The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “This is just the beginning,” he was saying. “Number one. Somebody keep score. We’re going to stop them. We’re going to push them right to the edge—”

  It was midnight in Prainha, 4 a.m. in Northumberland, and 1 p.m. the previous day on Takara and Memphis, orbiting high above the mid-Pacific. But technology and the wishes of Hiroko Sasaki had erased the differences that night. The four people waiting with Sasaki in her garden meeting room were all sharing the same moment with the five skylinked to the gathering, all waiting on the same report.

  “We are ready, Mr. Dryke,” said Sasaki, consulting the digital slate resting on her lap. “You may begin.”

  “Thank you, Director,” said Dryke from the tank in Houston. “I won’t belabor this. We got into Evan Silverman’s library about seven hours ago. The only defenses in his system were commercial repellents, which were taken down without damage to the files. About four hours ago, the Texas State Police handed over image copies of all the libraries, including Silverman’s contact logs. We’ve parsed them six ways to November, and there’s no evidence he was working with anyone else or at anyone’s direction.”

  “Let me be certain I understand,” said Sasaki. “There is no evidence of Mr. Silverman having contact with any person or organization on our Homeworld watch lists.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “There is no evidence of any communication or contact with Jeremiah.”

  “That’s correct. Understand, though, that no evidence means just that. The files could have been purged before Silverman went out that night—a good wipe utility wouldn’t have left us anything.”

  “Was there an AIP which could be questioned?” Sasaki said each letter individually, eschewing the acronym.

  “No. Silverman lived alone.”

  “Do you have any conclusions?”

  Dryke frowned. “One thing we did find in the library was a clip file on Jeremiah—all of his pirate speeches, coverage of the tank truck gag here a few months back, and the like. I’m inclined to think that anyone who would take the trouble to wipe out damning evidence would probably get rid of the merely suspicious as well. So I expect that the reason we didn’t find anything was that there wasn’t anything to find. We’ll run the files for embedded code, of course, before we close the book.”

  “It is your judgment, then, that Mr. Silverman acted alone, and on his own initiative.”

  “Yes. Based on what I’ve seen today.”

  “There has been speculation by the media that Mr. Silverman may in fact be Jeremiah,” said Sasaki. “Is there any reason to give this speculation credence?”

  Dryke snorted. “Julian Minor is an idiot. No. None at all.”

  “One final question: Do we know for certain that Mr. Silverman knew Ms. Graham’s involvement with the Project?”

  “He knew,” said Dryke.

  “Are you basing that on his word alone?”

  “No. On the fact that he was boasting about it when the Rangers picked him up. If he didn’t know before he left the bar with the woman, then she either told him or gave herself away somehow.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dryke, on behalf of the committee,” said Sasaki. “I know that this has been a long day for you. If you will allow me, I would like to close one other matter. Has there been any change in the status of the open gateway at the Munich operation?”

  “No change,” said Dryke dourly. “There’ve been a fistful of attempted penetrations, but all amateurs. It looks like the big fish saw the hook.”

  “I am told by Mr. Reid that it is through the exercise of discretion that they live to become ‘big fish,’ ” said Sasaki. “Please have the gateway closed and the operation terminated. The staff will require the navigation package to be available when they begin reporting after the New Year, and any further delays in its installation will endanger that.”

  “Yes, Director.”

  “We will contact you in the morning if we have further questions—please notify me immediately if there are new developments.”

  “Of course.”

  Sasaki touched her slate, and the Houston link was broken. There was a prolonged silence, more subdued than respectful, in the garden room in Prainha.

  “Mr. Tidwell,” said Sasaki at last, frowning. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” came the reply, ferried across the Atlantic by the sky-link. “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you have anything to add?”

  Tidwell’s eyes were dull, and the words came slowly. “I was fond of Miss Graham. I deeply—regret—her death. That said, I do not see what I can contribute to this discussion.”

  One of the men across from Sasaki stirred. “Can I ask what he was doing in Houston in the first place?”

  “Mr. Tidwell?” asked Sasaki. “Did you hear that?”

  “I had—made a judgment—that in order to truly know the colonists, I would have to share their lives—their experience.” He paused. “I meant to leave in three days, when the class was released.”

  “Does sharing their lives include dating twenty-year-old girls?” The question came from a woman sitting to Sasaki’s left.

  “I am satisfied that Mr. Tidwell’s involvement in these horrible events is tangential and entirely incidental. Further, that his involvement with Miss Graham was consistent with the purposes he named,” said Sasaki, her tone a sharp rebuke. “I have asked for his observations because he is in a position to speak to the present atmosphere in Houston, and for no other reason.”

  The woman lowered her eyes and was silent.

  “While in Houston, I saw a marked and growing polarization,” said Tidwell, stepping into the empty space. “Lines of allegiance have hardened. You hear bitter words on both sides, little communication between them. Emotions have outdistanced reason in too many minds. I am forced to say that I am not surprised that this happened. It was an undeclared war. No longer.”

  “Can you plot the curve?” asked the woman.

  “Pardon me?”

  “How long will the Houston operation be sustainable?” she asked. “Will we be able to move three more classes through by March?”

  “I see,” said Tidwell. “I am not well versed in the business of prediction.”

  “Noted,” Sasaki said. “I would appreciate your assessment, all the same.”

  Tidwell loosed an uncomfortable sigh. “The undeclared war was fought, I might argue, by gentleman’s rules. If Evan Silverman presages a new group of players who recognize no rules, it seems to me that it will be a near thing. There are wolves at the door.”

  “Thank you, Thomas,” said Sasaki. “You may leave us now.”

  “May I ask a question of my own?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why is Malena Graham so important? I was told today that twenty-nine people attached to the Project have died in accidents and other incidents this year, including three colonists. At least six of those deaths were murders. I am not aware that the committee was convened on the occasion of each or any of those cases. I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not more concerned about my involvement than you’ve admitted.”

  Sasaki briefly showed a tired smile. “You have answered your own question, Thomas. Malena Graham is so important because she demonstrates that the rules have changed. She is the first colonist killed simply because she was a colonist.”

  “But what does that mean to you?” Tidwell said. “I half believe that you’ve been watching for it to happen.”

  “We have been watching for certain signs,” said Sasaki. “Some time ago, the sociometric unit prepared a study of the rising curve of opposition to the Diaspora. It contained a multi-stranded prediction, specifying several checkpoints and watershed events. Malena’s murder and your assessment of the situation in Houston both fit the projection.”

  “Why was this study kept from me?” asked Tidwell.

  Sasaki showed a flash of annoyance. “As you said yourself, your province is the past, not the future. It was not kept from you. It was
simply not relevant to your work.”

  “I would like to have made that judgment myself,” said Tidwell, somewhat chastened. “In any case, I now understand your concern.”

  “Our concern is long-standing.” She gestured with her right hand, her simple metal bracelet gleaming. “To date, all is as predicted—the changing political and social climate, the drop in options and acceptances, and now the violence.”

  Tidwell’s expression was a troubled one. “What lies at the end of the curve? What does this mean for Knossos?”

  Sasaki was slow to respond, and it seemed to those in the room with her at Prainha that it was less for lack of an answer than for her reluctance to voice it.

  “I suppose that circumstance has now made the study relevant to your office,” she said at last. “If the projection continues to hold, we will never build Knossos.”

  “What!”

  “Or Mohenjo-Daro, or Teotihuacán,” Sasaki continued. “The Diaspora will end with Memphis. That, Mr. Tidwell, is why Malena Graham is so important.”

  “Then I will hope that fortune-telling is a less exact science than history,” Tidwell said. “Good night, Director.”

  “May I ask him one more question?” It was the woman to Sasaki’s right.

  Sasaki gestured her assent.

  “This boy you were talking to that night—the archie you left Malena for. Did you learn anything from him?”

  Eyes haunted, Tidwell slowly shook his head. “That cuts the deepest,” he said. “There was nothing he could tell me, because he didn’t know himself.”

  When Tidwell was gone, there was an uneasy silence in the garden room. Sasaki rose wordlessly and crossed the room to the dispenser for a cup of Japanese tea. One of the men stood at the window-wall at the far end of the room, looking out at the lights of the spaceport.

  “That’s it, then,” he said finally. “We’ve crossed a threshold.”

  No one spoke.

  “I’m surprised you told Dr. Tidwell as much as you did,” said the woman when Sasaki rejoined them.

  “It was time for him to know.”

  “But not the whole story.”

  “He is my barometer,” she said. “He now knows as much as he needs.”

  “I don’t think you should have soft-pedaled it,” said the man at the window, returning to his chair. “The truth is, we’ll be lucky if they don’t find a way to stop Memphis.”

  “I can’t accept that,” said Matt Reid, skylinked from Takara. “We can’t just sit still and let them come get us.”

  “The study makes clear that we can only hasten our decline by matching their tactics,” said Sasaki. “We have seen already, in the Singapore incident, that we are judged by stricter standards.”

  “Maybe I’m the only one here,” said the supervisor, “but I don’t take the study as gospel. I’m not seeing any of this up here. And I hate like hell to hear this kind of negativism on the committee.”

  “Takara is a special population,” said the woman. “It will reach there last.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t fight this,” the supervisor persisted. “And I’d put finding some way to silence this Silverman at the top of the list. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone willing to go head-hunting.”

  “No,” Sasaki said forcefully. “It is already too late for that. Mr. Silverman made his statement with his hands. His words are merely echoes, and you cannot silence an echo.”

  “So we’re going to do nothing,” said the supervisor, disgusted.

  “We will do what we planned to do, three years ago,” said Sasaki. “We prepared for a contingency no one wanted to believe in. Mr. Marshall”—she nodded toward the man by the window—“said that we would laugh at ourselves for fools the day that Knossos sailed. Is there anyone on the committee who truly believes we will see that day?”

  She looked at each of them in turn. No one spoke.

  “I accept the inevitability of the inevitable, the reality of the real,” she said. “But this is no surrender. Memphis must sail. We cannot allow the success of the Diaspora to depend on a single ship.”

  “Is there any better news from Ur?” asked the woman.

  Sasaki shook her head. “The trouble continues. There is no danger to the ship at present, and apparently little danger any more that they will turn back. But the new governor holds out little hope for a return to normalcy.”

  Marshall shook his head. “If he can’t deliver, then we may have picked the wrong boy to overthrow Milton.”

  “The truth is that there is little we can do from here to influence events onUr,” said Sasaki. “The threat of a communications embargo is rather a feeble lever. Our focus must be on that which we can control—the future of Memphis.”

  “Are you putting Contingency Zero in effect?” asked Marshall.

  “Yes. As of this meeting. Your individual responsibilities are contained in locked files which were transferred to your private libraries earlier this evening. The key is ‘Lights out.’ ” She smiled wryly at Marshall. “That was your phrase, as I recall.”

  “Last one on the planet, turn out the lights,” Marshall said. “Yes. That was me.”

  Sasaki continued, “When you review your files, keep in mind that the first priority will be to establish a firm timetable for the move—”

  The slate on Sasaki’s lap suddenly began to chirp insistently. At the same time, the skylink displays blanked to white, and the black-bordered box of a flash alert appeared in the center of each. In the center of the box appeared C. Gustav Feist, site director for the Munich center. His face was flushed, and his hands slashed the air as he spoke.

  “Director Sasaki,” he said hoarsely. “Where is Dryke? He won’t answer his page. Where is he?”

  “He’s gone to bed, I presume. He may be off-net. What is happening, Mr. Feist?”

  Feist’s eyes were pleading with the committee. “The gateway was closed, just as he instructed. Closed! Not thirty minutes. The com staff swears to it. None too soon, I thought. Now this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You haven’t been told?” Feist looked away from his camera as he listened to someone off-screen. “Gott in Himmel. It’s still going on.”

  “What’s going on?” Marshall demanded.

  “It must be Jeremiah,” Feist said agitatedly. “There’s a virus in the engineering network, tearing up the development systems. We can’t freeze it, we can’t kill it, and it won’t let us shut down. I’ve got to go. We’re being brain-burned, Director. Brain-burned while we’re talking.”

  CHAPTER 22

  —AAC—

  “… visions of Gaea…”

  In a private room in a private place, a private man put on his mask and went to work.

  He was David Eng and Roberto Garcia, Lila Holmes and Sandra Stone. His alter egos lived in an apartment overlooking the Chicago River, and a stately house on Avenida Manquehue in Santiago—claimed offices in anonymous towers on the fringe of Phoenix and in the heart of Vancouver.

  There had been other names through the years, a dozen years now, a parade of identities, some invented, some borrowed. There had been a chain of locked rooms and secret spaces, inhabited only by obedient machines put in place by trusted hands.

  And behind those masks, another mask—the constant, the connection. His name, taken from a man forty years dead, was never spoken, for no one knew better than he how the nets were watched, what tricks could be played with the bit stream of the skylinks. He spoke with other voices, always changing voices, but those who heard him knew that the words were Jeremiah’s.

  A construct in a silicon engine, an idea in the mind of a man, a weapon in a war of deceptions—Jeremiah was all of those. In the beginning, Jeremiah had been nothing more than these. But now the mask had been in place so long that the man who wore it had nearly disappeared, and it had become more and more difficult for him to leave the shadow places where Jeremiah was real and face the light outside, the world
where he himself was real.

  Necessity rescued him from that struggle. So much demanded Jeremiah’s attention, so many clamored for an audience, that there was little enough chance even to escape into sleep. The world never slept.

  He had allowed himself but three hours this night, the merest nap. Yet when he awoke, he found nearly one hundred new messages awaiting him, captured and forwarded by the relayers, coders, and recorders, collated and sifted by the comsole’s secretary.

  A third of them were reports from members of the Homeworld network. Another dozen announced new volunteers to join the order of battle. Fully half were answers to queries issued earlier. The remainder were nuggets of gold: a scattering of technical, financial, and logistical gifts offered for his consideration.

  But the message list was only the beginning. Also waiting in queue were more than seventy news stories collected by the secretary’s search engine, as well as a hyperlog of real-time intercepts of new and ongoing skylink conversations. Too much. Far too much. He could not review it all, not nearly so. His spies were too good, his sources too many.

  Undisguised, the sheer volume of traffic would have been a threat to the operation’s survival. But he had learned many tricks, invented several others. Intercepts were fragmented and dumped to null skylink addresses for his unregistered receivers to pluck out of the air and rebuild. Reports came in as innocent-looking packets quickposted as delete-on-receipt to the subscription services. Messages relayed from the four “mail drop” sites were laundered through a high-traffic business front.

  But that was not the only danger.

  Once, he had had it all in his hands, knew every thread in the weave. No longer. This thing he had created had its own heartbeat, and though he still guided it, he no longer controlled every movement. More and more of the correspondence was in the hands of Lila, the secretarial engine. More and more of the ancillary reports were archived unseen. The growing archive troubled him. It represented missed opportunities, needless errors, eager volunteers frustrated by his silence and driven to act on their own.