The Farpool (56 page)

Chase was not be deterred. “One of these
kip’ts would do. Sure, maybe with some modification…I’m willing to
risk it. It’s my life anyway. And the Farpool’s nearby.”

Now Kloosee turned from the mooring
cable and regarded Chase grimly. He could pulse the echoes of
determination inside the
eekoti
. Theirs weren’t so hard to read. Chase
and Angie had both been open books, hiding nothing. They didn’t yet
know the Omtorish way of layering echoes and bubbles, the art of
concealment and subterfuge.

“Chase, this is a bad idea. We need you
on the project. You know the Tailless, you think like a Uman,
you
are
Uman. You can help us
keep the misunderstandings under control. To move the wavemaker,
Uman and Omtorish have to work together. Look at you…you’re part of
both worlds. You’re Uman, yet with
em’took
, you live among us. There’s no one else
like you here.”

Pakma added, “Chase, it’s just that we
can’t afford to lose you…and you’ve been through the Farpool, so
you know how dangerous it can be. We can’t even be sure you’ll get
back to the right time and place. And there is the
em’took
…to reverse this is also
dangerous.”

“It’s never been done,” Kloosee admitted.

“I don’t care. Can you at least ask the
Metah? Ask Longsee? See what they say? I mean, it’s great that I’m
needed, that I can help. But—“ here Chase struggled to find the
words, hoping the echopod would convey what he meant, maybe even
fill in where he had no words to describe a feeling, “—I’m not
really like you. This—
thing
—“
he indicated his modified body, with its scales and armor and
ridges and projections and gills and—“—lets me live with you. But
you know I’m Uman…human, I should say. I like helping. I like
learning about your kel, your world, the Pillars, the seamothers,
even the Ponkti scumbags. But I can’t stay here forever…I’m not
sure I want to. Hell…I don’t know what I mean. Does any of this
make sense? Is it coming through the pod okay?”

Now Kloosee and Pakma looked at each other.
Thoughts passed between them, not by words. Only the echoes inside
spoke volumes. They pulsed each other and they understood.

“I’ll find Longsee,” Kloosee said at last.
“I’ll see what he says. If he agrees that a kip’t can be modified
and go through the Farpool with a decent chance of surviving, then
maybe you can do this. But we still need the Metah’s approval.”

Now, Chase showed them just how much
he
had
learned living among
them. “You’ve got repeaters with us…I know one of them…Pekto
something or other. Can’t they send a signal…like call home,
through that deep sound channel?”

Kloosee had to admit this was true.
“Longsee, first, Chase. Here, help me with this sack…careful…it’s
got
mah’jeet
inside. We’ll
wrap it around the anchor bed and let them eat their way through
the sack…and then the cable.”

Longsee was intrigued by the prospect of
modifying a kip’t for a Farpool trip. “We’ll have to strengthen it,
seal it better. Kloosee has some ideas.’

Chase was encouraged. “Then you think it can
be done?”

Longsee was examining a piece of a chronopod
that had been torn off and sunk into the sea. The scientist had
located a small grotto behind a bed of coral and set up a temporary
location there, from which to help oversee the dismantling. The
drumming of the wavemaker was audible, but muffled and more
bearable.

“It can be done,
eekoti
Chase. The question is
should
it be done. The Farpool is
variable…it intensifies. It relaxes, almost like breathing. The
wavemaker creates all
azh’puhte
…all the vortexes, including the
Farpool. The Umans have changed the way the wavemaker operates. We
don’t know what effect this change will have on the vortexes. It
might not work at all. It might send you somewhere other than what
you want.”

“I’m willing to take the chance. Will you
help me?”

Something in the way Chase spoke,
though the echopod did the translating, made Longsee look up. He
pulsed Chase deeply. Resolve, fortitude, grit, strength. All the
echoes were there, though Umans didn’t reflect like anyone else.
Longsee could see that Chase meant what he was saying and, worse,
would likely try the trip even without approval. He didn’t
want
that
on his
conscience.

“I will help you,” he decided. “But we must
put this before the Metah.”

They hunted down Pekto kim, a veteran
Omtorish repeater, who had come with the expedition because of his
navigation skills and knowledge of the northern seas. Pekto was
working with a small group on releasing mooring cables for the
wavemaker foundation.

Longsee worked with Pekto to formulate the
message.

“It’s has to be done a certain way,” Pekto
explained to Chase. “The format is very structured. Repeaters like
me have to sing long and loud, so the message can’t be very long or
complicated. Simple is better. Other repeaters who hear the message
and sing it on further expect messages to done the right way.”

Chase listened through his echopod to the
words that Longsee and Pekto composed. He didn’t begin to
understand all of it, but the echopod itself had told him about the
repeaters who were so important to long distance
communication….

…the long-distance, deep
sound channel is called
ootkeeor
….low frequency sounds can be reflected through this channel
for distances of hundreds of beats…all kels maintain a force of
living repeaters whose job is to roam the seas along this sound
channel and listen for news, warnings, signals, various messages,
anything that needs to be communicated across great distances…the
ootstek hear these messages and re-broadcast them in a manner
similar to songs…messages must be formulated according to strict
guidelines….

“What’s it like being a repeater?” Chase
asked.

Pekto was a muscular fellow, older with
some gray mottling, but possessed of powerful tail flukes. “We’re
all great swimmers,” he boasted. “We can swim forever, against any
current, any kind of condition. But what’s it like?” Pekto thought
a moment, put down his
mah’jeet
sack and let himself drift slightly. “Lonely. That’s the best
word for it. You’re out there in the far seas, all by yourself,
nothing but seaweed and pal’penk and coral beds for company. It’s
stressful too…you have to listen carefully, all the time. You can’t
miss anything. You have to concentrate and that wears you out.
Sometimes, we repeaters just have to shut ourselves down, drift
with the current, take a long sleep, to get our strength back. Ah,
but we have a great life, we do. The Serpentines, the Pillars of
Shooki, the volcanoes, the Likte Trench, we see it all. Every
repeater is a great story-teller. When we retire, that’s all we do.
Suck gisu, get drunk and tell stories.” Pekto bellowed out a hearty
laugh. Then he got down to work with Longsee to compose Chase’s
message.

The message described for the Metah what
Chase wanted to do. When it was done, and translated for Chase, he
agreed with the content. “I just want to see Angie again…I’m
willing to take any risks…I know the Farpool can’t always be
predicted.”

Longsee gave the finished pod to Pekto.
“
Eekoti
Chase, what you’re
doing is very brave…maybe even foolish. But we understand the pull
of your own kel…we’ll see what the Metah says.”

Chase asked, “Pekto, how do you send this
message now?”

Pekto explained. “I have the bulb with
the message. I memorize it while I’m traveling to the nearest point
of
oot’keeor
…a few hundred
beats south of here. From there, I orbit inside the sound channel,
each leg about fifty beats and I sing the message of the pod, your
message. Over and over again. I sing it for a day. Then I come
back. Other repeaters will hear it and pass it on. In a few days,
the message will arrive at Omsh’pont.”

“Like an old-timey telegraph,” Chase
observed. Then he realized nobody had any idea what he was talking
about.

As Pekto had predicted, the Metah’s
response came back three days later. During that time, Chase helped
Longsee, Kloosee and Pakma with unfastening the wavemaker’s mooring
cables, splitting open the section seams of the great machine and
rounding up the rest of the chronopods. The Umans were reasonably
helpful and there were daily meetings on the beach at Kinlok. Chase
was the designated intermediary, so he learned many details of the
plan to break down the wavemaker and transport it hundreds of beats
to the west, across the northern Serpentines, riding the Omt’chor
Current, to an island chain and seamount known as T’orshpont. He
began to learn more about Ultrarch-Major Dringoth in these
briefings…just what kind of person he was and how he had come to
command the 1
^st
Time
Displacement Battery.

He didn’t want to be there. Dringoth was a
lifer. He came from a military family, as did many residents and
colonists of Keaton’s World. After a brief stint as a commercial
ship captain with Keaton’s Transport and Storage, he had joined the
Time Corps’ Timejump Command. He needed something more than boring
freighter duty from one world in the Keaton’s World star system
(the sun was called Sturdivant 2180) to another, and to other
worlds in the borderlands between the Lower Halo and the Inner
Spiral (Centaurus Arm).

Dringoth always imagined himself a military
expert and sought out experiences that would have some hope of
bringing recognition, glory and fame. He came from a family where
the parents, Pyotr Dringoth and Natalya Dringoth, were famous in
their fields of expertise. Pyotr was a great explorer of backwater
worlds and satellites in the outer system of Sturdivant 2180, which
had some twenty planets and thousands of moons and satellites. The
only more famous person on Keaton’s World was General Oscar Keaton
himself, who lead the colony-founding expedition (“First Fall”) to
Sturdivant’s fifth planet several hundred terr before Monthan
Dringoth was born. Pyotr Dringoth was best known as the discoverer
of the great underground ice labyrinth called the Hollows, part of
the icy satellite called Gibbons Grotto in the outer system of
Sturdivant. This dwarf planet was hollow inside with thousands of
kilometers of caves, caverns, grottoes, mazes and warrens.

Monthan’s mother, Natalya Dringoth, was
a biochemist and neuro-engineer, perhaps best known as the
discoverer/creator of
scope
,
a mildly addictive compound that has become essential for preparing
Umans (and other sentient beings) for mind uploading, a process
known as The Switch.

With two famous parents and some
overachiever siblings, Monthan had to get out and left home for
Frontier Corps at an early age, signing onto a freighter crew
making the rounds of Sturdivant’s worlds. Initially, a robotics’
mate, he worked his way up over a number of years into positions of
command. Ten terr after joining the Corps, he went through officer
candidate school (OCS) (on Telitor, a nearby world of the star-sun
Delta Recursa III). About five years after that, he was given
command of small corvette called
Lalande
, which he skippered for another five
terr, until a navigation error under his command caused the
corvette to crash into a small asteroid in the Boru system.
Extensive damage to the ship led to an investigation and Dringoth
was found to be negligent and at fault. He was cashiered from
Frontier Corps.

About this same time, new developments in
temporal science and engineering led to new technological
breakthroughs allowing Umans to travel through time for limited
excursions. Not long after these developments, Umans learned of a
new threat in the Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of the
galaxy. A race of machine-like swarm entities called the Coethi had
also developed a means of conducting temporal operations and were
beginning to alter time streams around outlying Uman settlements in
such a way as to eliminate these Uman settlements from ever having
been established…changing the very nature of space-time and the
historical record.

Umans had to counter this threat immediately.
A new military force was set up, known as the Time Corps.

Monthan Dringoth, now cashiered out of
Frontier Corps and trapped in a dead end job on Sturdivant Eleven
as a mining camp cook and bot repairman was immediately intrigued
by this new development. He plotted to join Time Corps, mainly as a
way of getting off Sturdivant Eleven and making a name for himself,
independent of his famous parents.

He volunteered for service with Time
Corps and signed a contract after spending nearly seven terr on
Sturdivant Eleven. After passing the physical, he was sent to
recruit camp on Poona-Peona, where he nearly died in physical
training, after a serious fall in the Escape and Evasion course.
But he recovered and did well enough as a recruit (known as
nogs
to everybody) to get out of
Basic. His first assignment was to Hapsh’m, where he served as a
systems mechanic for a small detachment of time troopers, who rode
special vehicles (jumpships) into alternate time streams to hunt
down, engage and destroy Coethi scouts and troopers, who were
trying to alter the time streams.