The Farpool (27 page)

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 some 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 bred any offspring up there, like the tales
said, then such creatures would be as different from the Seomish as
it was possible to be.