The Farpool (42 page)

It was all incredibly risky, with no end of
things that could go wrong, but it had to be done. Kloosee held his
breath, his mind throbbing from the annoyingly acid water filling
the kip’t, and gripped the controls tightly.

They raced on toward the wavemaker.

With the shield between his own kip’t and the
wavemaker, he was able to slow his ascent more successfully than
the others, but even so, his maneuvering power was limited. And he
could tell they were almost there by the taut bulge of the shield
above him. He held his planes down as far as they could go and
nudged the rudder. The move shot him out well to the side and
nearly into the midst of a spinning whirlpool, just in time to see
the impact.

It all happened so fast that it was only
later that he could capture the memory of the moment. He had a
clear view of one kip’t, Habloo’s as it turned out, when it
momentarily disappeared into one of the cavities. He was horrified
at the sight.

In a fraction of an eye blink, he saw
Habloo’s kip’t disintegrate as it passed through the whirlpool.
First the bow and the sounder dishes. Then the bubble of the
cockpit and Habloo himself. Finally, the main body of the kip’t—the
rudders, jets, everything. Sucked into the void, spun into a burst
of phosphorescence…then nothing. A few sparkles followed, revealing
in silhouette the faint outlines of what had entered the whirlpool,
then those too faded.

The shield on Habloo’s side started to sag
and buckle, but before he could even react, Kloosee saw Habloo
re-emerge from another whirlpool a few beats beyond. It was the
same process, except in reverse. First, nothing. Then, a whorl of
light, coalescing into solid matter. The prow of the kip’t. Then
the cockpit, the rudders, the jets. Habloo himself. All of it
sliding out of the whirlpool as if from behind a veil.

The instant he was free, Kloosee
screamed into
kipkeeor
,
“Habloo! What happened? Are you all right?”

His reply was nearly drowned out by the
Sound, but Habloo seemed to ask, “What are we doing back here
again? We put the shield up yesterday.”

Kloosee had no time to puzzle out the
question. Habloo was safe, or seemed to be. Meanwhile the shield
was rapidly drifting askew in the suction field. In another
minute—

“Habloo!” he yelled, to get the pilot’s
attention. When he had, he motioned furiously for him to grab the
edge of the shield before it dragged them all into the whirlpool.
Confused, Habloo hesitated.
He’s stunned
from the experience
. Kloosee jetted over, skirting the
fringes of a whirlpool that lashed out at him, and bumped Habloo’s
kip’t with his own. The impact worked. Habloo shook himself and
stared out in a daze at Kloosee. After a few seconds of gesturing,
Kloosee made him understand the problem.

He watched as Habloo shot over to the falling
shield and scooped up one edge with his kip’t’s claws. He rammed
his side of the shield up against the wavemaker, pinning it against
the metal. Yaktu and Ocynth followed and the shield was soon draped
under the bowl, billowing out as it settled.

Kloosee hesitated only a moment, then closed
his throttle and went to work.

He had the most trouble with Habloo’s
end. Habloo hadn’t caught enough of the netting to get all of his
pad onto the metal—half of it had torn away when he had snagged it
and the
tchinting
was
unraveling around the pad. Kloosee swore at the Ponkti
weavers.
Stubborn ‘penks. What did they
really know about weaving tchinting anyway?
He did
what he could and, after the pad was pressed firmly down, he prayed
it would hold. He couldn’t spend any more time with this corner;
there was no telling how long the others could hold their
ends.

In turn, he came to Ocynth and Yaktu, helping
each secure the adhesive pads and pressing them firmly against the
netting, which seemed to hold.

There was still one more corner to go, but
Kloosee had no choice. He signaled his intentions to Yaktu, who
acknowledged, and then moved in perilously close to a slender,
fluctuating whirlpool spiraling off the wavemaker. This one whipped
about like an angry serpent and Kloosee slid gingerly around
it.

He got the final corner secured in no
time and as he turned the kip’t about, he felt faint and dizzy, but
happy. The wavemaker groaned a bit, then the whine died down to a
low drone.
Tchinting
absorbed
the sound well. If only the shield would last.

They had done it. They had beaten the sound
and overcome the technology of the Tailless. There was a comforting
hush in the waters around them, despite the murmur of the machine.
And before another minute had passed, the murmur was overwhelmed by
a steadily rising chorus of clicks and whistles: the sea’s children
coming home again. Kloosee drank deeply of the racket and let the
fatigue of the last few days wash over him.

“Boy, the silence is deafening,” Chase said
at last. “That shield makes quite a difference.”

“It’s a great day for all of us,” Kloosee
admitted. He signaled the other kip’ts to rendezvous at a
previously agreed upon point, a stubby seamount ten beats south.
Longsee wanted to go over final details of the installation and set
up an inspection schedule. Kloosee turned the kip’t about and
headed for the site.

And Angie wondered just how close they really
had been to the Farpool.

After Longsee’s meeting, the expedition crews
celebrated. They dined on gisu and tong’pod, ertleg and clams.
Stories were told, wild stories and lies, followed by drinks and
much laughter, then even bigger lies. Couples paired off and mated
in the shadows of the seamount.

And overhead, the small craft of the Tailless
People sped back and forth at the surface, no doubt investigating,
checking, trying to figure out what had happened to their
machine.

Longsee pulsed the skimmers warily. Over a
leg of tillet, he said, “It won’t be long before they come down
here. They’ll figure out what happened.”

Ocynth, the Ponkti pilot, offered to form a
guard force. “I’ve got experience as a prodsman…I can fight the
bastards.”

“Sure,” said Habloo, “you can fight their
suppressors with your little prods…that would be like me trying to
bite a seamother. We need a better plan.”

That’s when it was decided that Kloosee would
make a reconnaissance run around the perimeter of the
wavemaker.

“See if the attachments are holding,”
Longsee advised him. “I don’t want to risk too many of us when the
Tailless are buzzing about like that. It’s too dangerous. Take
the
eekoti
with you; they
could be useful if you encounter a Uman. See what they are doing.
And see if the shield will hold. I don’t want to head back to
Omsh’pont—“ he made a slight nod to Ocynth and the other Ponkti,
“or to Ponk’et if the shield is damaged or in danger of failing. We
have to be sure—“

So Kloosee set out in his kip’t alone, along
with Chase and Angie. They covered the ten beats to the edge of the
wavemaker in good time, noting just how much reduced the sound was
now, and how many of the whirlpools had vanished too.

“Maybe the Umans turned their machine down,”
Angie suggested. “I don’t hear that much now…just clicks and
whistles.”

“That’s normal life, returning to the area,”
Kloosee told them.

They cruised a few beats below the vast bowl
of the wavemaker, noting how the shield stayed taut in most places,
though a few ripples concerned Kloosee, especially at one
corner.

“I should check that,” he decided. He brought
the kip’t to a halt, nosing its bow into a small crevice at the
peak of a low seamount, just below one edge of the shield. A small
thatch of white, worm-like plants undulated in the swift
crosscurrents. Above them, the water was light green and turbulent,
waves and froth crashing back and forth through the gap between the
machine and the seamount.

“Stay inside,” Kloosee told them. “I’ll only
be a moment. I want to see why those ripples are growing…we may
have an edge or a corner that’s come loose.” He lifted the cockpit
and scooted out. He left the bubble open as he disappeared
upward.

“Chase, how far away is the Farpool?” Angie’s
question didn’t so much surprise him as annoy him.

“I don’t really know. And don’t get any
ideas. Kloosee said stay here. We don’t know how the Umans will
react. They could start shooting at us any time.”

Angie clucked. “You have an overactive
imagination…I’m getting out—“

“Angie…don’t—“

But he couldn’t stop her and before he knew
it, Angie Gilliam had slipped out of the kip’t cockpit and kicked
off into the distance. Cursing and swearing, Chase lunged out
himself and tried to follow her.

He swam and kicked and pulled for a few
minutes, tried pulsing to no avail—the wavemaker and the remaining
whirlpools made that impossible—but got nothing.

That girl…what on Earth…or
Seome…was she thinking?
He knew Angie was depressed, a
bit upset, homesick and anxious about what they were doing
here.
We just need to talk, the two of us,
heart to heart. Maybe coming through the Farpool with Kloosee and
Pakma wasn’t such a great idea after all.

The vast bowl of the wavemaker still
dominated the waters. There was plenty of light topside—as much as
there ever was on Seome—and Chase knew the surface was only a short
distance up.
It’d be great to see the
surface
, he told himself.
The
waves, the sky, a little land.
He did miss it, more
than he realized. He could tell looking up that the surface was
rough and choppy, though how much of that was the machine, he
couldn’t say. The Uman Time Twister was a vast structure, with
effects everywhere.

He considered surfacing, just for a
moment, but movement ahead caught his eye. He tried pulsing
again—
just can’t seem to get the hang of
that
—but his eyes caught movement and he veered off.
Something near the shield. Two figures…not Uman, but
Seomish.

He stopped short. It was Tulcheah. And one of
the Ponkti weavers…Kepmet, he seemed to remember.

Tulcheah and Kepmet each carried small
pouches. They were extracting something from their pouches and
fixing it to the shield netting, to a series of knots along one
fiber weave.

Tulcheah heard him approaching and
stopped.

“Eekoti
Chase…I recognize the echo…you sound confused, worried,
anxious…can I help?”

Chase greeted Kepmet, who backed away and
disappeared from view, around a bend in the shield.

“I was looking for Angie…she left the
kip’t…we came up here with Kloosee, some kind of inspection he
wanted to do. Have you seen her…I mean, pulsed her?”

Tulcheah came right up to Chase, nuzzled his
face with her beak. Her armfins stroked his arms.

“She’s nearby…but not too close…that’s good,
isn’t it, Chase. You and I…we can be alone…don’t worry about
Kepmet…he’ll go about his business, he won’t bother us. There is a
small ertleg hollow near here…they won’t bother us, they’re all off
mating…we can—“

Chase politely pushed her away, noting the
pouch she held contained something alive. It was wiggling and
kicking inside. “Tulcheah…don’t, okay? I like you…I mean…well, just
don’t. And anyway, what’s in that pouch?”

Tulcheah stopped her nuzzling and with
a quick tail snap, circled Chase in a tight orbit and came back to
face him. She was disappointed. Even Chase could tell that. “To
refuse
Ke’shoo
and
Ke’lee
…
eekoti
Chase, surely you know I’m offended. This
pouch—“ she held it out for Chase to look inside, “is full
of
ter’poh
. See how they
squirm…just as you squirm.”

Inside, the pouch was filled with small
plankton-like creatures, all shapes and sizes, all of them oozing
some kind of black jelly-like substance.

“What are they?”

Tulcheah sort of laughed, cinched up
the pouch and slung it on a web belt she was wearing. “Kepmet and I
are also inspecting…we’re fixing a knot. The
ter’poh
help solidify and strengthen weak joints
and seams.” She studied him with big curious black eyes, pulsing
him. “I don ‘t understand you,
eekoti
Chase. You show me interest—I can pulse
the echoes right inside you—yet you pull away. Very
confusing.”

Chase turned away. “Tulcheah, can I hide
nothing from you? You have an advantage with all your pulsing. I
don’t have time for this right now…I’m looking for Angie.”

“Ah…
eekoti
Angie…you have coupled with
her?”

“If you mean have we had sex, the answer is
yes…not that it’s any of your business.”

Just then, Tulcheah turned sharply and peered
off into the distance. She had heard or sensed something. A form
materialized, growing larger. Someone was coming. Tulcheah
stiffened, tucked her pouch further out of sight.

It was Angie.

“I saw movement over here-“ she told
them. “I thought…Chase—“ Then she realized Chase wasn’t alone. She
recognized Tulcheah. “Oh, it’s
you
….”

“You wandered off so I went looking for
you…we need to head back. Kloosee’s loading up the kip’t. After all
the inspections, we’re heading out. Heading home.”

Tulcheah pulsed the two of them
together, decided it was something like love. “Perhaps we’ll meet
again,
eekoti
Chase. When we
can be alone—“