The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Christopher remembered the trip to visit Lynn-Anne there, a memory highlighted by the quaint hubris of the CN Tower and the vertiginous delight of its upper lookout. There was a less vivid remembrance of an earlier trip to a weary, noisy New York.

  She always sent something at Yule, never on his birthday. He went her one better and remembered both occasions, but his gift-giving was duty-driven and the gifts chosen almost at random—he knew so little of her life that he had no idea what would truly please her, and Deryn could offer little help.

  Once every few months there would be an unexpected call or, if Lynn-Anne was in the middle of one of her depressions, a morose letter. He would answer with earnest but stilted missives which—at Deryn’s prodding—invariably contained an invitation to come home for a visit.

  But the invitations went ignored and unanswered. As far as Christopher knew, only once in twenty-two years had Lynn-Anne returned to the West Coast—a decade ago, for the funeral of Grandmom Anne, Sharron Aldritch’s mother, in Seattle. But after coming five thousand klicks across the country, Lynn-Anne chose not to come the one small step farther to Oregon; she was back in Maine before either Christopher, then in school in San Francisco, or their father, at home in the ridge house, even knew of the death.

  That was the break point. Perhaps understandably, the Aldritch-Martins had never taken Christopher into their hearts as a grandchild—the circumstances were unhappy, the link tenuous. Grandmom Anne was a name to him, little more, and he was not greatly surprised to learn he had been excluded.

  But he would not have expected his father to be kept in the dark, or Lynn-Anne to join the conspiracy of silence. That was the first time Christopher realized how hard the lines were dividing what was left of the family, and the first time he realized that he and Lynn-Anne stood on opposite sides of one of those lines.

  He missed one birthday, she the next Yule. With no protest or apology from either side, the remaining threads tying them together broke one by one. Without those threads, the semblance of kinship and friendship between them simply slipped away.

  There was never any formal declaration, no doors slammed. But silence was its own message.

  That was the gap he had to bridge. And all he had to throw across it were words. Two words.

  “Hello, Annie.”

  It was a jolt to see how she had aged. The picture he carried frozen in his mind was of her at the rail of the Toronto harbor ferry, pointing out the sights, or standing on the balcony of her 94th Street high rise, watching the two-mile-long shadow of Columbus Tower sweep across the city—a brave-eyed wry-mouthed woman in her twenties, living what seemed then like an adventure.

  But fifteen years had taken the courage from her eyes and twisted her mouth into a cynical pout. She looked at him won-deringly for a long moment before she spoke.

  “Christopher,” she said. “God, but you’re looking worn.”

  That was the second jolt. The picture he carried of himself was also frozen, locked in the first time he looked in the mirror and no longer saw a boy, with no allowance made for further aging.

  “It’s been that kind of year,” he said ruefully.

  Lynn-Anne passed on the opportunity to invite him to explain. “So, you’ve joined the real world at last,” she said. “Life is the great leveler. You don’t know how much comfort I take in that.”

  “I wanted to wish you happy holidays,” he said. “Are you going to do anything special?”

  “I don’t celebrate a winter holiday anymore, Christopher,” she said with a politely tolerant smile. “I didn’t believe in most of it, and the rest has been a disappointment. It’s rained for Solstice Moon three years running, Santa Claus is just a nice old man with whiskers, and I’m still waiting for Jesus to decide he wants me. Hardly any point, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I had my doubts about Santa Claus early on,” Christopher said with a gentle smile. “But it’s still a good excuse for catching up with people you’ve been neglecting.”

  Though she was only forty-two, Lynn-Anne had mastered the dowager’s raised-eyebrow look of skeptical disdain. “This may come as a surprise, but I don’t feel neglected,” she said. “It isn’t an accident that I moved here, you know. And I do know where you are and how to use the link. Besides, I hardly think that’s why you called.”

  He frowned. “Why do you think I called, then?”

  Leaning forward, Lynn-Anne collected the cup on the table before her. “Based on past experience, you either want something from me or you’re going to apologize for something you’ve already done to me,” she said, and raised the cup to her lips.

  It was an attack, and yet said so quietly, so gently, that he hardly knew how to respond. “I need your help,” he said. “I need your help understanding what happened to our family.”

  Her laugh was unpleasant. “We don’t have a family, Christopher. We only have relatives.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “Maybe that’s right,” he said. “But if it is, I don’t know why.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because I’m trying to build a new family,” he said. “And I seem to keep tripping over pieces of the old one.”

  “Give it up for a loss,” she said shortly. “McCutcheons don’t know how to love. It’s a birth defect. Their hearts are too small.”

  “I don’t want to believe that.”

  “Of course not,” said his sister. “You think you can have what you want, just because you’re you and you want it. You always have.”

  “Why are you angry at me?” he asked beseechingly. “I don’t understand what I did to you.”

  Frowning, she shook her head. “Be careful what you wish for. I might tell you.” She set the cup down before her. “Thank you for the holiday wishes, Christopher. And the same to you, just as sincerely meant. Good night.”

  And the screen brightened to white.

  “Damn you!” Christopher exclaimed, bouncing up from the couch, jangling with frustration. Satisfying Meyfarth’s conditions was no longer uppermost in his mind. Lynn-Anne had seen to that, with her genteel sniping and infuriating dismissal.

  He waited five minutes, composing himself, composing his words, and then called back. As he half expected, this time her AIP answered over the simple blue and black identifier screen.

  “I’d like to leave a message,” he said resignedly.

  “Ready.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Christopher said. “It looks like you’re just as good at avoiding the past as I am, Annie. I thought you stayed out there because you didn’t like us. I never thought it was because you were afraid of us.

  “We were a family once, on B Street. You were part of it. I was part of it. Maybe it didn’t last very long, but it was important. You’re a witness to my life. I need your memories to help me sort it out and put it in order. And if there’s some grudge you’re holding because of something I don’t even remember, I need to know that, too.

  “You used to tell me stories about our mother, and that was important to me. You knew her. I never had that chance. Buck and Annie didn’t even consider me a relative. But I needed to know what part of her is in me. I needed her to be real—”

  Unexpectedly, the display brightened, and Lynn-Anne’s face appeared. “You don’t have any right to call Sharron ‘Mother,’ ” she said, her eyes flashing angrily.

  “You thought I did then.”

  “I’ve learned things since then,” she said. “Hard things.”

  “I know that in most ways Deryn was to me what Sharron was to you. But Sharron gave me life. She made half of me. I’ve always felt that I had a father and two mothers.”

  “Wrong,” Lynn-Anne said curtly. “You had a father and a keeper. That’s all.”

  “Look—”

  “You really don’t know your own history very well, do you, brother dear? I ran away the day you were born. I spent five weeks on the coast, Cannon Beach, Nehalem, Tillamook, before they found me.”

&
nbsp; “Why?” Christopher asked, brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

  “Hurt feelings. While Deryn was pregnant with you, it seemed like I didn’t exist. William fussed and fretted and hovered and dictated every detail of what she did, so you’d be healthy. You were such a big production it was pretty obvious that he wanted you because I wasn’t good enough, that he wanted you a lot more than he wanted me. So guess what—I was rooting for you to die. Then Deryn would go away and everything would be the way it was.”

  Christopher blinked. “I never heard anything about that.”

  “Who would tell you?” she asked. “But you went and survived, even came two weeks early. As far as I could see, it was only going to get worse once you were actually born, so I left. I was just two months short of majority when they dragged me back.”

  “But then you stayed for five years.”

  “Yes,” she said, and glanced down at her folded hands. “And you even lived through them.” She looked up. “Does that shock you? That I thought about killing you?”

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Just remember, this was your idea,” she said, and settled back in her chair. “I had never been around a baby. I didn’t expect you to be cute. Deryn let me hold you, and I felt—protective. You were so tiny, so helpless. And then Deryn told me that I was the closest connection you had to your mother— to Sharron—and that you needed me. That Sharron—that my mother would have expected me to help.” Lynn-Anne fought off a tear with an angry shake of the head. “Stupid me, I believed her.”

  “She wasn’t wrong,” said Christopher. “I looked up to you. I loved you.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Past tense,” she said finally. “Or didn’t you notice?”

  “I do love you—”

  “Don’t rush to judgment on that,” she said. “Deryn was wrong. She was told a lie and passed it right along. All part of the plan.” She shook her head. “He started working on you as soon as you could talk. I finally left because I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t stand to stay around and watch it anymore.”

  “Working on me?”

  “Pushing, pulling, twisting, programming. The sculptor at work, creating a self-portrait.” She studied him with a critical gaze. “For a piece of statuary, you actually do a fair imitation of a person.”

  So sharp the scalpel, so deep the wound. She was an artist. He gaped, amazed. “Why do you want to hurt me?”

  “Why do you care what I think?” She pulled a yellow-wrapped cigarette from a sleeve pocket and lit it. “I was eight when Mom died. You notice things at eight that you wouldn’t notice at five, even if you don’t understand them.” A deep, breathy drag. “They had a fight, the night before, and then she came and held me.”

  “I remember you telling me.”

  “She knew I didn’t like it when he yelled at her. Usually, I was the one crying. This time she was. She said, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. So sorry. I won’t make the same mistake again.’ It was the last time I saw her.”

  “It happened in the lab the next day,” he supplied.

  She smiled faintly. “Yes. The toxicity lab. A lovely irony. Grandmom Anne came and got me from the city school, took me to the hospital. I remember how pale she was, how frightened. By the time we got there, my mother was dead. William was arguing with the doctors and barely noticed us. So Anne took me in to say good-bye.”

  Lynn-Anne’s eyes were unfocused and bright with tears. “I touched her hand, and it felt so wrong that I ran out of the room crying that it wasn’t her. I didn’t know until later that it was the hand where she’d injected herself.” She looked hard at him. “You know she did it on purpose, don’t you? You don’t still believe it was an accident.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I still wonder why she would do it. A moment of weakness, because they had a fight? That doesn’t explain it. There were better choices. If she was unhappy, she could have left, moved out, even divorced him.”

  Lynn-Anne was shaking her head in dissent. “You don’t leave William McCutcheon until he’s ready to let you go. Sharron Aldritch was a very bright woman, but not a very strong one,” she said. “She killed herself in a moment of clarity and strength, because she knew that it was the only way that she could escape him—the only way she could deny him. I’m as sure of it as I am of anything in this world. And I hate him for it.”

  Tight-lipped, Christopher nodded. “I guess if I believed that, I would have to hate him, too. But I don’t see him that way.”

  “You can’t,” she said with a sad smile. “Please don’t pretend on my account.”

  “I’m serious. Sharron gave me something precious—a piece of herself. I love her for that, even though I never knew her.”

  “She gave you nothing,” his sister said harshly.

  “I am what I am partly because of her—”

  “What makes you think she wanted you born?”

  He stared. “They harvested her eggs when they knew she was dying—she wanted—”

  “No,” Lynn-Anne said sharply. “I saw them take her to surgery. I remember, because I thought it meant she might be okay. They harvested the eggs after she was dead.”

  A deep frown creased Christopher’s face. “So I was confused,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it was before or after. The point is the same. She gave us a gift—”

  “What makes you think that she knew?”

  “Deryn told me—” He stopped short. “Was that the lie? Is that what you meant?”

  Lynn-Anne showed a smugly satisfied smile. “The light dawns. Yes, that was the lie. The fight was about you, Christopher.”

  Though he heard the words, the meaning eluded him. “What are you saying?”

  She laughed at his puzzlement. “Think about it. You’ll figure it out eventually. You see, you’re just like your father, Christopher. You’re just not as good at it.”

  The screen went white.

  And though he tried for more than an hour, she accepted no more calls from him that night.

  CHAPTER 24

  —UGG—

  “All sins are justified…”

  The memorial convocation for Malena Graham was nearly over when Mikhail Dryke returned to the auditorium. Sasaki was at the podium, a slender but powerful figure in her wide-sashed black and red kimono. Rather than create a distraction by returning to his seat in the front row, Dryke found a spot along the back wall and stood there.

  Dryke had resisted Sasaki’s plans to address the convocation in person, just as he had resisted the decision to hold the Block 1 pioneers over for two days at all three centers. Both actions seemed foolishly defiant, a challenge and invitation to any fanatics who might have been inspired by Evan Silverman’s example. Neither Sasaki’s movements nor the Project’s internal schedules were made public, but Dryke was under no illusions that he could ensure either remained a secret.

  The gathering made a lovely target, and Sasaki’s presence vastly sweetened the prize. When com services could easily place her “in” the auditorium with an Oration hololink, it seemed to Dryke a foolish risk for her to leave the controlled environment of Prainha for the urban front lines of Houston. When Sasaki dismissed his objection without discussion, Dryke could not help but read it as confirmation that she had lost confidence in him.

  But he had been wrong—wrong about the decision, and perhaps wrong about the meaning. Because of his everyday access to her, Dryke realized, he had lost sight of the power of Sasaki’s mystique, the calming influence of her quiet leadership. Since the word began to spread that she was coming to Houston, and especially since her arrival three hours ago, Sasaki had worked a transformation on the mood of the center more profound than that managed in three days by the center’s army of counselors.

  And now, with the closing words of her panegyric, she was sealing the change.

  “There have been many rumors—many more, no doubt, than have reached my ears,” Sasaki was saying. “I have heard that Malena Graham’s place
on the ship’s roster will be filled by her sister. That her body will be carried on Memphis for burial in space. That she anticipated her death and recorded in her diary a hope that she would be interred on a world of Tau Ceti.

  “I must tell you, perhaps to your disappointment, that these rumors are false.

  “Malena Graham’s diary was filled with anticipation of her life on Memphis, with reflections of the dream and the goal that we all share, with the private thoughts of the heart and the spirit. She had no inkling of what was to come.

  “Malena Graham’s family has requested that her body be returned to them for burial near Franklin, in Virginia. The coroner’s office of the Texas State Police has already complied with their request. Her body was never in our custody. Nor would the police have recognized any claim to it we might have made.

  “And I have decided that Malena Graham’s place on Memphis will be filled by a random draw from the qualified alternates— which is the usual process by which vacancies are filled.”

  Despite the inhibiting solemnity of the event, a scattering of voices was raised in unhappy protest. Dryke was shocked, but Sasaki remained unperturbed, holding up her hand to ask for silence.

  “I know that Dr. Oker’s office has received several hundred messages urging that Malena’s place be left vacant, as a memorial,” she said. “I sympathize with the sentiment. But I cannot believe that Malena would want us to deny to another, in the name of honoring her, the gift that she had been so grateful to receive herself.”

  The audience marked its agreement with applause—well short of universal, but louder and more emphatic than the protests which had preceded it.

  “Over this last year, our family has lost a dozen members to accident and incident,” Sasaki went on. “We mourn them and remember them, but we carry on.

  “If we leave Malena’s place vacant, we are as much as saying that we could have done without her, that her contribution to the community—and therefore her death—were trivial and meaningless. And that is not so.