Watermind

  Praise for Watermind

  “An exciting novel of technological and scientific detection and combat, in the course of which Buckner brings to life the diked, leveed, dammed machinery with which technological intervention has tamed the Mississippi, or at least tried to.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “A bold idea. Well-drawn characters. A gripping tale. M. M. Buckner’s Watermind is a first-class novel.”

  —Ben Bova, author of The Aftermath

  “An understatedly eco-conscious novel, based on a cool concept . . . Watermind’s ending is in the same category as the ending of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.”

  —Sci Fi Weekly

  “The action comes crisp and smart in this fast-moving novel, rich in ideas. I liked it a lot.”

  —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Human

  “A fast-paced, amusing thriller that affords a clever look at the implications of what casual disregard for trash might leave lying around.”

  —Booklist

  “Part techno-thriller, part speculative science, and all quality.” —Mike Resnick, author of Starship: Mercenary

  “Part B-movie horror, part Philip K. Dick dystopian adventure, this SF adventure/suspense by the author of the award-winning War Surf belongs in larger SF collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Suspense and nonstop action.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “What lurks in that polluted little creek you pass every day? In Watermind, Buckner takes a cold, scary look at what might be brewing in that toxic spew of pollution we pay so little attention to. Her characters are vivid and engaging, and her story rips along like a river in flood. Here’s a riveting look at the fruits of our pollution that charges along like a nonstop car chase.”

  —Mary Rosenblum, author of Horizons

  watermind

  M. M. BUCKNER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WATERMIND

  Copyright © 2008 by M. M. Buckner

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-5990-2

  First Edition: November 2008

  First Mass Market Edition: August 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jack, always

  and

  For Bonnie and Larry

  Acknowledgments

  In researching the unusual events described in this book, I have drawn on numerous books, articles, websites, and eyewitness accounts. However, most names in this story, some dates, and a few locations have been changed to protect individual privacy.

  Loving thanks go to my spouse and soul mate, Jack Lyle, for constantly believing in me. I also owe tremendous gratitude to many friends and colleagues whose patient advice and kind support made this book possible. In alpha order, some of these many friends include: Mary Helen Clarke, Lionel Currier, Joe DeGross, Mary Bess Dunn, Susan Eady, Steve Edwards, Joel Hinman, Skip Jacobs, Rob Karwedsky, Jan Keeling, Cindy Kershner, Thomas Longo, Bonnie Parker, Nathan Parker, Wil Parker, Martha Rider, Robert J. Sawyer, Bobbie Scull, Jason Sizemore, Carole Stice, and Ava Weiner.

  Earnest thanks go to my editor, David G. Hartwell, for his keen insights and guidance. And deepest appreciation goes to my agent, Richard Curtis, whose wisdom and unflagging confidence in this project have kept me buoyant through crashing waves.

  He maketh the deep to boil like a pot;

  he maketh the sea like a seething mixture.

  —Job 41:31

  watermind

  Prologue

  As the twenty-first century dawned over western Canada, three grad students saw their weather experiment ruined when their expensive “mote” computers washed away in a storm. The students were devastated. Their elegant motes! Each tiny device represented an epiphany of microengineering—with waterproof sensors, memory, processors, and radio transceiver—a complete weather station no larger than a diamond chip.

  Linked in a wireless network and powered by a mere fractional watt of sunlight, the 144 miniscule units could have lasted a hundred years, parsing climate data in Alberta’s old-growth forest. Instead, the costly pinheads washed out of the trees, sluiced over the mossy ground, dribbled into the rain-swollen Milk River, and dashed away South.

  For miles, they swam in sync through lambent Canadian waters, then whooshed over the U.S. border in a tight little pack. After surging into the jade-green Missouri, they recirculated for nine weeks at the confluence of the Yellowstone, accosted by fertilizer, engine oil, and genetically modified wheat germ. Eventually, 139 washed free and siphoned through the intake of the Garrison Hydroelectric Plant, where they blasted down a power tunnel, whirled manically through a turbine, then drooled out to the tailwaters below. Their circuits crackled with new information.

  For a month, they quizzed a crate of tractor diagnostic chips dumped in Lake Oahe. Near Sioux City, they passed a landfill spewing rotted fragments of eggshells, coffee grounds, old desktop computers, and human estrogen. One full week, they rumbled with a broken Game Boy. From there, the Missouri cut straight and deep through the heartland, till they plunged into the rust-red Mississippi, the fifth largest river in the world.

  The Father of Waters bedazzled them. Within its fluent grip streamed nearly 400,000 tons of refuse from half the continental U.S. and part of Canada. The motes waltzed along with pacemakers, depth-finders, baby monitors, and electronic car keys. They relayed signals from lost hearing aids and sunken memory cards. GPS channel buoys lent them guidance. As they snapped up data, their shared memory burgeoned.

  South of St. Louis, three motes got trapped in a plastic grocery bag, but the survivors whisked onward, quizzing sputum, jism, and Pentium chips. Where the Ohio River boiled in, they conferred with a roaming cell phone, tossed by its desolate owner from a bridge in Ithaca, New York. The Arkansas brought them methamphetamine and strontium-90.

  Yet despite their speed and curiosity, their willingness to seek out strange new worlds, only one mote made it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico—where, cut off from its network, it quickly overloaded and fried. As for the remaining 117 pinheads, the river marooned them at Baton Rouge.

  Almost one year from the day their journey began in Canada, less than two hundred river miles from the sea, the motes landed in a foul riverside marsh of petrochemicals, burned-out cars, trashed appliances, and mud. Within this addled broth, frogs grew humps and appendages, bacteria colonized battery cells, and active chips migrated from their motherboards to populate clouds of algae. The water stirred with signals and ring tones. And the motes formed new bonds.

  The place was called Devil’s Swamp.

  I Emergence

  Slosh

  Wednesday, March 9

  10:55 AM

  “Ooh. Sexy rhythm.” CJ Reilly stood knee-deep in orange mud, gyrating her slender hips to the music pulsing through her iPod. “You wrote this song?”

  “Eh oui.” Max Pottevents slapped a mosquito and shifted his shovel to his other hand.

  “Tell me everything about zydeco,”
she said, twirling and swinging her bucket.

  Around them, the broiling marsh stank of dead fish, and black rainbows marbled the oil-slick pools. Chemical waste sizzled among the reeds. Flush against the river, Devil’s Swamp foamed like a wet sponge.

  Max squinted through his goggles at a distant field where their coworkers were cleaning up a spill of hazardous toluene. “Zydeco? It come from la musique Creole. Little bit French, Spanish, African. Throw in some hip-hop, reggae. Pinch of blues. Zydeco mix up like gumbo.”

  As they pushed deeper into the swamp, the ground heaved and sucked beneath their feet, and the insides of their coveralls dripped with sweat. Both of them wore heavy hip boots, goggles, and gloves, and both—for separate reasons—were finding the conversation difficult.

  CJ turned up her iPod. “I hear accordions, right? What else?”

  “Eh la. Accordión.” Max suspected his pretty coworker was patronizing him. “Guitar, bass, drum. I play frottior. That the corrugated rubboard. Make the sweet sound.”

  CJ liked his accent, almost French but not quite. He wore a red bandana tied over his curly black hair like a pirate. He called it a paryaka.

  “Ooh look.” She stooped to touch a water moccasin.

  “Stop.” Max gripped her arm.

  “Scared of a little snake? You taught me how to pick them up.”

  “Not that one. Back away slow.”

  She kicked the deadly snake with her boot, then danced off through the cattails, laughing. Max frowned and followed.

  Humps of debris had washed in from the river, and CJ noticed a rusting white box wedged against a cypress stump. “God, it’s an old Apple computer.” She kicked at the gutted computer and the stump, then fished in her pocket for her crumpled marijuana spliff. “We can sit here.”

  Again, Max sighted the distant crew. She knew what he was going to say.

  “Not far enough, lamie. They can see us.”

  “You’re paranoid. They don’t care what we do.” She lit up and inhaled.

  “I rather we smoke after the end of the day,” Max said for the second time that morning.

  When she lifted her goggles to wipe sweat, he saw the damp rings denting her milky cheeks, and he bit his lip. She looked so fragile. Her eyes mingled all the colors a pair of eyes could be—gray green blue brown black. And like her, they changed with the passing clouds.

  CJ stubbed out the spliff. She felt grumpy and restless—premenstrual. This time of month made her want to kick her own shadow. “Your music is good. You should do something with it.”

  Max lowered his head. “Sa just a home recording. For studio time, we need the largan—money.” He knew she had no experience with music, but the kindness in her voice warmed him. For Max, CJ’s presence in this puant swamp was like a snowdrop in spring—something that couldn’t last. They’d met on this job two months ago. They’d been lovers for six weeks.

  As he crashed a path for her through soggy, chest-high brambles, she asked about his lyrics, his melody, his syncopated beat. The girl had a gift for questions. He tried to speak well and to make himself clear, but the day was hot, and her attention wandered. She fanned her face with her gloves. “I hate this suit.”

  Max shook his head. “Ceegie, it’s the rule. We gotta wear ’em.”

  “Mm.” CJ enjoyed the way he pronounced her initials to rhyme with squeegee, but she detested his reverence for rules. She stuffed her gloves and goggles in her pocket, and unzipped her coverall to the waist.

  Max worried his lips between his teeth. “Child, you gonna get splash in the eye. Get eye cancer.”

  “Don’t call me a child.” She was twenty-two, and Max was only three years older. She wriggled out of the upper half of her coverall and knotted the sleeves to keep them from dangling. Damp patches dotted the front of her thin cotton undershirt, and she saw him watching her nipples harden. Through his goggles, his light brown eyes looked golden.

  They slogged on through quivery black mire. Knife-sharp palmettos sawed at their coveralls, and soon, dense thickets walled them in. The last thing Max wanted was to get lost in two hundred acres of toxic quicksand. He checked his Ranger Joe wrist compass. The needle jittered wildly from East to North. He’d never seen it do that before.

  “What’s wrong?” The marijuana made CJ giggly. She grabbed his wrist to see the compass needle dance. “Must be magnetic interference. Power lines or something.”

  When they reached a grove of tupelo gum, Max listened for the sound of the river to get his bearings. Then he hacked at a mesh of catbriar with his shovel. He was thrashing so powerfully at the thorny vines that when he broke through, he almost bolted out the other side.

  “Ho!” He staggered to a halt and gawked at what lay ahead.

  CJ came up beside him and dropped her bucket. “What is that?”

  They stood close together on a muddy slope, staring down at a long comma-shaped pond that was fringed with rancid grasses and covered in a sheet of—ice. They glanced at each other, then faced the frozen pond. White, pearly, gleaming like sequins, the ice cooled the surrounding air. A skim of meltwater coated its surface, and a fine layer of mist shimmered just above.

  CJ knelt and touched the ice with her fingertip. “How could ice form in this weather?”

  “Put your gloves on, lamie.” Max pried up a large stone with his shovel and heaved it onto the frozen pond. When it skidded several yards, he listened to the echoes. “It don’ sound like ice.”

  Before he could stop her, CJ crawled onto the pond.

  “Come back, girl.” Max reached for her hand and missed. He swore under his breath, while she giggled and kept crawling.

  “See. It holds my weight. I bet this pond is frozen solid.”

  Max stood on the bank, wishing she would come back and knowing she wouldn’t. He couldn’t put into words what he sensed about her, that she had a raging wind trapped in her chest.

  He poked the ice with his shovel, and it rang like a steel drum. F sharp, he noted. When he struck it again, the shovel sank three inches down and stuck fast. “Huh,” he said.

  The shovel wouldn’t come out. He planted his feet, took the handle in both hands and heaved backward, then slipped on the muddy bank and fell.

  CJ burst out laughing. “Good work, King Arthur.”

  Max’s face darkened, and she realized he might not get the sword-in-the-stone reference. He hadn’t finished high school. It was one of the many little divisions between them. She hid her smile and crawled closer.

  The shovel stood like a flagpole in the ice, and her touch set it swaying back and forth. When it slipped sideways and fell with a clatter, she jumped.

  “Mauvais,” Max whispered.

  CJ touched the smooth ice. “It didn’t leave a mark. The ice just sealed over.”

  She stood up and curled a strand of auburn hair around her finger. Harry would know what this is, she thought, yanking her hair till it hurt. Harry, her father. Celebrated winner of the Cope Award in chemistry. When he died a year ago, she quit MIT without finishing her doctorate.

  Still, as she walked to the center of the pond, she remembered reading how ice could form at room temperature. “Some catalytic reaction must be absorbing heat,” she said.

  “Come back, lam.” Max paced the bank, trampling weeds.

  “Could the toluene spill be reacting with other pollutants?” She stomped the ice to check its tensile strength and nearly lost her footing. “Wow, it’s slick.”

  Then Max saw her nose wrinkle, and he knew she was plotting monkeyshines.

  “Hey Max, we can skate.”

  “Naw, girl.”

  She put on her headset, got a running start and slid across the pond in her rubber boots. Shadows moved across the surface, altering its texture from glass to white sand. Her marijuana buzz made everything radiant. She zigged and zagged, dancing to Max’s zydeco. “This is fantastic,” she said, gliding farther and farther away.

  But when she noticed Max’s hangdog look, she return
ed to the bank, hiding her disappointment. The first time Max took her dancing in West Baton Rouge, she loved the way his body moved, wild and free, shining wet in the dripping heat of the dance floor. But lately, he’d gone tame.

  No, that wasn’t fair. He had money problems—she didn’t know the details, but she knew he couldn’t afford to lose his job. As for her, she’d taken this gig on a whim, like all her choices lately.

  She removed her headset and sat cross-legged on the ice, facing him. Waves of cold penetrated through the seat of her coverall. “Your music’s really good,” she said again, smoothing and straightening her spliff. “Got a light?”

  “Hoo, check it. My compass playin’ 4/4 time.” He held out his wrist to show her. The compass needle swung much stronger than before, back and forth in a steady rhythm. “Accent on the third beat. Same as my zydeco tune.”

  “Max,” she whispered, “I think the magnetic interference is coming from this pond.”

  “You spookin’ me, girl. Magnetic?”

  He tried to pull her off the ice, but she laughed and scooted away. “Lots of things produce magnetic fields. Even our blood is magnetic. It’s no big deal.” She dug her lighter from her thigh pocket and relit her marijuana joint.

  “Ceegie, don’t. This petrified octane might catch fire.” Max listened for cracks.

  CJ took a drag, then offered the joint to Max, but he waved it away. While he glanced nervously from his compass to the pond, she tried again to decide if he was handsome. The goggles covered his best feature, his honey-brown eyes.