The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “A nice piece. But it was never professionally recorded, never published, and this Kristen Carlyle doesn’t come up in the stacks as either a performer or a songwriter. As near as I can tell, Tunnel Visions was as high as she ever got—thirty minutes on a regional arts showcase funded under USDC.”

  Christopher gritted his teeth. In the smug economic classism of the Los Angeles ent-art world, Department of Culture grants were viewed as welfare handouts, and the work they supported little more than vanity indulgences. He hadn’t expected Edkins to show such colors. “What does any of that have to do with the music?”

  Edkins sighed. “Look, you’ve done some work on the fiction stacks, haven’t you? What gets something in? Impact. Impact is the final criterion. You look at sales, cross-media citations, major reviews. You look for seminal ideas, innovative techniques, representative examples. What did the work give us? How did it change us?”

  “So it has to be popular and prestigious,” said Christopher. “It’s not enough to be good.”

  “It isn’t even necessary to be good,” said Edkins. “There are inferior fictions in the stacks because they added a single new word to the language, inferior songs because they caught everyone’s ear one summer. It’s not always fair. ‘Elegiac’ is a nice piece of work. I felt a tug, too. But it’s foam on the ocean, and no one’s going to miss it if it’s not there. Sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  Discomfiting as it was, Christopher knew that Edkins was right, and that arguing was pointless. He had gotten Biography to add his degrees and his Hastings Award; he knew what a victory looked like, and this wasn’t one.

  “All right, Lenore,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. I appreciate your taking a look at it.”

  Edkins shrugged. “You’re family. No thanks needed. Sorry I couldn’t bring back better news. If you’re interested, though, I’ll tell you where the door is open.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tidwell’s holding a lot of space open for a Folklife stack on the Diaspora,” Edkins said. “The impact arrow points the other way on this one—we’re looking for what effect the starship Project’s had on people’s hearts and minds and muses. He’s particularly interested in off-net material, according to recent memos. So if you’ve got any material dealing with the Project, make sure I see it.”

  Christopher brightened. “I might just have something. I’ll need to get a good recording made.”

  “I can’t make an unconditional promise, mind you, but I’d say there’s a good chance that your musicianship and family connection would carry even a borderline piece in.”

  “Charity, Lenore?”

  Edkins shrugged. “I won’t spin you. It’s the back door. But it’s a door. Do you want to live forever, or not?”

  Christopher swallowed any further words of indignation, and with them a measure of his pride. “What’s the timetable?”

  “The sooner the better, I’d think. We’ll probably close late, but we might have to be more picky toward the end.”

  Christopher nodded. “Okay. I’ll be in touch. Break, Dee.” He sat back in his big chair, thoughtful, troubled. Is that what it was about, this ache? Living forever? Edkins seemed to see so readily something Christopher had not yet acknowledged in himself. Edkins presumed an understanding Christopher wanted to deny.

  Living forever. A little piece of immortality. A mark, more permanent than a handprint in cement, than initials carved on a wooden railway trestle. More permanent than memory. More permanent than life.

  He circled the thought cautiously, unwilling to embrace it. He had scorned and pitied Jessie for this same passion. It was hard to be more forgiving of himself.

  But already one part of his mind was thinking, Need to work on the middle eight—could use the date at Wonders—have to rent a v-cam, Greg can do tech—be nice to get some friends down for it—

  “Ego and hypocrisy,” he chided himself aloud.

  “Excuse me?” asked Dee.

  “Ego and hypocrisy,” he repeated. “Not so different from Jessie, after all.”

  Barely five minutes had passed when the phone cheeped again—little enough time that Christopher had barely found his place in the audit. Little enough time that he didn’t bother to glance at the Caller ID, automatically concluding it was Edkins calling back.

  “I’ll take it, Dee,” he said.

  But it was not Edkins, not a call he would have taken had he checked the identifier. It was, in fact, a call he had been avoiding.

  “Hello, Christopher,” said William McCutcheon.

  His father seemed to have a sixth sense for trouble in his life. Sure as sunrise, his father would call exactly when Christopher most wanted to avoid him—in the wake of crisis, calamity, or failure. Christopher half suspected his father of spying on him somehow, except he could not convince himself his father was sufficiently interested to take the trouble.

  Probably it was just an accident of timing, a case of selective memory. All the same, the day after the blowup over John Fields, Christopher had directed his phone to divert any calls from William McCutcheon to V-mail. And true to form, in the two weeks since, there had been three such calls. Each time, his father had left an inconsequential message and an invitation to call back. Each time, Christopher had chosen not to do so.

  It would not take William McCutcheon long to realize that he was being avoided. And Christopher should have known his father would not quietly accept that, would find a way to reach him.

  Had.

  Dee screened personal com everywhere—home, work, on the road. But Allied screened station com. Not that Christopher would have thought to post a divert on station com. His father had never called him at work before. Never in all the time Christopher had been in Houston.

  “Hello, Father.” His father looked tired, and fatigue had always softened his features. Christopher saw more of himself in his father’s face at such times.

  “Your friend Jessie says that you’re not often home these days,” said William. “She thought I might have the best chance to catch you here.”

  William always spoke of “your friend Jessie” and “your friend Loi.” He refused to ratify the unconventional relationship by calling them Christopher’s wives, as most older people would, or even his mates, the style book compromise. In part, that was simple moral stodginess. In part, it was a commentary on the trine.

  “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Christopher, declining to ask the reason for the call. “Memphis sails in six months.”

  “So the nets tell me, with painful redundancy. Have you begun to think about what you’ll do when the ship is gone?”

  There it was. Christopher looked at his father in surprise. “There’s Knossos to come, and Mohenjo-Daro and Teotihuacán after that. Allied will still need archies. There’ll be work here until long after I retire.”

  “So you’re content to stay in Texas. I’m surprised. I would have thought you’d miss the woods more than you apparently do.”

  “I miss them, all right. Here you get bone-dry baked or flash-flood drowned. But this is where my job is,” Christopher said, wondering. “I don’t have the option to work where I please. Operations isn’t about to allow dial-ups into the hyper. Not when a scissors virus could rip ten years work apart in ten minutes.”

  “There are three inches of new snow on the ridge,” said his father.

  A crystal memory of being ten and tracking deer and rabbits in the new snow suddenly flooded Christopher with unwelcome nostalgia. “You’ll have to send me a picture. They tell me it hasn’t snowed in Houston for sixteen years.”

  “I was nearly in your backyard not too long ago,” he went on. “It seems that it was just as well that I didn’t follow my impulse to come all the way. I probably wouldn’t have found you there.”

  Another surprise. “You were in Texas?”

  “Not quite. I had to go down to Albuquerque a month or so back to look at some properties. That was the first long drive I’d taken
in the Avanti. Long overdue to check the GPS navigator. I timed it so I flew across the Colorado River canyonlands at twilight. Ever seen them, Christopher?”

  “Pictures.”

  “Inadequate. Magnawall or stereo tank, it doesn’t matter. Inadequate.” A more familiar William McCutcheon, pronouncing his opinions with the authority of Truth. “A thousand meters up and a hundred klicks an hour, that’s the way to see the Colorado watershed. If I had come to Houston I would have dragged you back with me so I could show you.”

  “I’ve been meaning to see it. But it’s not exactly our backyard,” said Christopher. “You’re probably closer to the Grand Canyon in Portland than we are here in Houston.”

  “Make the time. Do it.” He shook his head. “Turquoise-blue lakes. Winding canyons like knife scars. Arrow-straight fault ridges. Physical poetry, Christopher. The mesa cliffs are fissured top to bottom like a giant cat clawed them. The rocks are blood red, like a spill of paint in the dust. And when the afternoon shadows move across them—you have to see it, Christopher.”

  “It’s going to be awhile before I can think about taking sightseeing trips,” he said, a hint of impatience slipping into his voice. “I trust the Colorado’ll still be there when I get to it.”

  “It’s changing, now that people can fly in so easily,” William said. “There are five times as many people in southeast Utah as there were thirty years ago. And they’re leaving their mark as surely as wind and water. Patches of irrigated green, self-contained houses on top of the mesas, little communities in the river valleys.”

  “I’ll settle for almost virgin.”

  “It made me think about the white pioneers on horseback, in wagons, on foot,” his father went on, “reaching Denver and seeing that wall of mountains. That anyone went farther west is a complete defiance of sanity. It’s astonishing to me that those lands were ever crossed, much less colonized. They’ve never been tamed.”

  “Have you been to Denver? I’d have kept going, too,” Christopher said.

  It was said lightly, a casual joke, but his father shook his head dismissively. “Crowding doesn’t explain it. Not the first wave. Economic factors don’t become meaningful until the second wave.”

  “Maybe they kept going because it was hard.”

  His father cocked his head. “Do you think so? Does that make sense to you?”

  Again, he was suddenly ten, but this time he squirmed uncomfortably at the familiarity of the moment—drawn by his father into a duel of wits, stopped and subjected to a surprise oral exam. It could happen at any time. It had happened many times.

  “Each generation went as far as its will would carry it,” said Christopher. “Sons and daughters crossed the barriers that had stopped their parents.”

  “But they didn’t all go. That’s the puzzle. Some stayed to make a life. Do you think that those who left were any happier, burned any brighter?”

  Christopher’s back was still up. “Probably they lived harder lives. I imagine some lived shorter lives. You’d have to ask them if they were happier.”

  William McCutcheon shook his head. “You ask them, Christopher. You ask them if you get the chance. Aren’t they there with you in Houston? Isn’t that what the Diaspora is about? Aren’t they one and the same?”

  “Something like that,” Christopher said lightly, unwilling to launch into a justification of the Project. “Except wagons are more expensive now.”

  His father did not smile. “Much more. And we all have to pay for them.”

  The conversation stumbled after that, and shortly Christopher escaped to his waiting work. But he was left puzzled and unsettled. It was the most curious conversation he could remember having with his father.

  William McCutcheon was not comfortable with what most people called chatting—except with strangers, which was another matter entirely—and so he rarely bothered with it. When he spoke, he made speeches, conducted interrogations, issued demands, offered critiques.

  None of the above. Christopher recalled his father’s face from the capture queue to the display and stared at it. Why did you call? he asked the frozen image. Why did you have to invade this space, too? To ask my opinion? To take my pulse?

  The sudden thought that William McCutcheon might be lonely prompted a curious state of wonder. Mystery of mysteries, could it be you actually miss me?

  Christopher found himself growing angry without quite being certain why. He wanted to call his father back and say, Don’t change the rules now, goddammit. Everything else is breaking out of its box. You can fucking stay in yours. Don’t make me care.

  But it was too late. He already knew that something was wrong.

  It explained so much—his father’s purposeless persistence, the odd emotional tone of the call. William McCutcheon would not be one to easily acknowledge a problem or admit to his own needs and weaknesses.

  But it left unanswered the question of what was required of Christopher—what he was now bound to do.

  One more problem to deal with, one more demand on his energy. As if there weren’t enough. Someone else who wanted something from him. Someone else claiming a piece of him. And even though the claim was legitimate, Christopher rebelled.

  After all, what if he were wrong? Wouldn’t that be an amusing spectacle? No more foolish feeling than to try to hug someone who neither invited nor welcomes the embrace—

  The decision was made. Did his father need him? He could not cope if it were so, and so he chose to believe it was not.

  He would do nothing.

  Eric Meyfarth looked up from his desk as Christopher entered the office. “Do you mind if we get out of here?” he asked, rising out of his chair. “I’m getting a bit claustrophobic.”

  Surprised, Christopher agreed. He followed Meyfarth down a back corridor into the floor’s private section, where they commandeered an express elevator.

  “Otis—Sky Room,” said Meyfarth. The doors closed, and the arty leaned against the back wall. “How are things at home?”

  “It’s like being a bachelor with roommates.”

  “Jessie and Loi are closing you out?”

  “I don’t think it’s them,” Christopher said, shaking his head. “I think it’s me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just can’t be the same with them.” He glanced at the display. “Where are we going?”

  “The nearest spot that feels as little like an office as possible.”

  “Sky Room,” said the elevator, and the doors opened.

  “Here we go,” said Meyfarth, leading the way out.

  The top level of the Matador Building was a climoglas-enclosed forest micropark, complete with birds and bubbling water. Narrow paths led to private seating nooks. The air was slightly humid and carried the mixed scents of life.

  “This is nice,” said Christopher, craning his neck as he looked up toward the heat-blocking roof panels twenty meters overhead. The tallest trees nearly brushed them.

  “Very expensive, very wasteful,” said Meyfarth. “About eight percent of my lease payments go to maintain it. That’s about fifteen dollars out of every appointment, if you’re interested. I try to make sure I log my share of use. Anything like Oregon?”

  “Just the smells.”

  They found an empty nook on the east side of the densely planted greenyard.

  “You don’t have any contact with your host mother, is that right?” asked Meyfaith.

  “No. Not since I finished school.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “She’s on Sanctuary,” Christopher said with a touch of impatience. “I don’t have a lot of choice about it. I can’t even call her. She had to call me.”

  “I understand that. Do you have any clue to why she stopped?”

  “No. Is this important?”

  “I was just refreshing my memory,” said Meyfarth. “What does your father think about what’s happening with your family?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Really
? When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “This morning.”

  Meyfarth cocked his head quizzically. “So you chose not to tell him.”

  “It’s not his problem. There’s nothing he could do to help. So there’s really no reason to bring him in.” Christopher looked away and frowned. “Besides, it’s just not something we McCutcheons do. It took him two months last year to get around to mentioning that an aunt of mine was dead.”

  “Forty percent answer, Christopher.”

  “I know. I really don’t want to talk about my father just now.”

  “Guessing now—you didn’t tell him because he has a rooting interest.”

  “Not that he’ll admit to,” Christopher said. “But it’s true, I don’t want to have to deal with his reaction on top of everything else. He’s not fond of Loi.” That was diluting the truth; the two were stone and storm. “I suppose he’d be happy to see me break with her and solo with Jessie.”

  “Which isn’t what you want.”

  “No.”

  “Have you any idea why he feels that way?”

  “I really don’t know what he feels or why he feels it,” Christopher said irritably. “Does this have a point?”

  Meyfaith frowned. “Define your problem, Christopher.”

  “Look, there’s a lot of old history there, and I don’t much want to relive it,” Christopher said, exasperation tingeing his voice. “The, ah—the emotions are still a bit confused.”

  “Did you quarrel often?” Mey faith asked quietly.

  A wistful look crept onto Christopher’s face. “No. Not quarrel.” He smiled, and the smile was eloquently bittersweet. “I didn’t see enough of my father that I could afford to get angry with him.”

  The words seared his throat, stabbed deep into his chest. He was caught by surprise by his own thoughts. It was as though the words had leaped from his subconscious directly to his lips. Christopher looked plaintively at Mey faith and found the arty’s expression of empathy as distressing as the revelation itself. Rising, he walked to the edge of the nook, pretending interest in the plant identifier on a small pedestal there.