat anchor.” The portable battery for his multichannel analyzer weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and Peter was not accustomed to heavy labor. But Roman had ordered them to move immediately off the Gulf-Pac dock because a lawsuit was brewing, and Hammer Nesbitt’s hospitality had come to an end.

Peter stretched and arched his back. In the sky, he saw a flock of dark birds wheeling like a liquid wave. He watched them turn and plunge, and suddenly, they seemed to change color as their speckled underwings caught the slanting light. Ornithologists once believed that flocks communicated through electromagnetic emanations. But Peter knew their charming aerobatics emerged from the same simple rules which drove his computer boid: Stay close; follow your neighbor; go with the flow.

He scowled at the heavy battery. “Help me with this,” he called to the knotty, walnut-colored man in the gray work shirt.

But Rory Godchaux made no move. Rory had been running crews for too many decades to take orders from a chemist. Besides, Rory was not in good spirits. The blue gates were sealed up tight, but the boys on the Refuerzo couldn’t get their collar in the right place. The magnetic water kept creeping along the canal bed, slipping away from them.

On top of that, Rory couldn’t fill his nightshift. Three of his best workers called in sick, and one quit. Mr. Meir kept approving overtime, but Rory couldn’t find anyone to hire. And he was getting damned tired of eating soggy takeout from the Shrimp Hut. He wanted to go home to his wife’s fried catfish and spoonbread. He wanted to sink between her hot creamy thighs and rub his nose in her plump belly. He could almost taste her pickle brine.

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.

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