Through the Whirlpool (6 page)

“
Get that down you and see if you can’t get a bit of rest, lass, until we finish with your brother.”

Bilges had some sort of tube sticking in Kyle
’s nose while he lay on his side on the examination table. Joan and Patrick stood woodenly in the center of the small room, each peering over one of the doctor’s shoulders. Mrs. Cotild had squeezed her bulk between the filing cabinet and the examination table, and was wiping Kyle’s tears away. It felt like a scene from
Emergency
except Jade had no idea it all felt quite so horrible when it actually happened. Deep down in her gut she felt hideous. Everyone looked pale and worried. For the first time, she had to accept, to realize the consequences of what she was responsible for: This was her doing. It was all her fault for leaving her brother alone in the water.

No, Kyle would be okay as long as he could throw up
everything he swallowed in the sea. He would recover. Any minute now, it would be over. They could go back home and have dinner, watch television, do everything they always did in the evenings. Tomorrow they could go to the beach again. She would look after him better this time, not go and lie on her towel while he was out there, not even if their mom was watching, too. If she had stayed in the water with Kyle, she might have kept him from heading so far out. The weird thing was that Dr. Bilges, Mrs. Cotild, everybody kept calling her a heroine—even Patrick had said it—yet it was her fault that Kyle was lying here crying with a tube sticking up his nose.

She closed her eyes, tried to relax.

“Jade! Are you okay? Feeling all right?”

Her eyes snapped open at Patrick
’s voice. She had drifted off. Patrick put his arm around her. “Time for us to hit the road.”

They thanked the doctor and trailed out to the car. As they drove home,
Jade thought about the slick. It was still floating around out there, but where had it come from?

After leaving town by the motorway that ran down the coast, just over the bridge
from the turnoff to their beach, they drove by a place where the countryside was scarred by a wide swath of graded earth. This was the site of Jade’s troubles with Rena. The Synengine research facility: a squat, white concrete block, harsh against the green fields and darker forest across the river. Two aluminum chimneys rose ten yards high, gleaming in late sunlight. From the right-hand funnel a wisp of pale smoke or steam drifted, but otherwise there was no movement. In the car park, a dozen or so workers’ cars sat beside a flash, lead-colored BMW belonging to the Synengine CEO, Dr. Hagues.

“
That place is so ugly!”

From the front seat,
Joan raised her head from nursing Kyle: “It’s for a good cause. Sometimes we have to accept a little ugliness in life to help improve the world.”

“
I’ll never accept an ugly life.”

They skirted the perimeter and turned onto Point Mauri Road, leaving the looming monstrosity behind. Then they were traveling between fields on the right and the Mauri
River on their left. On the far shore, gloomy in twilight, rose the native forest reserve, a dark, closed mass of vegetation. The road curved, and dunes came between them and the river mouth, hiding the sea, which lay east. Finally, they turned right, into their own road, and roared up their driveway.

Later, lying in bed—after having eaten some hot stew Patrick had cooked up—Jade
’s queasiness returned. This time it didn’t strike as strongly as before, yet seemed to creep into her consciousness quietly—as a sort of waking dream. All those competing colors whirled about in her head, and sounds of the sea seemed to follow her heartbeat softly, insistently. Something wanted to be acknowledged. She could hear a mocking voice, the boy’s, and a trace of his laugh... He seemed to be forming words, yet she felt weak, could not understand the sounds…
hursshh… faa… daw… oh..
. Little by little her concentration frayed, drifting away into the wide night. She slipped down into a silky, dreamless sleep.

A
lake… so large… it is Bhaanj-krraash-oh-bhaan…

Kreh-ursh
felt bewildered. It must be… Dragon-Belly Lake… but why was this mythical place appearing in his vision? Purple-brown peaks rose jaggedly all around the broken sides of an ancient crater that formed the lakeshore. Sun flashed into his eyes off the water’s flat surface. His disembodied awareness hovered above, staring down into the still depths.

Describe…

Nothing. Dead. Still…

Then he saw it, could hardly believe his eyes: a creature he had only ever heard of in stories…

Here… it can’t be…

Why was it entering his vision? His eyes were dazzled by the bright, changing
colors. He had to be mistaken, but no underwater creature could come close to this for such awe-inspiring beauty. It really was...

Describe.

Ee… ee-kawg-zjhur!!!

Ee-kawg-zjhur… the
mythical jewel fish. Almost as soon as he spied it, the fish flipped out of his sight. With that, the vision dissolved, giving him no time to react or reflect on what he had seen.

Smoke swirled, wafting him deeper into its billows. As it cleared, in the fire
’s heart, a scene was forming: He was standing inside a bright, white-lit building. A young boy lay on a high bed, such as the Rraawuu city dwellers used inland. He was pale with sickness. People—probably the boy’s family—stood around, dressed in peculiar, clinging garments.

Then that scene dissolved. He was carried across plains. Cloud shadows chased each other over waves of grass forever rippling like a wind-blown sea. A silver mist approached from the horizon. He was intrigued, the way it undulated, changing and flowing… Then the silver took substance, the ear
th trembled underfoot. He realized he was watching a huge herd of white and gray beasts thundering wildly through the knee-high grasses. They galloped closer, and he identified flying manes, tails, snorting nostrils, and pounding hooves… He saw horns: thin, straight, gleaming ivory sprouting from each beast’s forehead. Then they were upon him. The dust of their passing rose up, obscuring their forms. The blowing grass melded into the fire’s green-gray smoke, and the vision flowed onwards, carrying him toward…

K
aa-meer-geh…

Why?

A… ritual… don’t understand…

The secret island of the
shahiroh. What did it mean? To see this, he must have to go there… but only the shahiroh, the sea callers, came onto this island. Yet it could be no other: Everything was red rock and dust, and that smoldering crater dominated the skyline. There was a wide, sandy space, surrounded by a ring of wooden stakes driven into the ground. Beyond, he saw huts similar to his own but somehow more brooding, more mysterious, and farther off, the mouths of caves. Groups of shahiroh stood in the central area, identified by their blue robes. They appeared to be chanting, but he heard nothing. One of the shahiroh approached a kneeling figure, hooded, in green, holding a clay cup of some liquid. And he knew that person…

But the scene had changed
once more, and now he was flying high in the air. He glided up a steep green valley over which two volcano-like peaks towered. They gleamed silver in the sunlight.

Gehg… Mountains!

His thoughts were now flowing fluidly to Taashou, verbalized mentally even as he formulated them. The vision dragged him back:

…sun shining… freezing wind…

A wind that roared down the valley. The air was colder than he had ever felt in his life, and that chill whiteness covering them, which he had heard about but never seen before, that must be snow. That was why it was cold. One of the peaks was slightly higher than the other. Could they be Geh-urbh-geh-ot?

Heh…
Taashou confirmed,
Geh-urbh-geh-ot.

Big-brother-little-sister, the twin peaks at the
center of the mainland, from which they say all creation sprang.

…high up, valley between two peaks… building… a building
made of the sea!

At the top of the valley was a constru
ction surrounded by more snow. As shiny and translucent as the sea, yet it looked as hard as mountain stone, as if it were obsidian from the volcanoes, but clear not dark. Those parapets and turrets could not be real. It would be impossible to build such a palace. He drifted closer, distinguishing two frail figures standing before the building. They appeared old and stooped, a man and a woman. Then mist swirled again.

N
ow very dry… hot, scorching…

The vision had
changed once more, showing him a dry desert, scorched and seared by heat. This was not like the desert he knew to the north, where low scrub and age-worn escarpments melded together in arid harmony. This dead dryness seemed to scream in the agony of its lifelessness, as if whatever growth it might once have had had been torn unnaturally from its back. In the middle was a trudging figure. A single line of footprints trailed away behind to the far horizon. Kreh-ursh glided closer on the wings of his trance. The figure stumbled, near death, parched with thirst. Then Kreh-ursh was almost alongside, and he was able to see that it was a young man, emaciated, only a few years older than himself. The skin of his face was burnt and parched, his clothes ragged and torn. The stranger raised his eyes—red, grit-filled—turning his face toward him… It could not be… It was himself! As the vision dissolved, his alter ego fell face forward in the sand and lay unmoving…

Describe.

…No!

He struggled with every scrap of willpower. Taashou did
not insist. Then Kreh-ursh was fighting to be free of the oppressive smoke clouds that held him captive. He lashed out at Taashou with his mind. She did not strike back, but suddenly he was aware of the fire before him on the beach, the cold sand. The fire’s smoke, normal and natural, swirled upwards into the night sky, and darkness eclipsed his inner sight. He was exhausted. Abruptly aware of the long day, the lack of food, and his own emotional strain, he could not last any longer. He felt himself sag, noted Taashou’s arms around him, one hand massaging his temples, pressing insistently on a certain point. Then he was slipping toward sleep, wondering why Taashou had insisted on seeing into his visions… Is that normal? They were his own… secret… no other candidate had ever revealed… How many different scenes! Questions whirled in his brain, unresolved, but he was already entering a pleasantly dark, dreamless realm.

He did
not see how Taashou caught him as he fell unconscious toward the fire, how she laid him gently on his sleeping mat within the fire’s warmth and wrapped him in a blanket. Neither did he see, oblivious in his exhaustion, how she sat for a long time, gazing into the dying fire herself, another thousand unanswered questions flickering in her own dark eyes along with the firelight.

T
he next day Jade got up early. She went in to see Kyle before breakfast and found her mom there. Her brother was sitting up in bed, and Joan was helping him take some of Dr. Bilges’ pills.

“
They taste awful, Mom! Do I have to?”

“
Come on, Kyle, they’re to make you feel better. Just the three, and then you can have some breakfast.”

He submitted silently, but immediately after he swallowed began to
cough and retch, bringing the pills straight back up. “I can’t, Mom. I don’t want to go back to sleep. The bleeding man...”

“
They won’t put you to sleep. They’re to stop your tummy hurting, dear. What bleeding man?”

“
The man with the bleeding face. He came to save me, but he scares me.”

“
Can I do anything, Mom?”

Her mother was abrupt
, tiredness and worry showing on her face:

“
No! Sorry… Please, could you get us all some breakfast? That would be a help. Now, Kyle, stop talking nonsense and just take these pills, will you?”

She left them, Kyle now crying, his face a patchwork of red and brown blotches where tears and
the sludge from the sea had stained his features. She remembered how he had looked as he began to slip down into that mass under the waves, and a stab of guilt shot through her.

Hoping to distract herself, she turned on the TV. It was a rerun of the earlier Mau
ri Cove item on the twenty-four-hour news channel her mom liked. And there onscreen was that flask of multicolored swirl. She froze the image. Was it possible? She was going crazy! But she could feel her frontal lobes beginning to pulse as if a headache were chasing her. That synthetic fuel… it was like her dream, like the swirls of seaweed that had surrounded her in the water. That’s normal, she told herself. We always incorporate bits of reality into our dreams. Yet why should this substance she had never encountered before have such an effect on her?

An unexpected bright
flash from outside drew her toward the window. It was a clear day, yet over the roofs of the line of houses that separated their home from Mauri Cove, a strange storm was brewing. Out to sea, beyond their bay, more clouds than before were stacked up like a huge frozen yogurt cone, yet darker, more sinister. They appeared to revolve in a slow whirl at least a mile wide. All around, the sun still shone… blue sky, summer heat.