The Farpool (25 page)

“If it’s so stormy,” Chase asked, “why are we
going that way?”

Kloosee’s answer was simple and direct. “It’s
faster. We have to convince the Umans to shut down the wavemaker as
soon as possible…or all the kels will die.”

Chase stared moodily out of the bubble
cockpit at the terrain flowing by beneath them. The summits of the
peaks here had been eroded over the ages by the swift trans-ridge
currents they were now riding and so each peak was a rounded dome,
fissured in places from the heat of expanding crust beneath the
floor but otherwise nearly featureless. A steep escarpment littered
with the trails of ancient lava spills and rock slides sloped away
to their right, eventually flattening out into a broad table of
ooze that stretched for hundreds of beats before itself slumping
into the abyssal plain far to the east.

The ride was smooth and uneventful for hours
and when night came to Seome, what little light that filtered down
from the surface fell off and was replaced by the eerie glow of a
trillion luminescent bottomfish. Chase watched as chains and loops
and swirls of light, of all imaginable colors, paraded before and
beneath them. The two of them stared in rapt silence as the stately
ballet proceeded.

Streaks of red dots twinkled among
pirouettes of orange and violet and were scattered by glowing green
diamonds. Triangles of scarlet wove tiny filaments of light,
forming curls and bows and networks of lace. On occasion, a few of
the lights would brush the cockpit of the
kip’t
and their radiance would dissolve into
terrifying, nightmarish shapes, beasts with gaping mouths and
lancelike tendrils, gleaming eyes and teeth like knives. There were
tubes and spheres, with horns and raked fins, and tails longer than
the
kip’t
itself, and when
each one showed its face, Chase would shudder, then smile, and
remember the diving stories he had learned as a child from his
Dad.

The sparkles and splashes of color
continued for awhile, but faded away to only a rare, faint burst
and finally to the black oblivion of night. Though he could see
nothing around them, when Kloosee let him, Chase could feel in the
control handles the approach of Pulkel. The current they had been
riding was full of little eddies and bumps now and their ride was
no longer so smooth. Every few minutes, a weak but perceptible
tremor could be felt in the handles and Kloosee told Chase that
Pulkel had sensed them and was reaching out. There were other,
easier but longer routes to Kinlok Island they could have taken but
each would have required weeks and a constant struggle against
strong currents flowing the wrong way. The route through the
southern trans-Serpentines was daring enough to challenge the most
skilled
kip’t
pilot but it
was far quicker and Kloosee wanted to make it into the Ponk’el Sea
before the currents shifted to the south again.

Now was the time to prepare for entry into
Pulkel so Kloosee let the sounder probe the nightwaters. A
splotchy, staccato burst of bleeps and beats, scratches and chirps
filled the cockpit and the echoes began clicking and whining madly,
indicating general turbulence ahead. Chase could make nothing out
of the cacophony and had to rely on Kloosee to describe what was
happening. For a few moments, Kloosee ignored the signals and
listened carefully for what he knew must be sweeping across their
path.

“The clicks are the echoes of cavities
of rough water,
m’eetorkel’te
we call it, and the whines are the collisions of pressure
waves.”

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” Chase decided.

Sure enough, in between the staccato tapping
and the whine, a thin, whistling hiss could be heard, faint but
audible, and growing by the moment. Kloosee listened with a rising
sense of anticipation; there was the feeling of extraordinary,
indescribable pressures, just barely contained, a feeling of a
monster now awakening, stirring after a long slumber.

These, he knew, were the
azhpuh’te
, the real whirlpools, the
deadly submarine funnels that lurked in the canyons and trenches of
the intermountain zone. They could strike in an instant and swallow
a fleet of
kip’ts
without
trace and they had done just that all too often in the past. They
were not going to try and brave the
azhpuh’te
; only a fool would do that. But
Kloosee needed to know the general heading of the storm bank in
order to adjust his and Pakma’s course. Their ride would be rough
enough, just skirting the edges of it.

He listened for many minutes, letting Chase
hear the sound too, which by now had become something more than
just a hiss. It was a tormenting wail now, a forbidding roar of
power that seemed trapped between an agonizing howl and a muted
rumble. Kloosee held the shaking rudder handle with one hand while
tuning the sounder, trying to find the boundaries of the zone. It
covered a wide swatch of the waters ahead.

They both heard Pakma’s voice crackle
over the circuit. “I believe
azhpuh’te
is angry today, Kloos.”

He brought the
kip’t
to a new heading west of their present
course, and Pakma followed right behind, though the new course
would still take them around the whirlpools…he hoped. “We’re hemmed
in by the mountains,” he announced. “I can’t find a clear path
through.”

A short distance behind, Pakma listened
to the voice of
azhpuh’te
herself for a moment, then said over the comm circuit, “Take
us as close to the cliffs as you can and descend a few beats or
so.”

“But it’s too narrow for us down there.”

“Kloos, have you lost your
kip’t
driver’s sense…it’s also too
narrow for
azhpuh’te
. We may
just find a little tunnel of calm water next to the face of the
cliffs, where the funnels can’t form.”

Kloosee ground his teeth and decided
she was right, putting the lead sled into a shallow dive, easing
down carefully as the grip of Pulkel tightened and began to shake
and buffet them. Several times, he fought off violent
cross-currents and wild ascending columns of water that slammed
into the belly of the
kip’t
.
The
azhpuh’te
screamed in the
speakers but Kloosee gripped the handles tightly and drove them
deeper and deeper. He let the portside sounder guide him ever
closer to the sheer wall of rock racing by, unable to see or pulse
it but straining to hear the steady ping of echoes. Outside, the
pressure had increased and was squeezing them tightly. The
kip’t
groaned and grumbled but
held.

With a patience that would have been
admirable in any
kip’t
pilot
and was therefore all the more remarkable in Kloosee, he let the
nose of the
kip’t
find its
own way…a trick he had learned apprenticing under Manklu tel many
mah ago…. They were pinned in a narrow corridor of relatively calm
water, no more than half a beat from the hard vertical face of the
cliffs, a few beats beneath the funnels somewhere above them. Each
tiny tremor, each bump and shake and vibration worried Kloosee and
he had to force his hands to relax around the control handles to
avoid catastrophe. He could feel the tension churning in his
stomach but there was nothing he could do about it and he was
secretly glad that
eekoti
like Chase hadn’t yet learned how to pulse properly. It would
have been too embarrassing…bad
shoo’kel.

For what seemed an excruciating length
of time, Chase and Kloosee said nothing to each other and dared
only a few necessary breaths. Time had solidified and frozen them
in a trance; the only things they were aware of were sounds, most
of all the wail of the funnels, crashing by overhead. All else save
a shrill, almost inaudible whistle had blended with
azhpuh’te,
a deep and terrible
chord.

It took several minutes for Kloosee to
burst out of his trance and realize what that whistle was telling
him. The tunnel was collapsing ahead of them;
azhpuh’te
was closing in, squeezing the waters
around them. He trained the sounders on the spot and the echoes
confirmed his fears. They didn’t have a moment to lose.

He knew he couldn’t put the
kip’t
into the whirlpools at his
present depth; the pressures would crush them into junk if it
didn’t smash them into the cliffs first. He had to bring them up.
If they were lucky, the canyon would widen and they would be able
to sneak over the tops of the cliffs, unless they had already
entered the Pulkel. If they had, they would not find the summits
anywhere underwater; all along the equator here, the Serpentines
soared far overhead and poked their craggy peaks well above the
surface, creating a necklace of small islands.

Kloosee pulled them up sharply, almost
losing control. At Pakma’s advice, he eased even closer to the
cliffs, using the side sounder to hunt for a slope that wasn’t
quite vertical, evidence of the broadening. The skin of the
kip’t
crinkled as they rose but no
break in the flat wall could be found and when the sounder told
them that
azhpuh’te
had
managed to pinch off the rest of the tunnel, he knew their fortunes
had finally run out.

With a firm pull on the rudder handle,
Kloosee nosed the
kip’t
hard
to the right and in an instant, the
azhpuh’te
had them.

Sometime afterward, it seemed to Kloosee that
they had started a rapid spinning at that point, for once they had
entered the whirlpool, all of them had lost consciousness for
awhile then came to, dizzy and sick, and pinned tightly to the
sides of the cockpit. A pair of leaks had sprung just behind
Kloosee and cold, high-pressure water was flowing into the cockpit,
stirring up things.

Kloosee grimaced at the taste of the
water; it was
tchorkelte,
numbing cold and painfully dense, with too much salt. He
could only imagine what it must feel like to the
eekoti
, though behind him, Chase
said nothing. He grabbed the controls and tested them. They
wouldn’t budge at all at first and he was afraid they might shear
off from the
kip’t
if he
tried to force them. At least, they hadn’t been torn off
yet.

He didn’t know where Pakma’s
kip’t
was and heard nothing over the
circuit. Had they been slammed into the cliffs? Had they been
crushed into twisted junk? Slowly, with just the slightest nudges
of the bow planes, Kloosee was able to slow their spin to a
manageable rate. His muscles ached from being pinned for so long
and he massaged them for awhile. Outside, the black void now showed
streaks of color, an occasional smear of red or orange mixed with
the white froth.

“Are you okay back there?” Kloosee asked
Chase.

“Okay
…for…the…moment…” it was a grunted reply,
forced out against the centrifugal pressure of the spin.

Kloosee gingerly tried the rudder, squeezing
the handle hard to overcome the forces acting on it. Each time, he
would shove the handle a little further and each time, it would
snap back to its original position when he let up. But there was
something there, he had felt a shudder. A cavity, perhaps, or a
stray current. Whatever it was, it seemed like the only hope they
had.

He spent the next few minutes trying to
find it again.
There it is.
He felt the handle shudder a little more with each push.
Somehow, he had to slide the
kip’t
toward it, without losing the rudder, without losing what
little stability they had and to do so before the current was
yanked back into line by the stronger currents around
it.

Slowly, cautiously, with firm but
precise taps on the handle, Kloosee slipped the nose of the
kip’t
into the stream.
I can do this, I know I can do this
.
He’d seen Manklu tel do things like this many times when he was a
midling, apprenticed to the famous
kip’t
pilot. Kloosee inched the nose of
the
kip’t
into the stream.
Suddenly, they shot forward.
Azhpuh’te
grabbed the
kip’t
and shook it violently and the
acceleration pushed Kloosee down hard into his cradle, but he held
onto the handles. The little sled shuddered and groaned and rocked
madly for a few seconds, then another current caught it and sucked
it forward.

Now, he had to fight the controls. The
whirlpool would suck them in tighter and tighter, pressing them
down and eventually grinding them into the rocky floor below.
Desperately, he hauled back on the bow planes to keep them level
and leaned on the rudder to force the
kip’t
to the outer periphery of the vortex. The
handle fought back, gouging his hands, but Kloosee pulled with all
his strength and prayed to Shooki that the planes wouldn’t break
off.

For a single awful instant, it seemed as if
nothing was happening. They were careening sideways through a
raging vortex, a maelstrom of crushing waves and churning, white
froth, slipping, rolling and spinning all at once. They bucked and
crested each wave as it rolled by and Kloosee could only hope that
the funnel was not taking them back toward the cliffs.