BLIND WAVES.

Steven Gould.

1.

Beenan: Vomitar debajo del agua

Once upon a time in America, Patricia's father told her, you could say what you wanted in public, buy cheap land in the mountains, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service wasn't the second largest division of the armed forces.

That was before the Antarctic Volcano field. That was before the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf slid.

That was a hundred feet of water ago.

This is now.

Terminal Lorraine was fifty miles from the Houston dikes, inbound, seventy feet of water under her keels, passing over Fort Jacinto Military Reservation, the old northeastern tip of Galveston Island. The sky was mostly clear, blue diamond with white puffy cumulus clouds scudding northward, and the sun beat down hot enough to make the deck uncomfortable. A trio of oceangoing shrimp boats were passing to the north on their way out to the deep water. A giant container ship had passed them earlier, headed for Houston, and was slowly shrinking in the east.Patricia could've saved time by passing more to the south, but their escort and client, the hundred-foot-long workboat Amoco Mechanic, drew a lot more water than Terminal Lorraine did and they didn't want to risk running into the top of one of the old Baylor Medical School buildings.

Terminal Lorraine handled rough water pretty well, for a trimaran, but when the wind and seas aligned on her rear she developed a corkscrewing motion that got Patricia every time.

Toni, Patricia's new crew, was telling her a joke, and Patricia was listening carefully, trying to distract herself from simulcasting lunch.

"So, during the Deluge, the mayor of San Francisco sees the water rise and he says, 'Oh, my god!' The mayor of New York sees the streets filled with water and he says, 'Oh, my god!' The mayor of Miami sees water everywhere and he says, 'Oh, my god!' Then the mayor of New Orleans watches the fish swim through his office and says, 'I do declare. Humid, today, eh?' "

Patricia had heard it before, but she laughed anyway. Toni did a great Cajun accent and Patricia was still trying to get her to relax.

The fathometer dropped back to 140 feet, meaning they were past the old shoreline and over Bolivar Roads, the historic mouth of Galveston Bay. The Amoco boat turned again, following the old Texas City ship channel, and Patricia adjusted the sails, letting the thick Dacron rope run through her fingers, while Toni brought the boat around to the new heading, then recleated the sheets. Toni had been aboard only for the last two days, and Patricia was mostly happy with her, but she wished her regular crew could've come.

Terminal Lorraine's two outer hulls were elegant forty-foot-long fiberglass blades, each sporting a single unstayed mast forty feet high. She carried fully battened "junk" sails, Kevlar-reinforced Mylar with composite ribs that stretched the width of the sail. They were easy to handle single-handed since they were self-reefing; in high winds the crew just lowered them a span or two and the bottom battens stacked neatly.

The pitch was a little better on the new heading, Patricia faced into the wind and breathed deeply, trying to settle her stomach. She smelled salt water, sunscreen, the barest hint of diesel exhaust, and her own sweat.

Toni looked sideways at her new boss. "You okay, Patricia? You look a little green."

Thanks so much for the reminder. Patricia shook her head, irritated. "Not your problem. Mind the helm."

Toni shrugged and her face closed up a little.

Patricia was pleased Toni didn't get seasick-the topside hand needed to ride out rough weather sometimes-but she could keep it to herself. Toni'd learn,hopefully.

Toni was sixteen years younger than Patricia, a sun-browned blonde with big breasts and a small nose, unlined face, and a long and lean body that was a head taller than Patricia-hell, Toni was everything Patricia wasn't. She seemed to live in Speedo suits and T-shirts. Her parents were from peninsular Florida, but she'd been born during the Deluge and, as a cash-poor Displaced American, she really didn't have a chance of getting land outside the wet-foot ghettos or a homestead in the Nevada "Displaced Citizen" projects.

Toni's sailing experience was extensive, since she'd lived all her life on a forty-five-foot ketch, and, though she didn't have any experience with multi-hulls, she was doing all right.

"We gonna hit them in the ass," Toni said.

Patricia looked forward again. They'd picked up a knot of speed on the new heading, and the distance between them and the workboat was dropping. "Pass them to port."

"Passing to port, aye, Moth-Captain."

Patricia laughed. "Do I really remind you of your mother?" Toni's mother was in her early fifties, twenty years older than Patricia. Patricia had met the woman briefly the week before and thought she looked a lot like Toni-the same build, and the same face if you accounted for the difference in mileage. Certainly she looked nothing like Patricia. "You'll make me feel my age, child."

Toni shook her head. "No. It's habit. Mom would skipper. Dad did maintenance.

I was crew. Our boat was already forty years old before the Deluge, so it's over sixty, now. Everything was jury-rigged." She shrugged. "Keeping it afloat was a full-time job for Dad. Parts."

She didn't need to say anything more. Most yacht and marine supply warehouses and manufacturers went underwater that year.

"That's pretty cool about your mom," Patricia said. "My mother gets seasick driving across bridges."

"She does? How does she handle the storm surge on the Strand?"

"She doesn't. She lives in Austin. Won't go near water." The old familiar guilt rose up inside Patricia. "We used to call her the 'Ruler of the Queen's Navy.' "

"I don't get it," Toni said.

"HMS Pinafore." Toni still looked blank, so Patricia explained further. "The song is about the Lord High Admiral who is appointed to the post after an extremely successful legal and political career landside. He sings, 'Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee.' ""Oh, they said you spouted Shakespeare."

Patricia froze and counted to ten before saying calmly, "Well, yes, but that wasn't William Shakespeare-that was William Gilbert. Anyway, when my parents divorced, my mother stayed in Austin, and I came out here with my dad."

"How old were you?" She looked wistful.

"Fourteen."

"Wow. And she let you go?"

"Let me go? It wasn't that simple." Patricia shook her head. "She was very busy.

She was a full partner in a firm and in her first race for Congress. She didn't want a messy and public custody fight."

"I wish I could get my mother out of my hair."

"Would you have your parents divorce?"

"No, they're happy. Did your dad remarry?"

"No." He just slept around a lot. "Uh, he dated. He could recite Shakespearean verse for hours. It was his shtick. He was very popular." Patricia could recall a host of "aunts" who came and went like candles.

The VHF crackled. "Hey, Beenan?"

Patricia picked up the mike. "I hear you, Mateo." Mateo was the tool pusher on the Amoco boat.

"We'll be on station in ten minutes."

"Right-we'll power up."

Patricia went forward, bare feet quickstepping over sun-heated white textured fiberglass, following the deck above the middle hull of the Lorraine. The middle hull was slightly less than thirty-five feet long, a big titanium pipe four feet in diameter, with stubby wings in the middle, a big ducted fan with vertical and horizontal stabilizers at the rear, and a transparent acrylic nose. It was a stupid design for a sailboat hull, but a darn good submarine.

"You ready for this, Toni?" Patricia called back.

Toni shrugged. "No prob, boss."

"Okay. Just remember she's a lot more lively without the sub attached," Patricia said. "And if that INS Fastship drops back by, just show them your papers and cooperate. Mateo will back you up."

There was an Immigration and Naturalization Service patrol boat, a 110-foot ex-Coast Guard Fastship, about six miles northwest of them. The INS Fastship had already queried Mateo's people by VHF, but they were used to Amoco Mechanicworking this area, and Amoco still had a lot of clout, even if its largest refinery was underwater.

It was the INS that made Patricia leave her regular crew back home. They were floaters-displaced aliens-and the INS had a mandate to keep them out of the U.S.

Exclusive Economic Zone. They were fair game anywhere within two hundred miles of the coast. Toni, as a mere wetfoot, was legal here.

"You told me a hundred times already," Toni said, but smiled. "Besides, why would they mess with Assemblywoman Beenan?"

Patricia felt her face twist like she'd bitten into something intensely sour. "First, I'm just an alternate on the assembly, and second, why should the INS care? New Galveston is only vaguely associated with the U.S. What the INS should care about is that we have the legal right to be here."

Toni looked skeptical. "Yeah, they should."

"The youth today." Patricia shook her head and lifted the fiberglass hatch on the personnel tube. "Christ, I remember when my dad used to say that to me!"

"When do I meet your dad?" Toni asked.

Patricia froze in the mouth of the personnel tube, silent for a moment. Then she said, "You don't, Toni. Full fathom five my father lies; of his bones are coral made. He went down four years ago, in the Cobia, our second submarine."

"Uh, I didn't mean-" Toni's mouth was open, searching for words.

"Of course you didn't. How could you know?" Patricia flashed her a grin she didn't feel and pulled the hatch shut, muttering to herself, "Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, but suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell, the son-of-a-bitch."

Patricia was still pissed at Dad.

He was into act four of Comedy of Errors, calling back and forth on the underwater telephone. She took the part of Angelo and left him with Antipholus of Ephesus arguing over just who had the golden chain. That's the trouble with identical twins (and there are a lot of them in Shakespeare and two sets in Comedy of Errors).

It's never clear whom you're dealing with.

Dad had just said, As all the metal in your shop will- And she hung there, waiting, waiting, waiting. It's "answer." As all the metal in your shop will answer.

But he never completed the sentence. He did not "answer."

The personnel tube was a short fiberglass shaft that protected the pilot hatch of the submarine from flooding while it was on the surface. It ended with a pneumatic gasket snuggled tight to the titanium hull of the sub. With her feet still on the bottom rung, Patricia contorted in the narrow tube, reached down, and snaked the transparent acrylic hatch open. The thing was two inches thick, and getting it open inthe narrow space was always awkward, even with years of practice.

Patricia's dad had never seemed to have trouble with it. Longer reach.

She dropped through the hatch and latched it shut above her. She was in the back of the pilot's station, a space reminiscent of a sewer culvert, stuffy, barely three and a half feet across on the inside diameter, and lots of that was taken up with boxes, plastic conduit, canisters, and oxygen tanks, all mounted to the walls. Carefully, she eased forward and sat in the backward-facing chair, tucked her knees up, and spun it until it faced forward. It locked with a loud click that reverberated in the confined space.

The front half of the chair stuck out into the acrylic nose of SubLorraine.

Patricia's feet were bare, so she pulled on a pair of socks before lowering them to the plastic surface to avoid smudges. Surface water foamed greenish white along the top of the nose and green below. She could make out the outer hulls through the water.

It was on the warm side of comfortable, and Patricia could smell her own armpits, a whiff of ozone, the vinyl chair cover, and something like blue cheese. Her stomach gave one minor heave, then settled. It was time to pull the charcoal filters and bake the volatiles out of them again.

She pulled her sunglasses off and put them in the baseball cap, then stared at her distorted reflection in the acrylic dome: spiky red hair matted from the hat, oversized blue eyes, pronounced cheekbones, small breasts under a worn green tank top, bicycle shorts, and a long nose with perpetual sunburn. She straightened in the seat and tried the confident look-the grown-up woman of business. Christ-you're starting to get crow's-feet, and you still look like a kid!

It was hard for her to climb into SubLorraine without thinking about Dad. They never found Cobia, so she didn't know what had gone wrong. It made her very careful.

First things first: life support. Carbon dioxide scrubber fan on. Oxygen tank at full, valve on auto. Emergency tank full. Now if she'd just changed out the charcoal filters. Ah, well. At least it was only her own farts-not somebody else's.

She didn't notice that her motion sickness had vanished, dropped like last night's pajamas the instant she stopped waiting and began to work.

She took the computer off standby and called up the diagnostics on the electrical system. Green lights all around. She'd spun the flywheels up two days before, when they'd powered out of the Strand, and they were still spinning at eighty percent capacity, about forty-eight thousand revolutions per minute. The reserve kinetic energy was probably enough for everything they'd be doing today, but still she wanted them at full capacity; just in case.

Dad always did.She flipped the snorkel switch, opening the intake and exhaust doors for the turbogenerator, and then hit the start button. There was a slight shudder after the turbine sped up, when it ignited. It was a forty-five-kilowatt natural gas-burning jet turbine generator, spinning on compressed air bearings and self-cooling from intake air. It could run only on the surface since it pulled in several hundred cubic feet of air every minute, and the exhaust temperature was over 550 degrees Fahrenheit, but it could spin up all three storage flywheels from a dead stop to full speed ahead in less than five minutes.

While the flywheels were spinning up, Patricia flipped on the rest of the subsystems. GPS, sonar, pressure depth gauges, CO2 monitor, VHF, acoustic telephone, external strobe lights.

"You there, Toni?" she asked over the VHF, speaking loudly over the roaring hum of the generator.

"Yes, Patricia."

"Try the Gertrude."

The speaker from the acoustic telephone said, "How's this?"

"Radical," Patricia said, over the same system. "Receiving?"

"Loud and clear, assemblywoman."

"Wiseass," Patricia said aloud in the chamber, but didn't transmit. "Try this."

She switched the acoustic phone back on. "Hang on for a minute."

"You mean wait?"

"No, silly woman-I mean hang on to something."

Patricia kicked in the big ducted thruster at ninety percent, and Terminal Lorraine jumped forward. She tested the control surfaces, first shaking the boat side to side, then porpoising it up and down.

"My, how refreshing!" Toni's voice sounded like she was talking from between clenched teeth. In a more relaxed tone she said, "We passed Amoco Mechanic, and you put enough water into the cockpit to soak me."

Patricia grinned and shut the thruster down. "You're dressed for it. Drive check complete. Flywheels fully charged. Shutting down generator. Securing snorkel doors."

Five minutes later the VHF crackled, and Mateo's voice said, "This looks like it, Beenan. We were about here when we picked up the diesel plume, but we haven't been able to trace it any further topside-between surface contaminants and wind dispersion, it hasn't worked."

"Gotcha, Mateo. I'm switching on the HCD now." One didn't so much turn on the hydrocarbon detector as access it through the instrumentation bus. Patriciatapped through a menu on the touch screen, and a small readout window appeared.