The Farpool (67 page)

“Even worse…the Farpool is gone. I have no
way home.”

Kloosee throttled back on the kip’t’s
propulsors to negotiate a narrow chasm up ahead. He hoped this was
the opening to the Gap. “When the
ak’loosh
comes, it means Shooki is angered.
Judgment is coming. There’s nothing anybody can do.”

Now Chase knew why he had come to Seome. It
slapped him in the head like a monster wave from the Gulf, the kind
that often rolled onshore in advance of hurricanes, the kind the
lifeguards whistled you out of the water for.

‘Oh, yes, there is, Kloos.”

“What is it?”

“We can build our own Time Twister.”

Chapter 22

Seome

Likte Trench and Omsh’pont, kel: Om’tor

Time: 768.9, Epoch of Tekpotu

Likte Island was a towering seamount, a wart
on the floor of a vast range of mountains, valleys, ravines,
depressions and underwater canyons. Longsee had originally proposed
the island and its nearby trench system as a new location for the
Time Twister because of its canyons.

“The sound and vibration will be lost in all
that chaotic terrain,” he explained. “The ridges and canyons will
break up the sound and dampen the effects of the Uman machine.”
Now, Longsee would never see the results of his decision. The
Coethi starball and its effects on the star-sun Sigma Albeth B had
made the oceans of Seome rougher, colder, and saltier than ever and
hundreds of kelke had died as a result. The effects fell most
severely on the very young, the ill and infirm…and the elderly.
Longsee had been over sixty mah in age.

The Seomish didn’t know it but their sun was
dying, slowly but surely being forced off her normal sequence by
the effects of multiple starball impacts, the fusium bombs banking
her fusion furnaces, dampening her helium-deuterium reactions,
drenching her nuclear fires with waste products that couldn’t be
blown off. In time, and even the Umans didn’t know how long,
Sigma-Albeth B would succumb to the gravity of her own mass and
implode. And because she was many times the mass of Earth’s own
sun, the collapse would surely lead to a catastrophic supernova
explosion, obliterating everything in her family of planets and
moons. All that would remain would be a gaseous bubble, and
shrapnel from her death throes, flung into interstellar space at
nearly light speed.

But the Seomish knew none of this. They
were more concerned with re-assembling the Uman Time Twister, not
because they cared for the weapon or its effectiveness, but because
they knew it was the only way the Farpool could be regained, and
the Farpool was the only way the final collapse, the great
ak’loosh
, could be
avoided.

The Farpool was increasingly seen as the only
way out, the only way to escape total annihilation.

The convoy of kip’ts bore down on Likte
Island and her deep trench with all possible speed. Chase had
managed to squeeze into one of the larger sleds with Kloosee and
Pakma. Like the other kip’ts, they had taken in tow several pods of
material from the Time Twister, in their case, several nets full of
the chronotron pods, the active mechanism of the Twister that, when
powered by its singularity engine, would reach out from Likte and
grab local spacetime by the throat and twist it into infinite
curvature, like a fist squeezing a gisu bulb. Once the chronotron
pods were in place and powered up, and the Twister foundation and
components re-assembled, the Uman machine could operate as before.
And the Farpool would once again open up a passageway to a new
world.

Such was the thinking of Omt’or’s sled
drivers as they reached Likte Trench.

Many kip’ts towed sections of the Twister’s
outer casing, the vast dish-shaped structure that rode along the
surface like a breaching seamother, partially exposed to the
Notwater, and partially submerged. It was upon this huge dish that
the chronotron pods would be mounted. And before that could happen,
the dish would have to be made fast to her foundation, itself
buried in the muck and ooze at the bottom of the trench.

Much work remained to be done.

It was Pakma who voiced their greatest
concern. “From what I learned, it’s this device the Tailless called
the singularity engine that we have to worry about. Do we have it
with us? Was it recovered from the storm?”

Kloosee was concentrating on positioning
their nets full of chronotron pods into a holding spot off Likte’s
southwest shore. The convoy had decided to use a shallow valley
just beyond the surf line of the island as a staging place for
pods, foundation and main structure elements, and all the mooring,
tensioning and cabling that held the entire assembly together.

“Manklu and Lepkos said they found a
heavily shielded device on the bottom, near one of the original
foundation mounts…it matched the description Chase gave us from one
of the Umans…
eekoti
Golich, I
believe.”

Chase remembered when Golich had given
him a device to explain how the Twister worked…”Yeah, that’s right.
I recorded some of it on this bulb…” He rummaged around the cockpit
and found the device, then turned it on. A voice, Chase’s voice,
came out in scratchy bursts…’
The Time
Twister contains a naked singularity at the core of its field.
Umans have learned how to use existing stars and their extreme
gravitational fields to compress matter enough to create such a
singularity. The distorted space-time field around this singularity
core of the Twister is known as a twist field. It’s like the warp
field in Star Trek.

‘Uman engineers have developed a way of
creating, maneuvering and regulating the effects of the twist
field. This is done through a screening field and a series of
buffers, known as twist buffers, or just T-buffers.

‘Like a nuclear power plant with its core
always on, but regulated by control rods, the Twister is also
always on. The singularity engine at the core, once created and
activated, can’t be turned off. But it can be regulated through a
series of T-buffers. These moderate the twist field…’

“So that’s my question,” Pakma asked again.
“Do we have this singularity engine with us?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Kloosee
decided. “Unhitch our load here and go find Manklu.”

They did just that.

The kip’t driven
by Manklu
and Lepkos had stopped several beats short of the Likte Trench.
Only continued pulsing and calling enabled Kloosee to find them.
They had parked the sled on a small rise overlooking the first of a
series of increasingly steep ravines, east of the island. The rise
was peppered with odd black columns of smoke corkscrewing into the
upper waters from hot vents on the seabed. Local kelke had long
called the entire region the ‘Land of the Black Smokers.” In fact,
each ridge top was covered with the same smoke columns.

Manklu explained. “We were cruising along
just fine, half a beat, maybe more, from the Trench when the water
all around us started to vibrate. It was that blasted crate down
there—“ he pointed an armfin at the bottom of the ravine. Something
glowed dull red in the gloom down there, a pulsating red like a
beacon. “…she was eating right through the net fibers, coming
loose.”

Lepkos added, “Eating through all the
towlines…we were going to lose our whole load, right into that
crater down there—“

Manklu went on. “We had to cut the damn thing
loose, let it drop. It was steaming, and frothing the water,
vibrating like a seamother’s tail, it was coming apart---we didn’t
have a choice.”

Kloosee and Chase drifted over the top of the
ravine, a steep V-shaped cleft in the seabed. “What is it? What’s
inside?”

Lepkos honked. “Shooki’s
wrath…mother
ak’loosh
…head of
a seamother…who knows? We cut her loose and got away from
it—“

Kloosee and Chase looked at each other. Each
had the same thought. “We’d better go down there, see what it
is.”

“It may be the singularity engine,” Pakma
said. “You shouldn’t try—“

But they had already nosed over the side of
the rise and were headed down into the dark.

Kloosee and Chase descended into the ravine
and straight away felt a strong turbulent current thrashing them as
they went down. The red light became more diffuse, more of a glow,
though it brightened as they approached. But it was the strong
currents that made the descent more difficult.

It was like being trapped in a spiral,
corkscrewing wave, not unlike the Farpool in miniature.

“Maybe we shouldn’t get too close,” Kloosee
suggested.

But Chase was undeterred. “We have to be
sure…if we’re going to re-build the Time Twister, we have to
know—“

A few moments later, they ran into the outer
boundary of a twist field. Suddenly, the water became denser, the
current stronger, they were slammed by waves left and right,
battered and caught in a strong grip, now being sucked downward,
ever downward, an undertow had grabbed them and lights were
strobing and—

For what seemed like hours, maybe ages, Chase
felt himself spinning, caught in a narrow cylinder, with an endless
looping vid of images flashing past, too fast for him to focus on.
There were explosions and giant waves and stars detonating and
crashing surf and dead silence and a kaleidoscope of crazy dreams,
hallucinations, illusions and dreamlike things flitting by. It was
like falling through a movie, or running through a funhouse at the
circus, everything was distorted and misshapen and none of it made
sense…all you could do was watch, and keep watching and hope the
spinning stopped….

Then a strong force propelled him out of the
cylinder and Chase found himself pinned against the rubbly slope of
the ravine while all around rock and mud and silt rained down,
sometimes in slow motion, sometimes sped up.

With effort, he crawled and kicked his way
upward and there nearly collided with Kloosee. They scrambled and
strained to make the top of the rise and then, with a final kick
and push, they both squirted free and drifted stunned and dizzy
through the water.

Pakma was right there. “Are you two all
right? What happened? You went down and came right back up.”

It took a few minutes for the two of them to
regain their senses. Carefully, Pakma shepherded them back toward
the small fleet of kip’ts. Other kelke were busy unloading their
cargo nets, depositing Twister parts and mooring cable and pods
full of equipment into a shallow valley.

“I think we found the singularity engine,”
Kloosee finally said. He sucked at a gisu pod, trying to get some
feeling back in his tail and armfins.

Chase agreed. “Whatever that was, don’t get
too close. The Umans said you couldn’t turn the thing off. We’ll
have to devise a way of hoisting it up into the Twister when it’s
assembled.”

Now Pakma was joined by one of the repeaters
from Omsh’pont, a husky loudmouth named Arktet. “He’s got a message
from the Metah,” she told them.

Arktet was nothing if not persistent. He
rubbed up against Pakma’s flanks, blinking at her hopefully. She
tried to ignore his entreaties. “I just came from Omsh’pont…really
bad that place is. Dark and full of dirt…I think the T’orshpont
might actually collapse…there’s talk of it.”

“What’s the message?’ Kloosee asked. He
nudged Arktet away from Pakma with a shove from his own beak. “I
thought the
ootkeeor
was
disrupted…I thought no songs could get through.”

Arktet now slapped his tail and circled them.
He couldn’t stay still; repeaters were like that. “Oh, it is…it is.
All scrambled…can’t get a beat or a word through. No, I’m a courier
today…I came straight from the Metah. Six hundred beats…and I’m
famished. Got anything to eat around here?”

Pakma gave him gisu, just to keep him quiet
and still for a few minutes. Arktet sucked and slurped loudly on a
bulb. “What’s the message, Arktet?”

The repeater glared at all of them.
“You don’t have to be so rude…it’s a long way…anyway, Iltereedah
has asked for all the kels to send a representative, send even
their own Metahs to Omsh’pont. A big gathering, like the
vish’tu
. A conclave. A roam. She
wants to discuss the…situation. What’s happening to the world…what
can be done. And she wants these two…Kloosee and the
eekoti
to be there…to explain how
they’ll put the Twister back to together…the wavemaker.”

“When is this
vish’tu
?” Kloosee asked.

“In three days. It’s to be a great
gathering….”

Kloosee said, “
Three days
? It will take at least that long to
get there.”

Arktet let gisu juice dribble out of his
mouth. He didn’t bother wiping his face, but slurped loudly until
he had sucked the bulb dry. “Then you don’t have a moment to
waste.”

Kloosee commandeered one of the larger kip’ts
and he, Pakma and Chase piled in. They sped away from the Likte
valley, negotiated the vast Omt’chor Current, made the Serpentine
Gap and headed out across the abyssal plain of Omt’or to the huge
city. Kloosee sped up the sled to as high a speed as he dared.

They made Omsh’pont in slightly less than two
days.

Chase was frankly appalled at what had
happened to the city. By sight, Omsh’pont could barely be seen in
the silt and murk of the central sea of Omt’orkel, but even a
cursory pulse would betray the outlines of the great city.

Now, the unending drone of the Uman machine
and more recently, the Coethi attacks on the star-sun Sigma Albeth
B had created wave conditions that leveled much of the upper
reaches of the seamounts, with a ceaseless rain of debris, rubble
and silt having settled like a heavy fog over the valley.