Chapter 9
Seome
Omsh’pont, kel: Omt’or, and en route to Kinlok
Time: 766.1, Epoch of Tekpotu
“It’s called the Pulkel,” Kloosee told Chase. Kloosee steered the kip’t in a wide southerly circle out of Omsh’pont, cruising first directly south over the dim chasm of Shookengkloo Trench, then more easterly toward the jagged range of cliffs and canyons known as the Serpentines. Soon enough, the first ramparts of the chain began to show themselves, initially as streaks of blips and bleeps on the kip’t sounders, then more ominously as a massive gray-brown presence, indefinable in shape except for the open seas beyond that it blocked. “A place of great turbulence, but going that way allows us to catch the Pom’tel Current and make a faster trip. If we can get through—“
Chase was fascinated with the kip’t’s controls. “Maybe I could help out with the driving…if this trip takes several days. Have you got any maps I could study?”
Kloosee laughed. “You eekoti use your eyes more than we do. Our maps are made of sound. Patterns of echoes, beats and reflections…that’s how we navigate. Someday, I must teach you.”
Chase seemed to snort and wheeze a little. “Sorry… it’s these gills. The water seems different in here…guess I’m still getting used to this.”
Kloosee adjusted something on the control panel. “We keep the water in our kip’ts tchor’kelte…calm but cold. I’ve made a change that should help.”
“Thanks… I’ll be glad when we can go back to our old selves. I know Angie will be too.”
Kloosee said nothing to that.
He slowed and brought the kip’t around to follow a parallel course to the northwest, easing the sled more and more to his left so that it drifted over the shallower slopes of the ridge. Behind them, Pakma was in control of the second sled. She altered course to follow. When they had found a narrow stream of smoothly flowing water, vishm’tel as it was known, they let the current take the nose of both kip’ts and then each settled back. Kloosee rested his hands lightly on the bow plane and rudder handles.
The Serpentines cut a ragged, sinuous course across the bottomlands of Seome. They started in the far northwest, in the Omt’orkel, the home sea for Kloosee and Pakma. For three thousand beats, the chain twisted from west to east across the world, bisecting the Omt’orkel with its steep slopes, vertical cliffs, deep canyons and trenches and crumbling, boulder-strewn intermountain plateaus.
Just north of Lik’te, the planet’s largest island, a kink appeared in the ridge. Like a broken bone, the Serpentines veered sharply to the southeast, zigzagging around Lik’te and splitting the sea diagonally in two as it crossed the equator. It was here, in the sluggish equatorial seas that the Serpentines merged with another great chain of peaks, the Ork’nt, slicing in from the east like an enormous scimitar of rock and lava. The intersection zone was the scene of some of the most violent, unpredictable and deadly storms and currents anywhere on Seome, above or below the sea. It was called, simply, Pulkel—the Death Waters.
“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.
Where is Pakma? He didn’t have time to worry about it but the thought surfaced anyway. He was nearing the limit of his strength and his arms were weakening. The kip’t trembled and a crunch jarred them so hard that his hands were wrenched from the controls for a moment. He heard a groan from behind; the eekoti might have been knocked out. But he didn’t have time to check. It was as if they had stopped, right in the middle of the storm, and lay poised on the brink, ready to slide backwards or spring forward to freedom. The controls were soft, having no bite, and Kloosee held his breath. When they lurched forward again, he gave all he had to give.
The kip’t shook and quivered like a pain-crazed animal, then took a final wrenching kick from azhpuh’te.
A cool silence followed—it seemed deafening to them—and Kloosee slumped against the bulkhead while the kip’t drifted in waters stained with purple and red, the remains of mah’jeet hordes that had been sucked down from the surface into the funnel.
The sight of it made him laugh. He sucked up some of the warm water that had penetrated through the leaks around the cockpit and giggled deliriously for a few moments, while the kip’t found calmer waters and settled down.
He knew they would have to stop somewhere and fix those leaks. They couldn’t head into polar waters up north with leaks like this.
Now concerned for his passenger, Kloosee twisted around and pulsed into the rear compartment. The eekoti named Chase seemed to be conscious, at least, and Kloosee whispered thanks to Shooki for that. And as he watched, Chase opened his eyes and slowly waved some of the fresh water now streaming into the cockpit toward his gills. He saw Kloosee watching him and smiled back. Or maybe it was a grimace; he could never tell after the em’took procedure what his muscles would do. A weak voice crackled over the voice circuit.
“What happened?”
“We were lucky,” Kloosee told him. “Azhpuh’te didn’t want us today. Now, let’s go find Pakma.”
He checked the sounders first. Nothing. Then he realized that azhpuh’te had carried them north for hundreds of beats, out of the Pulkel but not exactly where they would like to have been. The sounder showed that they were well to the east of the Serpentines, essentially still in Omtorish waters, though the region was disputed. They would have to track back to the west and re-cross the Serpentines again, following the Ork’lat, in order to head north and find the Pom’tel Current. It was that vast circular river of fast-moving water that would carry them further north, straight to the Pillars of Shooki…and to Kinlok Island.
He made the necessary course changes and eased them back down to a good cruising depth. Then the sounder beeped. Kloosee checked. It was a solid return. It could be loose rock. Or it could be—
“That was quite a ride you took us through, Kloos—“ came a familiar voice over the circuit.
It was Pakma. Kloosee pinged and located them two beats to port. He homed on the signal and soon enough, the other kip’t came into view. It had somehow survived the battering of azhpuh’te, none the worse for wear.
“How’s Angie?” Chase asked. “Is she okay?”
A hoarse but familiar voice rasped over the comm circuit. “I’m fine, Chase…a little bruised. But okay.”
Kloosee said, “We’ve got a leak here. I’ve got to stop somewhere and seal it before we go further. The Pon’kel Sea is too cold to operate a kip’t with a leak.”
“I sounded a small rise a few beats ahead…put your kip’t down there.” Pakma led the way and Kloosee followed. Presently, they came to a broad uplift in the seabed, a mound surrounded on all sides by gently undulating strands of tchin’ting. Kloosee felt the current was mild enough here to undertake some repair work.
Both kip’ts settled on to the top of the mound.
“I can help,” Chase offered. He was grateful for any reason to get out of the cramped confines of the kip’t cockpit.
“The repair kit is behind you,” Kloosee said. Chase found it and the two of them set to work scraping down the bubble joint around the cockpit and applying sealing tape.
Meanwhile, Pakma and Angie left their own kip’t. “Follow me,” Pakma said. “I need to collect some raw tchin’ting…my supply is running low.”
Angie kicked her way out of the cockpit. It felt good to stretch and kick around a bit. She did a few easy laps around the sled. “I’m still getting used to my---whatever it is. My new body, I guess. What is that stuff…that tchin’ting?”
Pakma had borrowed a small satchel and drifted down to hover over the tops of the tchin’ting beds. She started snatching and snipping, pulling strands of the long, stringy plant into her sack. “Tchin’ting is a weed…I hope that translates okay. “
“You mean kind of like kelp?”
“I think that is a good comparison. It grows mostly in warmer waters. Kind of unusual to see it here, on the border of the Ponkel Sea. We harvest it after it’s grown for a full mah…it’s a waxy, pasty substance that we mix in with other foods as an extender or filler…especially fleshy foods.”
Angie went closer to examine the tchin’ting field. She found the individual stalks spindly and serrated along one side, with small purple buds at the top. She watched the way Pakma was collecting, grabbed some herself and the two of them headed back to their kip’t.
“I’m hungry,” Pakma announced. She circled alongside Kloosee’s kip’t; he and Chase were hard at work, applying sealant to their cockpit flanges. “Want anything to eat?”
“Later,” Kloosee said. “I want to finish this first. Save us some pods.”
Pakma and Angie went back to their sled and shut themselves in. Angie felt better in the filtered water of the cockpit; the colder Ponkel waters made breathing hard…she was still getting used to her gills. She tried not to think about where she was…hundreds of meters below the sea, breathing water like some glorified flounder. Really, this is insane, she told herself. I know this is a dream and any minute now, I’ll wake up in Mr. Lott’s Geometry class and he’ll be asking me a question about Venn diagrams.
“Try this…it’s not to eat, just smell. It’s ot’lum… a scentbulb.” Pakma handed Angie a small fist-sized pod.
Angie took a whiff…and jerked her head back. Whatever it was, it just about made her head fly off her shoulders. A strong, musky odor filled her nostrils.
“What is that?”
“Puk’lek…seamother. I work with scentbulbs…as an artist. I compile different smells and odors, mix them together…I’m still working on this one. What do you think?”
Angie scrunched up her nose. “An artist, huh? With smells. Cool. Um…I guess it’s fine. It smells like Chase’s clothes after he’s ridden his bike in the rain.”
“You know Chase a long time?” Pakma was setting out a small spread of bulbs and pods…these smelled much better.
“Oh, yeah—“ Angie took an experimental whiff of one pod. It was gisu, ripe gisu. Fruity and sweet. She took a bite. “Hey, I‘ve had this before…not bad. About Chase: we’ve known each other for years. Since we were kids.”
“Kids? No translation for that…explain?”
“Children…very young people.”
Pakma understood. “Yes. We say midlings. You like Chase. I can pulse this. When you are together, I pulse you in harmony with each other.”
Angie munched on the pod for a few moments. “Pakma, when you say ‘pulse,’ what exactly are you talking about? Sounding and listening for echoes?”
“Exactly.” Pakma opened more pods and speared several for herself, using her beak. She sucked loudly on one particularly juicy pod. “I pulse…I send sound waves out and they come back. I can hear your stomach now…it gurgles and growls…you like gisu…I can hear this. We Seomish pulse each other all the time. We know what each other has eaten, how each other feels, you can’t hide anything in pulsing. You know Shoo’kel?”
“Shoo’kel…is that a name? Is that someone?”
“No, shoo’kel is peace, tranquility. Here…make the sound of knowledge…kkkkllllooossshhhkkk, as I showed you. Your echopod will explain—“
It took Angie several tries but she managed to activate the little wikipedia feature of her echopod. The usual whiny, nasal voice filled her ears….
“…shoo’kel…the desirable state of having one’s inner fluids in complete balance, so that any pulse of you by someone yields a clean, regular echo. Any state other than shoo’kel is considered vulgar or obscene. Shoo’kel is a form of personal honor and dignity. Control of excessive emotion is necessary to efficient and accurate pulsing. Also, used in a general or universal sense, to mean tranquility or peace, the natural order of things, stability….
Angie nodded that she understood. “So this shoo’kel is like being at peace with yourself?”
“That is one explanation. Seomish see and hear much…sometimes, too much. Without shoo’kel, we would be overwhelmed with ec
hoes and sounds…sometimes we are anyway. As with you, kah-Angie, I pulse you have no shoo’kel when your Chase is nearby.”
Angie had to smile at that. “You mean does my heart go all fluttery when he’s near…I guess. We’re in love. We’ve dated for several years…I’ll have to explain that if I can. We talk about getting married—“
Pakma had a grin on her bemused face, it practically split her whole face. “Even now, you talk of Chase and I pulse many happy bubbles…no shoo’kel with this. This is a happy echo of Chase.”
Angie said, “I guess you could say that. We make happy bubbles. I like that. What about you? You and Kloosee? You’ve known each other a long time?”
“Many mah.” Pakma munched thoughtfully. “We are not in the same em’kels, however.”
“What about your families…are there families here?…you know, Mom, Dad and the kids.”
Pakma explained. “When a child is born, it stays with the mother until four or five mah. The father does not stay with the child. After that, the child enters the Kelk’too. The em’kels are our real families.”
Angie gave that some thought. “It’s almost like there are no families…like the whole community is the family.”
“I pulse that this is true.”
They both chewed on several more gisu bulbs in silence.
“Chase and I love each other,” Angie said. “I suppose we’ll get married some day. We’ve talked about it. But I’m in no hurry. I love Chase but sometimes—“ she picked at her gisu for a moment. “—it’s just that he…I don’t know, I wish he was a little more ambitious. He already graduated and now he works with his Dad. A T-shirt shack on the beach. Can you believe that? He doesn’t aspire to anything greater…except he wants to be an explorer. Sometimes…I don’t know—Pakma, about guys, I mean. Are you and Kloosee going to get married?”
Pakma didn’t understand and Angie had to explain about marriage. After awhile, Pakma seemed to grasp the concept.
“We have no such thing. The em’kel is our family. But anyone can join. We join and leave all the time. Kloosee’s em’kel is called Putektu. They have one goal: learn how to live in the Notwater.” Pakma made a face of disgust. “I can’t understand that. Nobody can…it’s senseless. A waste of time. And Shooki commands us to avoid Notwater.”
“Shooki is God?”
Pakma indicated yes. “Shooki is God, life, all there is, father of all the kels. All Seomish live in the middle waters.” Pakma was reciting something she had long ago memorized. “Bounded by Ke’shoo and Ke’lee. Love and life. The two eyes of Shooki. Longsee lok and other elders and wiser kelke say our future cannot be in the Notwater. Shooki forbids it. In fact, the opposite is true: we learn more by concentrating on understanding our past, exploring the cave cities of the ancients, listening to their echopods, sniffing their scentbulbs, than we could ever know roaming around in the Notwater.”
“But don’t the Umans live in the Notwater? And so do Chase and I. The Farpool takes you into the Notwater.”
“Yes,” Pakma admitted that was true. “That is our dilemma. We can’t live in the Notwater. Notwater is Death. We can’t survive there. But we have no future unless we learn how to survive there…or defeat the Umans.”
Angie was about to say something, but Kloosee came up. “I’ve got the kip’t fixed. We’d best get underway again. Have you two got your kip’t ready? And I’d love some of that—“ he filched one of Pakma’s gisu pods and speared it expertly, slurping out pulp and juice.
Pakma looked at Angie. Men! Their eyes said it all.
The kip’ts were powered up again and Kloosee resumed the lead position. Pakma drove her own kip’t just beyond the wake of Kloosee’s sled. After everyone had eaten, they said little to each other, preferring to watch the endless beauty of the sea sweeping by. The Pom’tel current carried them along at a brisk pace.
Kloosee piloted his kip’t expertly across the southern reaches of the Ponkel Sea, drawing on his experiences with Manklu tel, the famous kip’t pilot from long ago. The current took them over the flat, weed-choked T’kwan plains, over dense stands of wild blue tubegrass, through the edges of mah’jeet blooms—these were given a wide berth—schools of redhump and pocketfish, all the while approaching the great northward bend in the Ork’nt. Despite the scenery and despite a few terrifying moments when they wandered into a school of dazzling glowfish, twinkling every color of the spectrum and nearly into the maw of a hungry eelot that had come up from the depths to feed, none of them found much to talk about. Angie thought a lot about what Pakma had told her and about how her own relationship with Chase seemed to find eerie parallels in Pakma’s with Kloosee.
Must be a universal problem, she decided. Both Chase and Kloosee wanted to go places they shouldn’t go, see things nobody had ever seen before. Well, Chase, you got your wish. And you dragged me along with you.
Their silence gave way to reverence when Pom’tel carried them around the majestic bend in the mountains. There beneath them, on a small wedge of a plateau sheltered from the current by Ork’nt’s twisting bluffs, an eerie, half-lit forest of ting coral stretched away into the distance, a prelude, Kloosee knew, to the subterranean gap that would take them away from the familiar currents of the Ork’nt out over the steep face of a decline and into the bitterly cold waters of the middle Ponkel.
From their cockpit, Kloosee and Chase could see a phantasmagoria of shapes and colors. There were long blue spindles where the ting had coalesced around weeds growing out of the bottom and lumpy pillows where it had clustered around boulders from the mountains. Twice, they noticed the dazzling spirals of brain coral, each time nestled securely in between shoulders of fallen rock. As they streaked on toward the T’kel’rok gap, they passed over row after row of convoluted ting branches, long, coiled arms of blue and green, raised as if in salute.
The sight of it made Chase uneasy and curious at the same time.
“They look like individual fingers from this distance. Each one pointing upward, toward the surface.”
Toward the Notwater, Kloosee didn’t have to say. Where we must go.
They made the gap at the end of the next day. Kloosee carefully guided both kip’ts out of the grasp of Pom’tel and descended toward a narrow gash in the seafloor that led into the gap. There was no light at this depth and despite the sounder’s echoes, he felt vaguely uneasy. The walls of the valley converged to a tiny oval of black ahead and he slowed them almost to a stop. They summoned all their courage and entered the tunnel.
The transit lasted several hours…several hours of total darkness.
After what seemed like forever, they emerged from the gap into the numbing cold, gray-black waters of the middle Ponkel and, in spite of the bleak surroundings, Kloosee was glad to be heading up, toward the open sea and light. He understood now what might have compelled the ancient Seomish to leave their claustrophobic caves. Maybe they felt constricted after all that time. Maybe they were just cramped and had to get out. Kloosee understood that; he’d felt it himself, from his midling days. Living in such close spaces couldn’t be comfortable. The mind was molded by its surroundings; how could the ancients have wondered about the open sea when they couldn’t even pulse more than a few beats?
The kel of the Ponkti themselves were a clear example of that. For as long as anyone could remember, they had clustered together in a single subterranean city and seldom ventured far from it even in disasters. All of their history and culture was contained in that one network of caves; in a real sense, the Ponkti had never evolved beyond that stage. They were throwbacks to the pre-migration phase of Seomish history. No wonder they were so suspicious of everyone else.
Kloosee shared none of this with Chase, who appeared content to study the scenery and the beat echoes on his panel, trying to fathom the structures that reflected their constant pinging. Instead, Kloosee sounded the approach of a decline s
ome fifty beats ahead of them. He steered them around a strong upwelling and a dense bank of silt before finally reaching the first of the slopes. They had a long climb ahead of them to find a gap through the range of hills so he throttled back the jets and let the kip’t settle as close to the mud as he could
Behind them, Pakma did the same.
Ahead of them, a low ridge of mountains loomed large and rugged, a fence of saw-toothed gaps and rounded peaks cresting a plateau in the distance.
“Through this gap,” he finally explained to Chase, “we catch the northern arm of the Pom’tel current. After that, it’s a straight path to the Pillars and Kinlok.”
“How long?” Chase wanted to know.
“Perhaps a tenthmah…a day or so, to you.”
Kloosee sounded ahead, looking for a gap in the range, but instead of the steady bass echo he expected, he got something else in return. The mountains seemed to be moving. There was an unmistakable shift in the echo, a flurry of halftones. Something was in motion about ten beats above them and it couldn’t be the mountains.
He sounded no rockslide and the waters were too calm for a seaquake. Sounding again, he couldn’t imagine what it was, except huge. The echoes weren’t rock, the pitch was too high for that and the frequencies too complex—it was flesh, no doubt about that. He slowed up just a bit, reading the outlines of the echoes and then he knew. With a shudder of excitement and foreboding, he knew.
Puklek. The seamother. An entire herd of them.
Sometimes called Kelm’opuh, the destroyer of nations. Sometimes called Ke’shoovikt, the One who flows against the Current. Always feared. Always respected. And never, in a thousand thousand mah of known history, understood.
“We’re trapped!” Kloosee yelled. “Get down in your cradles as far as you can and pray!”
They had somehow blundered into seamother feeding waters, unmarked and unsuspected, and now they were caught in the middle of a rising herd of serpents.
Kloosee shut off the jets and Pakma did likewise. Now they were both stopped in the water. The beasts were everywhere, above and below them, on all sides, scores of them. A series of waves rocked the kip’ts. Kloosee and Chase couldn’t always see them clearly and though Kloosee knew well the story of the Skortish repeater who had stared a seamother in the eye and was turned into a spineless globbula groveling in the mud.
The kip’t sounders told them that the herd had just finished feeding. They usually ate makum, a slim barracuda that liked to school in the protected valleys of the mountains, especially in subarctic waters like this. Kloosee could tell from the echoes they were satiated and now they were heading for the surface, churning up the water and sweeping along anything that got in their way. He could feel them all around; now the best they could hope for was to stay out of their way, rise with them and pray the herd didn’t close ranks anymore and crush them to death.
He was exhilarated and frightened at the same time. It was like riding the crest of a great wave, or wallowing in the mouth of a whirlpool. The waters frothed with the steady beating of flippers and the kip’t rose with them, buckling in the turbulence.
Chase was mesmerized. He could almost reach out and touch them. Never had he seen anything like this. They were right on top of the kip’t, no more than a few beats away, just beyond sight in the dark waters but close enough to trap the sled in their wakes.
They had run into the herd nearly an hour west of T’kel. If all the stories were true, the herd would soon leave the water altogether, once they had made the surface. Kloosee knew that T’kel possessed several peaks that nosed just above the water—he wasn’t sure if they were nearby—so it was possible the seamothers would beach themselves on those tiny spits of land. No one had ever seen the phenomenon, mainly because no one had ever been able to survive the Notwater. No one until Kloosee and Pakma and the coming of the Farpool.
It seemed like they would witness the spectacle whether they wanted to or not. Pakma realized it at the same time as Kloosee did and the thought scared her.
“Can’t we do something?” she shouted over the circuit. “We’re going up! The kip’t won’t stand it!”
She was right, of course, but it was already too late. Their kip’ts weren’t built to operate in the high waters; already they were creaking and flexing under the reduced pressure. Kloosee wasn’t worried for himself but for the eekoti, Chase and Angie, and most of all, for Pakma. Chase and Angie were creatures of the Notwater, but now, after the em’took, who could say? Yet if he tried to jet his way out of the herd, he would likely frighten the serpents and wind up crushed to death.
They were caught in the middle with nowhere to go but up.
As they ascended, Kloosee struggled to keep them away from the flailing tails and flippers. It was much like when they had run through azhpuh’te a few days before. They were in the midst of a crushing maelstrom of currents, being kicked, pulled and shoved in all directions at once. A seamother displaced a lot of water just floating. When she was in flight, it was said, all the oceans heaved.
“Looks like we’re caught in the middle of them!” Chase yelled over Kloosee’s back.
Kloosee said, “For the moment…I don’t want to startle them…we could be crushed…we’ll just have to ride it out—“
Unable to sound clearly for direction, Kloosee had to rely on other means of fixing their location. For the first time, he felt a sharp pain in his midgut, the first sign that they were approaching the surface. He heard a groan over the circuit—Pakma wasn’t up to this, though the eekoti could survive. He clenched his teeth. Could they survive?
They had one chance to survive and it was something old Manklu tel, the ancient kip’t driver, had once taught him. Ke’tee. Kloosee was rusty on the techniques; he’d last used them during his own Circling many mah before. He didn’t know whether the trance would work against the effects of low pressure but they had to try it. The eekoti couldn’t operate the kip’ts. He didn’t know if they would get another chance.
“Ke’tee!” he yelled to Pakma. He could barely pulse her kip’t; the thrashing of the seamothers was steadily driving it further and further away. “Use the Ke’tee! It should help!” He knew Pakma had never really mastered the art, but they had to try…it was their best chance. Maybe their only chance.
Pakma grunted and Kloosee heard her murmuring the chants, panting, straining the words out, moaning with pain as her gut swelled. The midling who undertook the Circling needed Ke’tee for the long, lonely days he would spend alone in the open sea, with no one but himself to rely on. It was a body and mind discipline, a system for early warning. It was a way of giving the mind something to do when it might otherwise manufacture illusions out of boredom.
Kloosee repeated to himself the chants as he remembered them:
I am the Water, let my blood dissolve,
I am embraced, calmwaters in the sea;
I am free-bound, Arm of Shooki;
Stir not Azhtu, stir not Death, lie silent
At the bottom.
My way is ahead and peacemind is with me.
Ke’tee always helped when there was pain to fight. It made you more aware of the body’s whispers—the pressures, the blood flowing, the muscular contractions. You could control them, with enough contractions. But you had to fight to stay under.
He listened carefully, hearing the slurred chants coming from Pakma. Stay in it, he told her silently. Notwater’s like a powerful jaw, ready to clamp down. You can beat it if you’re strong enough. “Don’t give up!” he shouted. “If they can do it, so can we!”
He wondered if the seamothers had anything like Ke’tee. Probably, they didn’t need it. They were hybrids, at ease in either world. In that way, they were like the eekoti, like Chase and Angie. Both could go from the crushing pressures of the deepest trenches to the giddy spaces of Notwater in minutes and suffer no ill effects. He envied them that. And if they had bre
d any offspring up there, like the tales said, then such creatures would be as different from the Seomish as it was possible to be.
The surface had to be near. He could both feel it and see it now; a diffuse green light above them. For the first time, he caught more than just a glimpse of one of the seamothers.
Behind him, he heard Chase suck in his breath. “My God---“
She was just below them, all mouth and snout and black eyes. If she had chosen, she could have swallowed them whole. Never had he been so close.
No more than three beats separated the kip’t from her reptilian head. They could see each rib in the broad, veined crest that crowned that head; the crest shook with each stroke of her huge paddles. From nose to tail, the seamother averaged maybe five or six beats—this one seemed larger than that.
They could see her horned and spiked tail too, whipping back and forth like a wave. Her flanks were a rippling mass of silvery-white, mottled with gray and also with scars from innumerable battles she had fought. Blemishing the otherwise smooth skin were dozens of tiny, tube-shaped scapet, symbiants who scavenged off the remains of the seamother’s meals.
He barely had time enough to notice all this before their kip’t was smashed by the forepaddles of another serpent and tossed out of the water altogether.
They hurtled across the surf like a mad wing-walker before slamming into a roaring wave. The impact stunned Kloosee and Chase both, even before the kip’t crashed back into the water. Another jolt nearly split the cockpit.
For several minutes, their kip’t was thrashed about at the surface, knocked by the forepaddles of each serpent as it surfaced. The seamothers slapped the water with loud thumps, bellowing happily in the spray.
The fracas continued for quite some time, long enough for Kloosee to lose consciousness a couple of times. The ride from Omsh’pont had exhausted both of them and even Ke’tee hadn’t helped that much. He heard nothing from Pakma and Angie but didn’t have the strength to worry about it. He felt like a mudball swept up in vishm’tel, like a helpless particle in the sea’s fastest current.
Chase was trying to squeeze past Kloosee into the driver’s cradle, but the thrashing of the kip’t made that impossible. “Maybe I can help…move a little and I’ll take the controls—“
But it was useless. They were bounced from one hump to another, from tail to tail, thumped and thoroughly beaten. Kloosee no longer fought the pain but now welcomed it. It would be so nice to give in, to succumb, just for a moment. Only a moment. He was so dizzy, weakening fast, the cramps were tightening…wrenching his stomach…swelling up…ready to…burst….
Blind with pain, he didn’t at first realize it when the sea had finally calmed and the thunder subsided. It seemed like a hopeless wish…don’t give in to it…but no, it was true. They were floating, drifting, pitching lazily with the waves and he was so tired, so very, very tired….
Gradually, Kloosee regained some sense of where he was and, though he ached from beak to tail with racking throbs, he was able to catch a brief glimpse of a magnificent sight.
The entire herd had moved away, still on the surface, happily splashing its way toward a band of low peaks sitting on the horizon. All he could see was a glistening white shoal of humps and necks and crested heads, bobbing away from them, immersed in a light mist that refracted light into a faint rainbow of colors. Long, rolling swells slapped against the side of the kip’t. A violent storm was building and the wind whipped the water into a foaming froth.
The stories were true. The seamothers were heading for land.
“Pakma! Look!”
A weak voice replied, “Get us back under…Kloosee…it’s not safe up here….”
He was nearly unconscious himself but Kloosee was enthralled at the view.
Chase marveled at the sight. “On Earth, these would be monsters…nightmares…people would tell stories for generations about this—“
“Here too,” Kloosee admitted. “It’s incredible…we’re seeing something that our storytellers have wondered about for millennia.” He paid no attention to the hoarse groans coming over the circuit. Pakma didn’t have the stamina that Kloosee did.
He remembered all those tales of serpents and demons of the Notwater and how he had been enchanted by them. They were living those stories right now, watching a herd of seamothers roll toward the rugged slopes of T’kel, honking, wheezing, filling the Notwater with spray, and he was every bit as joyous as they were—awed and thrilled and moved by it all, all at the same time.
He heard Pakma’s voice in the distance, scratching out something he couldn’t understand. He felt his own eyes bulging, and his stomach ballooning. A cramp convulsed him, squeezing out a cry of pain, but he fought it down and gasped for breath. Not now! I…can’t…leave…now….
The waves thundered and broke over the kip’t cockpit. Swells many beats high lifted them up and flung them down hard. A dense spray flecked the bubble and made seeing difficult. Above, the huge puffy masses he had noticed on his earlier trips were no longer white or yellow. Now, they boiled in heavy grays and blacks, rippling and surging overhead like a reflection of the water itself.
A deafening crack split the sky and Kloosee craned his neck to see.
“Wow!” yelled Chase. “Great lightning…just like the Gulf!”
Even as they watched, another boom rattled the waters and a vivid white vein of light streaked through the Notwater. It held for an instant, then vanished, illuminating the masses with jagged branches of light, so that it seemed he could see the very insides of Notwater, ripped open for inspection.
There was something marvelously alive in all of it. Below, the waters were steady, the currents unvarying, the mountains and trenches and plains unchanging. That’s the way all the kelke liked it. But here, a mountain could be built and demolished in an instant; there was energy here, raw and uncontained, here the energy of an entire civilization could be expended in a futile effort to re-sculpt the sea.
It was like the Notwater he and Pakma had seen so many times on the world of the eekoti, but not like it at the same time. Here, he gaped at things he could see when the waves lifted them high over the water: towers and domes and obelisks of water; long, writhing mountains and crumbling pillars; huge, crashing ramparts and cliffs, all of it water, held for a split second in a pose of splendor, then just as quickly destroyed in an avalanche of foam.
“Uh…Kloosee…anybody there…hello…?”
He might have died right then and there had not a weak voice interrupted his reverie.
It was Angie.
“…we have a problem here…hello…anybody there—“
“Yes—“ Kloosee replied. He could not see Pakma’s kip’t anywhere. Was it even on the surface? “Yes…what—“
Angie must have heard his reply. “Kloosee, is that you? Pakma’s…I don’t know…passed out or something…she’s not moving, she’s slumped over the panel—“
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know…we’re on the surface….I can’t see anything…those serpents have moved off.—“
Kloosee started sounding, finding only intermittent returns. Notwater was a lousy medium for sounding. But there was something there…a blip…a shadow of a return. Kloosee wrestled the kip’t around toward that heading…whatever it was, it was below the surface but not far…several beats away…and moving off toward the islands on the horizon.
“Kah, t’alp’te Pul’ke! What have I…Shooki, help us!”
Kloosee took one last look and let the image sink in. Sheets of water were beating down on them now. Somehow, he had to get their kip’t started up again, find Pakma’s kip’t.
He tried the jets but they sputtered in the Notwater. A numbing ache was tearing at him from inside; his eyes were too swollen to focus on the instruments. There was only one thing he could try.
Struggling with his last shred of strength, and with Chase’s help,
he forced the bubble of the cockpit open as far as he could wedge it. He needed water, cold, dense, salty water over his face and gills. He couldn’t get to Pakma if he passed out. And Chase—
A harsh blast of Notwater scraped his gills, burning them. But the heavy seas spilled over the lip and into the cockpit as he had hoped and the kip’t was soon flooded. It sank quickly plunging down through layer after layer of cold, salty water, while both Kloosee and Chase clung to their cradles to keep from being sucked out. Kloosee drifted in and out of consciousness while the water cooled and grew denser. He didn’t know how deep the Ponkel was here but a faint pulse told him the bottom wasn’t far away.
He felt something push him aside and didn’t resist. It was Chase, maneuvering to get at the controls. Chase, with his long arms, somehow managed to take control of the kip’t and slow their descent. They were still headed down but the trajectory had flattened out noticeably.
The kip’t hit bottom and gouged into a sandy headland, buried nose first. Cold, sweet m’eetor’kel water swept through the cockpit and Kloosee raised his head slightly to let the flow wash over his beak. It was the finest water he had ever tasted. Choking with laughter, he collapsed in the cradle.
He was buried in a deep cave, fighting for breath. The water was seeping out and he struggled to escape, before he suffocated. He could feel Notwater in his gills and he coughed blood, rasping hard to expel it. Then something warm held his beak and he opened his eyes.
It was Chase’s hand.
“How do you feel?” came the voice.
Kloosee blinked. He let his eyes rove for a minute, before realizing they were still in the kip’t, still buried in the sand.
“Like a seamother swallowed me.”
“Here, eat this.” A ripe gisu was waved under his beak. He let Chase pop it into his mouth. It was tart but good. After a few more bites, he could feel a little strength returning. He groaned and lifted himself off the cradle.
“Hey, man, don’t exert yourself. You’ve lost a lot of…something, I’m sure.” Firmly, but gently, he pushed Kloosee back into the cradle. He resisted, but not very convincingly.
“Pakma…Angie…what about them? Where are they?”
Chase sat back, waved some of water over his own gills. It did taste better than the air topside. Maybe he was becoming more Seomish. “I think they went to the bottom like we did…I think they landed nearby. I’ve tried the radio thing. But nobody’s answering. I’m worried.”
Kloosee struggled up and situated himself in front of the controls. “We’d better look around. “
“Can you do this?”
Kloosee powered up the sled, found the jets working, but they sputtered into life before settling down into a smooth flow. “Can you? We’ve got to find them. Pakma’s not as strong as I am…she doesn’t hold up in Notwater. I think this is her first time.”
“What a sight,” Chase seated himself in his own cradle, automatically made sure the bubble was secure. He’d seen Kloosee do it, so he had an idea. He wanted to have a go at the controls of the sled…this is way cooler than my turbo…but Kloosee seemed stable enough.
They backed out of the sand and lifted away from the bottom. Kloosee started pinging as they began searching for the other kip’t. A few minutes later, he had found them, likewise buried in a cloak of silt and sand a few beats away.
Pakma was just waking up. Angie had been nursing her and feeding her as Chase had done with Kloosee.
Kloosee left his own kip’t and nosed his way over to the cockpit of the other sled. He found Pakma groggy, but okay. Some food and some rest time was all she needed.
Pakma nuzzled with Kloosee. “You gave up your precious Notwater to come looking for me…I would never have thought that of you, Kloos. Sometimes, you surprise me…just not often enough.”
“You’re pulsing pretty tired, Pakma…fatigued even. Maybe we should stay here for awhile. This water is tchor’kel’te, cold but calm. Rest and food, that’s what we all need.”
“No,” Pakma waved him away. “No, we’d better get going. Seamothers…Puk’lek…that was a coincidence, wasn’t it? You didn’t deliberately steer us into a nest, did you?”
Kloosee pretended to be hurt. “Me? I would never do that…true enough, Notwater fascinates me. But deliberately…?”
“Sorry. I guess we were lucky.”
“Very lucky. And Chase here…he took over the kip’t when we went down…kept us from being damaged when we hit bottom.”
Chase grinned. Or grimaced, you couldn’t tell when you looked like a gigantic frog. Angie laughed, in spite of herself.
Pakma stroked Angie’s foreflukes. “Angie too. She figured out how to call for help. And she got the cockpit open, so I could get a breath of real water…she saved my life.”
Angie tried what she thought was a shrug. She wasn’t sure it came out that way.
“Hey, what am I…window dressing? This girl’s no bumpkin…I’m the real deal. It just took me a few minutes, that’s all. I figured everything out.”
Kloosee made sure Pakma was going to be okay. “We’d better get going. I’ll have to hunt around to find the Pomtel--.”
He stopped in mid-sentence, listening carefully. “I don’t hear the Sound…the wavemaker. Do you?”
Pakma listened. “Nothing. The wavemaker is quiet.”
“Maybe the Umans turned it off. But they could turn it back on again. If I can find the center of the Pomtel current, we can’t be that far from Kinlok.”
“Let’s go,” Pakma said. She pushed Kloosee away and began securing their cockpit bubble down.
Kloosee and Chase went back to their own kip’t.
Together, none the worse for wear after their encounter with the seamothers, the two kip’ts lifted off the bottom and turned toward the north. Kloosee pulsed ahead and soon enough, found the reassuring echoes of the great northern river known as the Pomtel Current.
They headed north, toward the Pillars of Shooki, toward the polar ice pack… toward the Farpool and the Time Twister.