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Chapter Fifteen

I finally got out of bed and started toward the sound of the shower, trying to formulate the exact wording of the questions I needed to ask. If I had been . . . well . . . violated . . . by a beautiful faerie queen and elven sea goddess while unconscious, I had to articulate the issues without sounding either pathetic or stupid. And given their known mythology on the issues of child abduction, I doubted the Sidhe had any cultural concept of "date rape."

Before I could reach the head a pounding on my cabin door diverted me. "Better get out here," Setanta's muffled voice announced, "it's bad!"

If the Hound of Ulster, the warrior prince who defied elves and gods and fought whole armies single-handedly says something is bad, you don't play Twenty Questions on the other side of a closed door. I freshened up with what was at hand and dressed quickly. The shower was still running as I left my cabin and came out into the scorched ruin of the salon.

The TV was on some local station as we were running down the river and couldn't keep the satellite dish oriented. A newscaster was standing in a tropical downpour, shouting something unintelligible into his microphone. The term "downpour" was somewhat of a misnomer as the thick, heavy raindrops were zipping across the screen diagonally, upper right to lower left corners. The trees in the background were bowed by the force of the wind and debris flashed by in intermittent peekaboo bursts of leaves and scraps and paper bags and cups.

The abrupt transition back to the newsroom was all the more jarring by the contrast of the quiet, well-lit room and perfectly coiffed anchor seated behind the desk. "Again, the National Weather Center has no explanation for these phenomena. It was announced just thirty minutes ago that Hurricane Eibon has jumped from a category two to a category four hurricane, its wind speeds increasing from over ninety miles an hour to nearly one hundred and forty. Furthermore, the latest satellite imagery shows that the storm has continued to grow and pick up speed and we are anticipating landfall within the hour. All evacuees are being advised to abandon their vehicles and seek shelter in a basement or reinforced structure if they are within fifty miles of New Orleans.

"While the wind damage from a category four storm is of great concern, it is New Orleans' position between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain that has most disaster experts worried. Following Hurricane Betsy in 1963, the levees and floodwalls surrounding the city and outlying parishes were raised to heights of fourteen to twenty-three feet. Unfortunately, the construction design is only guaranteed to withstand a category three storm. Congress failed to fully fund an upgrade requested during the 1990s by the Army Corps of Engineers. Funding was cut in 2003 and 2004 despite a 2001 study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency warning that a hurricane striking New Orleans was among the three most likely catastrophes to befall the country in the future . . ."

Setanta shook his head. "What fools these mortals be!"

I cleared my throat. "Yeah, well, estimates to reinforce the levees to resist category five forces put the total cost at twenty-five billion dollars and maybe twenty-five years to complete the job. Which puts the twenty-five billion dollar estimate into low-ball territory. Factor in the Big Easy's long history of graft, corruption, malfeasance, and downright incompetence, well, no one's keen on throwing good money after bad."

"New Orleans flood control measures," the news guy continued, "include more than 520 miles of levees, 270 floodgates, 92 pumping stations, and thousands of miles of drainage canals. It is the price of living in a city on the edge of the ocean that sits below sea level. And since its pumping stations are below sea level as well, a catastrophic breach would pretty much be the end."

"What does that mean?" Setanta puzzled.

"It means," I explained with a sinking sensation, "that the city sits inside a bowl. And the bottom of that bowl is lower than the water outside of the bowl. If water finds a way to start coming into the bowl really fast, the pumps at the bottom of the bowl will end up underwater faster than they can pump it back out. Which means the pumps stop working—like maybe forever. And the bowl fills all the way up until the water inside the bowl is at the same level as the water outside of the bowl."

" . . . estimates place property damages could potentially reach twenty-five billion dollars . . ."

"Hence the gamble," I said, "of spending the twenty-five really-large for sure or crossing everyone's collective fingers that the damages will be less in the long run."

" . . . and 25,000 to 100,000 deaths by drowning," concluded the news anchor.

Cuchulainn shook his head. "Madness!"

I nodded. "You bet. At least it ain't Tokyo."

"Tokyo?" He looked bewildered.

"Giant radioactive monsters."

"Really?"

I nodded again. "And Raymond Burr."

 

It was an act of madness.

Crazy enough to try to take a houseboat down the Mississippi. Oh, it could be done but we were neither rigged nor rated for the trip. But, more importantly, we'd run out of time. Unfortunately, the solution to that problem was an even greater act of madness.

Liban was going to open a path to the sea. To a point just offshore of the Port of New Orleans.

Right smack dab in the middle of a category four, soon-to-be category five, hurricane.

"Maybe not," she said, not quite meeting my eyes. She hadn't quite met my eyes since I'd discovered her topside, discussing the coming logistics with Camazotz at the New Moon's helm.

On the one hand I wanted to confront her, grab her and shake her, demand to know if I'd been taken advantage of while unconscious (and dancing up a storm). On the other hand, it seemed a bit unseemly to make accusations without more concrete evidence of some kind of "crime." And if there was a culprit, might it not be pheromone-enhanced moi who may have driven her (albeit unintentionally) to act so precipitously? It was a very precarious blame game if one were to start rolling the dice.

And, seeing as how we might all be dead very soon, such lesser issues seemed rather non-starters. Survive the next forty-eight hours and then have a little movie review of While You Were Sleeping.

"What do you mean: 'maybe not'?" I asked her.

"Opening a path through the sea moves us through time as well as space. The greater the distance, the more time will pass. I do not know what will happen when I try to open a path from a tributary to the sea. The circumlocutions of land may bend such elements in unforeseeable ways." Now she looked up at me and there was fear in her sea-green eyes.

They said Captain Ahab was an obsessed madman when he risked his ship and his crew in pursuit of Moby Dick. Well, I wasn't chasing a great white whale, I was racing the storm of the century to rescue my family from the flood, the monsters, and, just maybe, the end of the world.

"I'm going to New Orleans and I mean to get there as quickly and by any means possible," I said.

"This will be very dangerous," she said. "If the path itself brings us through safely, we may perish upon arrival."

I nodded. "Help me," I said softly. "Or get out of the way and off my boat."

She stared up at me. Nodded. Then pulled a strand of pearls from the multiple bands of gems, coins, corals, and shells that hung from her neck and offered a modicum of modesty where her neoprene jacket gaped open. "Here." She dropped the necklace over my head and adjusted it, tucking it into my shirt. "Do not remove this while we travel. It will keep us linked inside the pathway." She turned to Zotz and presented him with a necklace of gold coins from her décolletage. "And you as well, Sir Demon. You must be able to follow me ere you be lost in the 'tween."

And, with that, she stepped out from under the awning and moved to the railing overlooking the bow.

The skies had turned the color of oily guncotton and a sharp, pelting rain had begun to fall. The canvas awning above our heads turned the impact of each drop into a snare-drum report, as sharp as a whip crack against leather. Liban had left the helm's limited shelter and was exposed to the bitter shower. In moments her hair was plastered to the sides and back of her head. Only her orange wetsuit protected her from a further drenching.

"Here's an idea," Zotz murmured, sotto voce, "why don't you steer while I go hold an umbrella over the lady?"

Before I could think of a suitable reply, a wind sprang up. Even though I couldn't feel it, I saw Liban's dark tresses stir, lift from her head and shoulders, and stream back from her face. She reached down and unzipped the orange neoprene jacket and shrugged it from her shoulders. As the top half of her wetsuit slid down her back and off of her arms, the clouds parted just enough for the sun to strike her with a stray beam of light. Her pearlescent skin began to glow.

All around us it was still gloomy and the rain continued to fall. Curtains of darkness swept the river ahead indicating we were headed into heavier weather. But Liban stood bathed in light and her hair was a flag of mahogany and moss, wafting in an unseen breeze.

And now it seemed that the rain was not even touching her. She stood as if in a bubble of sunshiny, summer day while all about her the world was sinking into storm-tossed darkness.

She climbed up on the railing and balanced precariously. As she did, something happened to the lower half of her wetsuit. A pattern began to emerge and the material took on a shinier appearance. She flexed her knees and I shouted as she jumped.

Dove, actually: her leap propelled her forward and she leaned out, her arms coming up as she formed herself into a fleshy torpedo. She cleared the forward deck below by a good seven feet even with the New Moon's forward momentum as a nonnegotiable factor, and sliced into the water ahead of us. I ran to the railing and looked down.

All around the boat the water was dark and blackish green. A short distance off, the river was just black.

Directly in front of the boat, however, was a patch of blue. Water the color of turquoise and azure. Water you only find between virgin beaches and reefs untouched by human industrialization down in tropical paradises.

Improbably, the blue began to stain the water ahead of us . . . 

"Steer for the blue," I said.

"What?" Zotz yelled.

The engine noise alone was enough to make us raise our voices. But a growing sound of thunder was making the twin Mercruisers seem quiet by comparison.

"Steer for the blue water!" I yelled back.

"You sure?" he answered. And pointed at the spreading blue stain.

We were well into the turquoise waves now and the surface turbulence was markedly different. The surface was calm while dark green waves crashed in the distance off of our port and starboard sides. There seemed to be no break in the clouds above us but the rain was no longer striking the boat and our immediate surroundings brightened considerably as if the sun had come out directly overhead.

But Zotz wasn't pointing at where we were.

He was pointing up ahead.

A little less than a mile downriver the Ouachita took a sharp bend to the left.

The blue stain continued straight on into the bank.

"Are you ready to do a Fitzcarraldo?" my demon helmsman asked me.

"Slow down!" I yelled. "Give me time to think!"

And don't run us into the bank with the throttle wide open.

I studied the blue stain that was supposed to be our "path to the sea." As it approached the bend in the river, the turquoise strip widened and shaded a deeper, darker blue. It was still easily visible in contrast to the dirty green and black waters of the rest of the river. All around us those darker waves rose higher and grew more turbulent: we glided between them as if riding through a sheltered trough.

"Cut back on the throttle!" I yelled as the riverbank loomed nearer.

"I did!" Zotz yelled back.

I couldn't tell from the sound of the engines. The continuous roaring of thunder drowned out practically everything else. And, if anything, we were going faster, now. The shoreline loomed ahead . . . and above!

We were sliding down into a trough between giant waves, great looming walls of water to either side. But instead of bobbing back up again with the natural undulation of the swell, we kept going down! The trough became a tunnel and the New Moon slid down beneath the storm, beneath the river, down, down into a sapphire water slide that easily dwarfed the Lincoln Tunnel. Water closed above our heads forming a curved aqua ceiling.

I squeezed in next to Zotz and flipped switches for the running lights and the forward spot which I directed into the water-walled tube ahead of us. The tunnel ahead twisted and turned off into darkness but no other features were readily apparent. No rocks, obstructions, visible hazards of any sort. And no evidence of Liban. Not that it made a lot of difference at this point: we had no choice but to follow where the tunnel led. At the moment we weren't even traveling under our own power—a lucky break, actually, as a refueling stop was working its way to the top of our priorities list.

The next switch I threw was for the GPS screen. It lit with a gray, hissing radiance. No multicolored chart displays, no boat icon to indicate our position on river, lake, or inlet. Just frantic oatmeal magma churning in actinic black, gray, and white. Looking at the static-filled screen stirred an unpleasant memory—something from my childhood or, perhaps, in a dream . . . 

Zotz reached over and switched off the GPS. "I wouldn't trust anything that did show up on that screen right now," he said.

Setanta eventually heaved his way up the ladder from below looking decidedly green. I didn't think his coloring was entirely due to odd light within the confines of our watery tunnel. The houseboat was riding the curved walls of the liquid chute like a bobsled on ball bearings, skittering up one slope and then down and over and up the other side. I was starting to feel a little green, myself.

" 'Tis an unnatural way for mortals to travel," Goldilocks groused, grabbing the handrail at the top of the ladder as the boat swayed and swung again.

"Beats flying," Zotz growled back. "Give me water, any day."

I wasn't about to point out that traveling by means of an inside-out water hose via trans-dimensional vortices hardly qualified as "sailing." For the moment I was wholly invested in holding on tight and hoping our water-walled conduit didn't collapse or produce something otherworldly. . . . 

That's when the ghost of the alien rutabaga with the starfish appendages and the Winky Dink voice materialized in front of us.

"Okay," I said, "tell me you guys see that."

They looked around. And then they both looked at me.

Setanta grinned. "You have horns!"

"Naw, they're antennae," Zotz corrected. "Rabbit ears. Not even UHF. You should really talk to your nanos about upgrading to dish." He squinted at me. "You're not going to pass out again, are you?"

I pointed at the alien monstrosity floating directly ahead of us. "You're telling me you don't see barrel of seafood tripe floating in thin air?"

"You're gonna have to catch him," Zotz told Cuch. "I can't let go of the wheel."

"I am not delirious!" I insisted. As soon as I said it I wasn't so sure, myself.

"Fine. But would sitting down be such a bad thing under the circumstances?"

"Anything to keep you from shapeshifting into my mother," I groused at the demon as Setanta escorted me back to one of the bolted-down deck chairs. The giant rutabaga followed.

Once I was settled I shooed the big Celt away. "I'm fine! Just going to sit here. Enjoy the ride! Chat with my imaginary friend! Go! Keep an eye on Zotz; he's doing the important stuff!"

Cuch must have figured being ten feet away wasn't such a risk and backed toward the helm. After a few feet the noise of the water gave me sufficient privacy to turn to the rutabaga and say: "What is the deal?"

"The deal?" it intoned.

"Don't play coy with me, Al. Lot's of end-of-the-world signage and suddenly some very odd types think I'm supposed to have some kind of hand in pulling the emergency brake. The problem—besides me not volunteering for role of hero—is that no one is terribly clear about what's expected or how to go about it. Other than some kind of sacrifice. Involving my son. Which ain't gonna happen. So, you got some 'splaining to do. First to me. Then to your elephant-head buddy when you tell him I said to take this quest and shove it—along with his dance, dance revolution—where his disco ball don't shine."

"Communication . . . is difficult," it answered haltingly. "Distance . . . language . . . context . . ."

"Okay then, I'll talk slow. Who you? Why me?"

There was a burst of sound—nonsense syllables—that, I guess, was the expression of a name. Whether personal specific or species general, I couldn't say. As to reproducing any approximation of the alien verbiage with my own lips and tongue . . . 

"Hold on there, Starkist. I take it that you're what Mama Samm referred to as one of the 'Ancient Things'?"

There was another burst of static inside my head. ". . . known as Old Ones," it finished.

I sighed. "Old Ones, Great Old Ones, Elder Gods, Outer Gods—Great Crowley's Ghost, man-thing, you illegals from the Outer Dimensions aren't exactly consistent on the ID issues and I don't have a scorecard. So, what is your dog in this hunt?"

"Your mind is very noisy. If you will quiet your thoughts I will answer your queries as best I can."

"I'm all ears," I said. "And half antennae."

"First of all, you speak as if my kind is alien and visitor to your shores while your race would claim some legitimate title to this world. My race was the first life-form to take possession of the planet that your kind calls 'Earth.' We were the ones who seeded it with life, crafted the single-celled organisms into protoplasm and sculpted all manner of life-forms—for our own purposes as well as those of chance and jest."

"Jeepers, Al!" I exclaimed. "You sound like a secret Scientology seminar. Are you trying to tell me you're a Thetan? If that's the case you just trot back to Xenu and tell him we want Tom Cruise back!"

"I do not know what you are babbling about," it said.

"L. Ron Hubbard?" I tried.

"I do not know this Elron you speak of."

"Sorry. My bad. You're just another alien with Mayflower snobbery and a God complex. Big surprise."

"You and your kind might well show more respect."

"What? Respect my Elder . . . Things?"

"If you do not recognize us as your creators, you must certainly give us due as this planet's defenders and protectors. We arrived in the epoch your kind has labeled the Archaen period, when the entire globe was still covered in water. For countless eons we built our cities beneath the cool green waves. When global upheavals began to create land masses that divided the one, vast, unbroken ocean, we established beachheads and communities there, as well. By your Carboniferous period, we inhabited every continent, with our greatest megalopolis sprawling about what eventually became this planet's south pole.

"Then the octopoid spawn of Cthulhu came, falling down from foul, distant stars, and we battled for dominance, eventually driving them into the seas. We were weakened, even in victory, and in the Permian age our servants, the shoggoth, chose the opportunity to rebel and turn against us. The two that the Enemy sent against you last night were but shadows of what the shoggoth were in our day. Still we had sufficient strength, even unto the age of the Jurassic to strive against yet another invasion of the Old Ones! The Mi-go drove us out of the northern lands. Eventually our remnants retreated to the Antarctic where we strove in final conflict with the coming of the Ice and the Enemy stronghold of Kadath. In the end we were too spent to prevail against the Great Old Ones in their strength, the betrayal of the shoggoth, and the arrival of the endless cold.

"Yog-Sothoth closed off all gateways to escape and Nyarlathotep was already mad back then and continually betraying and changing alliances. But before we were vanquished, we wrought the paleogean sciences that kept the Deep One in check through the long millennia. And it was we who vanquished Cthulhu and left our seal upon his sunken tomb to keep him slumbering until the end of time."

"Gee, Al, that's swell," I told him. "I certainly couldn't have done better, myself. Which is why I'm not going to risk messing up millions of years of monster wrangling by sticking my nose in now."

"But you are the one," Barrel o'Chum intoned.

"Dammit! Why does everybody keep saying this crap? How come I got nominated to be the captain of the Titanic? If you're serious about recruiting a competent, capable hero type, there's got to be better nominees out there! Have you tried looking around? Sifted some resumes? Checked out Monster-dot-com?"

"Yes. You were not the first choice," it answered bluntly.

"Really?" Well, snap!

"There was a wizard in Chicago, a necromancer in St. Louis, a waitress in Bon Temps, and a weather warden—who hasn't spent much time in any one place, lately. We also considered a guardian in London."

"And?"

"It was not possible to make contact with them."

I waited. Finally: "What? Unlisted numbers? Do Not Call list? How come I'm the default guy here?"

"Apparently most humans are incapable of receiving our telepathic communications. Yog-Sothoth holds the gates and thresholds and that which is perceived is limited to those minds most often kept caged in institutions, hospitals, jails, and madhouses."

"Nice," I said. "And then there's me."

"Apparently you are linked to an overmind, a hive consciousness that is separate yet coexistent with your own."

"My nanites?"

"Your overmind enables you to comprehend certain frequencies and vibrations imperceptible to humans possessing but a single consciousness."

"Goody. So, in addition to turning me into a weaponized hormone factory and a Swiss Army knife, they now make me loony-bin compatible for podcasts from the Twilight Zone?" I closed my eyes. "That's why I'm your nominee for end-of-the-world problem solver? I'm the only one with a working mail slot for the engraved invitation?"

"You are the only one we could communicate with and even that has been difficult. At first, only through the erratic filters of your hypnogogic, altered consciousness . . ."

"My dreams."

" . . . and later, when you reached certain filtered subsets of preconscious receptivity."

"While I was unconscious." I opened my eyes and looked around. At ghostly barrel monster and the arched blue ceiling of the water tunnel overhead. "What about now?"

"You have entered a state of transdimensional flux. There are fewer impediments to the hyperspatial synaptic linkage accessing the temporary wormhole between your planet and the star system where our remnants have taken refuge. For this brief time we may communicate directly rather than through symbolic conceptualizations."

"And yet," I griped, "you're still managing to make everything as clear as mud."

"What specificities do you require?"

I gaped at him—it—the Winky Dink voice in the barrel. "Look, Al, aside from the fact that I'm not really interested in saving the world—"

"Why would you not want to save your world?"

I closed my eyes again. I was so tired. Depression is just a word, a cliché to people who aren't wrapped in its suffocating, gray embrace. I'd managed to ignore the soul-numbing marathon of days and nights without purpose when my family and friends were threatened. But it was a temporary distraction, at best. And when you haven't got much motivation for your own future, investing in something much larger is beyond comprehension. As Joe Stalin supposedly said, one man's death is a tragedy, a million deaths are only a statistic. Asking me to care about the rest of the world was asking me to care about a statistic. Suggesting that my son be sacrificed for a statistic was a good way to become one, yourself.

If I sound like a right bastard let me say that I have a more practical approach to world-saving. According to the Jerusalem Talmud: "Whoever destroys the life of a single human being . . . it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves the life of a single human being . . . it is as if he had preserved an entire world." I figured if I could get Lupé, Deirdre, and—God help me—even Theresa out safely, add the babies, before or afterwards, and I was already up to a half-dozen worlds. Let the rest of Planet Earth find some additional heroes-in-waiting.

I looked up at Al but was too tired to put any of that into words even as I opened my mouth.

"It is not necessary," alien Al answered. "I am not actually receiving the sound waves that emanate from your vocal apparatus. We commune on an entirely different frequency; articulation would be redundant."

Telepathy? That would make sense. . . . 

"But I do not understand why you utilize the term 'Al' in referencing me as an entity."

"I've got to call you something," I told him. "The simpler the better since I can't wrap my head much less my lips around that burst of noise you use as a name."

"And there is some significance to the name 'Al'?"

"Depends on whether I end up being your bodyguard and you end up being my long lost pal."

"Pal?"

"Call me Betty."

"I do not understand. . . ."

I sighed. "Welcome to my world."

 

Yeah, there was a language barrier. Talking to an alien over a billion years old through a transdimensional relay bridging an interstellar gulf measured in thousands of light-years was a part of the problem.

But the ultimate hemming and hawing had more to do with Al's lack of a coherent plan beyond "showing up."

The old adage "Ninety percent of success is just showing up"—erroneously attributed to Woody Allen—was hardly a working strategy for confronting a squid-headed Elder God and its army of Deep Ones. When pressed, all that Al could come up with was that the unique juxtaposition of my mutated biology and nanite constructed hive-mind made me the one person capable of communication with beings outside of the normal time/space continuum. Too bad none of that communication seemed to offer much in the way of enlightenment. Just lots of annoying distraction.

And a big target painted on my back.

A target big enough to include my unborn son, it seemed.

There were some vague assurances that "other forces" were in play. Emphasis on the "vague." Whereas the Elder Things might be considered extraterrestrial entities, his protestations to the contrary, the other players were more in the category of home-grown powers-that-be—overminds—that were attempting to put their own dogs in the hunt. Ganesh/Kankiten and Hanuman were putting their money on someone named Dakkar; the elves had brought Cuchulainn to the dance—or maybe someone (or something) else had brought them. And God (or gods) knew who or what else was being dumped into the mix. Susanowo-no-mikoto had mentioned something about volcanoes and putting multiple pieces on the board but maybe I could chalk all of that up to a sex-induced dream rave.

All the more reason to leave the big showdown to the willing and better equipped.

Something I was trying to explain to the rutabaga for the sixteenth time when his ghostly form began to dissolve.

"The transdimensional hyperlink is growing corrupt," it said. "Communication will become more difficult."

As if we had approached anything close to an exchange of clarity during the past couple of hours, I thought. So, no big. Except . . . 

If the transdimensional conduit was breaking down, it wasn't just a question of losing our two-way real-time conversation—it meant our so-called "passage to the sea" was growing unstable and that could be a very bad thing if the tunnel o' water went splat while we were still inside!

I threw myself out of my chair and ran through the dissipating ghost of Al on my way to the front of the boat.

"Brace yourselves!" I yelled, grabbing the edge of the pilot's chair.

Cuch and Zotz turned to stare at me. "Brace for what?" they both asked.

I shook my head. "I don't know but it's about to happen!"

The tunnel collapsed.

 

I'm not sure what I expected. Maybe that the tunnel—the transdimensional conduit—would turn itself inside out. And us with it!

Or that it would implode, crushing us like the collapse of an elongated singularity.

Or explode, scattering our dust particles through seven different universes.

Instead, we slid into a patch of fog and stayed there, gliding to a near stop.

"Zotz?" I asked, groping for the instrument panel.

"No discernable current," he answered, "maneuvering power only."

"Where are we?"

"In a fog bank, duh!"

"Turn on the GPS, Cap'n Crunch," I growled.

"Oh. Yeah." There was a sound of switches being toggled and the screen flickered to a dim semblance of life behind a filter of gray mist. "Well, whaddaya know? It woiks!" He fiddled with the settings and I got an impression of the graphics shifting and enlarging. I couldn't make out any details.

"So?" I asked impatiently. "Where are we?"

"Looks like we made it. . . ." he murmured, tweaking the settings. "According to this, your girlfriend delivered us all the way down to the Big Easy."

"Don't start," I warned. Then looked around at the wall of gray mist that encompassed us on all sides. "But how close are we to the harbor? If we're in a shipping lane it could be very bad if one of those tankers comes along in the fog and rams us." Never mind a tanker, a collision with a small tugboat would probably sink us just as effectively.

Zotz continued to fiddle with the settings and abruptly gave the monitor a couple of smacks with the palm of his "hand."

"Whoa there, Chief! Don't break the navigator!"

"That would be redundant," he grumped. "It's already broken. According to this we're in New Orleans."

"Yeah. You just said—"

"No, according to this thing we are in New Orleans. Downtown, just off the Mississippi River, in fact."

"What? You're telling me that we've run aground?"

"Does it feel like we've run aground?" The fog was thinning a bit and I could see the frustration on his half-human features more clearly now as he consulted the screen. More than that, I could feel the movement of the deck beneath my feet as the New Moon rode a swell of water, the motion indicating a current and cross motion simultaneously working at our hull.

"This piece o' crap . . . high tech . . . scrap . . . places us just beyond the north bank of the Mississippi River, at the apex of Canal and Common streets!" His mutterings devolved into creative juxtapositions of profanity and technology reviews.

"Zotz," I said slowly, "turn on the fish-finders . . ."

His tirade never lost its rhythm or intensity as he flipped the appropriate switches. At least until the screens lit up. "What's this? Test patterns?"

The fish-finder screens were displaying an odd assortment of geometric patterns.

Storm surge, I thought, my blood suddenly running cold. We didn't beat the hurricane, it had arrived first. And, unless we were in the relative and momentary calm of the eye, it had already passed by. Some flooding would have been inevitable: the Big Muddy would be bigger and a lot muddier.

"It looks like a dump down there," Zotz said as he attempted to fine-tune the transponder settings. "I mean, I've got outlines and silhouettes that are definitely man-made: angles, corners, symmetrical configurations . . ." Looking down he didn't notice that the breeze was starting to tear holes in the fog. "What is that? A car?"

Through one of those tentative gaps I could see the New Orleans' World Trade Center just a block or two behind us—aft—I needed to remember my nautical terms, anything to hold on to a sense of perspective in the face of what was appearing through the vanishing mists.

Because my perspective was all screwed up. By the fog, by the water.

By the dawning realization of our likely position.

Nearly a dozen other tall buildings of the downtown and warehouse districts were appearing around us, now, and fanning out northward: The Wyndam at Canal Place, the Mariott, One Shell Plaza, Capitol One Tower, the Riverside Hilton, Place St. Charles, the Plaza Tower, Energy Center, National American Bank, Harrah's Hotel, the Sheraton, LL&E Tower, Pan American Life Building, and Tidewater Place . . . all looking strangely familiar and utterly alien at the same time. Two things were wrong with this picture and I recognized both almost simultaneously. We were drifting further uptown into the middle of the city's geographical arrangement of its high-rise real estate. And all of these landmarks were shorter than usual.

Their first fifteen stories or more were missing.

Those floors and the rest of the city were gone, hidden beneath an inland sea of gray-green water that stretched from here to the visible horizon.

Louisiana had a brand new coastline somewhere else, many miles to the north.

New Orleans had become the New Atlantis!

 

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Framed