The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “I have to,” he said.

  They perched on the edge of the settee-bed, and he began, marrying fact and supposition in his narrative. The story he told went further than Deryn could have guessed, and its quiet drama and horror awakened her protectiveness.

  But Deryn kept that emotion contained. A father’s death and a son’s grief, however immediate at that moment in that room, were dwarfed by the other dimensions of the account. Deryn began to hope the Shelter guide had ignored her wishes and monitored the conversation, for there were parts of it that Anna X would need to hear.

  She tried to listen as though she did not know him, to hear him as Anna would. But Deryn could not forget whom she was listening to, and wondered at how the child she had borne—this child of such promise, now a man of such paradox—had become a witness and a victim and now a player in such a tale.

  Toward the end, Christopher became careful about his words. Deryn understood that he was not yet ready to ask what he had come to ask of her, that he was not yet sure of her. But she was ready to be asked, and gently stole the torch from him when the chance came.

  “You’re here to do more than tell me William is dead.”

  He nodded. “I thought you should know. But that isn’t the whole of it.”

  “And the rest is—”

  “I came here to find out what you can tell me about Sharron.”

  She cocked her head and studied him. “And?”

  “And what your geneticists can tell me about myself. I’ll pay for information, people’s time, any testing—whatever.”

  “The first I can understand, though you may be disappointed,” she said. “But why do you think that anyone here can answer questions about the Chi Sequence?”

  “Because you’re conceiving children here with one parent,” Christopher said. “And it’s a good bet that parthenogenesis requires more than a casual acquaintance with human genetics. If you want to deny it—or you’re obliged to deny it—I guess I understand that. If you really don’t know, I guess someone’ll come bursting in here any moment to stop you from finding out. But let me tell you what I know, and maybe we’ll see where to go from there.”

  “I remember the rumors and the jokes. You won’t need to repeat them for my benefit.”

  “This is more than rumor,” said Christopher. “This is a matter of record. Angela O called for parthenogenetic research in her Womyn’s Manifesto long before there were any satlands. The year before this station was completed, the Sanctuary Committee—of which Angela O was a member—purchased a copy of the complete data base of the Human Genome Project.

  “Four of the five geneticists given grants by the Free Womyn’s Guild to work on problems in parthenogenesis stopped publishing, even privately, after Sanctuary opened. Two came up here openly, with the first wave. It’s a safe bet that the other two came here as well. On top of that, you’ve admitted at least eighteen first-rank geneticists in the last twenty years, including one who was with the Project in Munich for a time.” He shook his head. “If you don’t already know about the Chi Sequence, you at least have the tools to find out.”

  “Why does it matter, Christopher?”

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly, and she saw in that moment the part of him that had not yet grown. “I have to know who I am. I have to know what to be.”

  “No geneticist can tell you,” she said.

  “I don’t think you understand how deep this runs,” he said. “It’s the difference between a pointless life and a life with purpose.”

  “Who’s judging, Christopher?”

  “I am.”

  But he was not, she knew. He was looking for a new Authority, a new compass. He did not know how bright was his own fire. He did not trust his own wisdom.

  “I know how deep it runs,” Deryn said. “I saw your father crush your confidence a hundred times by withholding his approval, by telling you how you could do better instead of how well you’d done. I remember when you were five and spent an entire afternoon creating what you called a movie—a poster covered with a dozen crayon drawings, complete with titles and credits. You were so proud. I hung it on the kitchen wall.”

  “I remember,” Christopher said.

  “Do you remember that when William came home, he took it down and told you to put it in your room? That he ripped off a corner in the process, and how you started to cry? That I found your ‘movie’ that night in a corner of your room, torn into pieces and crushed into a ball? That runs deep, too, Christopher.”

  His face, sulky and defensive, told her that resistance had set in. “I know about my father. I need to know about me.”

  She shook her head. “But you’re asking the wrong question. It isn’t who you are. It’s who you want to be.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out—who I am at the root. What my part is. What I got from Sharron.”

  “What will you do with that knowledge if you get it?”

  “Then I’ll know what it will take to make me happy.” He said it with more hope than confidence.

  “Will you?” There was more she wanted to say, but he had stopped listening. He so feared the responsibility of choosing for himself—so feared being wrong—he could not hear the inner voice. And that voice mattered far more than hers.

  “I never told you about when I met your father,” she said at last.

  “Yes, you did.” He looked puzzled. “How you heard about what he was doing from the doctor in Tacoma—and came up to the house to introduce yourself. The Mary Poppins story.”

  She smiled. “That was your father’s version—official family history. And it was true, as far as he remembered. So I never contested it, and even repeated it a time or two. But I actually met William years before that. And not only William. Sharron, too.”

  He gaped in surprise, his defenses breached. “You did? When?”

  “It was a party on Long Beach—there still was a Long Beach then, the big Easter storm was still a few years away. ’55, I think it was. Ten years before I signed the contract to have you.”

  “Please tell me about it—”

  “I wouldn’t have brought it up if I didn’t mean to,” she said, and patted his hand. “There was a party with a capital p at Carl Walter’s big old place near the north end of the peninsula. I really didn’t belong—so much so that I didn’t know who all those people were, though everyone was Somebody. Carl had those kinds of contacts, all through Oregon and Washington.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I was a friend of the family, Carl’s daughter’s favorite tutor, visiting for a few days on a face-to-face. I would as soon have gone up to Ledbetter Point for a few hours, but they wanted to introduce me around.

  “William was there with Sharron, being William—being charming and earnest with strangers and neglecting those he could take for granted. Sharron looked as out of place as I felt, so I sat down next to her and we started talking.”

  “Did you have anything to talk about?”

  Deryn laughed, remembering. “More than we had time to cover. We talked for almost four hours with never a lull. No one knew us, no one bothered us, and we didn’t mind one bit. We understood each other. She felt like someone I already knew. Have you ever had that happen with someone? An acquaintance of mine calls them ‘friendly mirrors’—you see the parts of yourself that you like in them.”

  Christopher was sitting forward, eager and hopeful. “Can you remember anything Sharron said?”

  “Everything I remembered, I made sure I shared with you at one time or another in the house on B Street. I just let you think it came from your father,” she said. “I remember less now. Sharron told me stories about Lynn-Anne, who had just turned three. About the house they wanted to build in the woods. About the poems she was writing, and about how no one had any use for poetry unless it was set to music. She seemed very glad to have someone to talk to. I didn’t know how to read that then.”

  “She was lonely,” Christopher said
slowly.

  “I think so. For a certain kind of company. For a certain kind of attention.”

  “Did she say anything about having more children?”

  “I don’t remember so,” Deryn said, slowly shaking her head. “Nothing either way. When William was finished holding court and came to collect her, she introduced me. By that time she felt like a friend. She was living a quiet life, but her heart and her mind were alive. I admired her. It seemed like she had more focus than I did, more purpose. I went away with a lot to think about. I was only five years younger than she, but I felt like a child by comparison.”

  “Then later, my father didn’t remember you.”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “That’s such an amazing coincidence.”

  “No,” she said, smiling at his innocence. “Not coincidence. It goes deeper than that. If I had never had that conversation with Sharron, I would never have become your host. I wasn’t registered with an agency, you know. I had never thought of hosting. And it was only by chance that I even heard of what William was doing—about Sharron’s eggs. There’s the coincidence. Everything else was purely intentional.”

  Realization began to light Christopher’s eyes. “You knew what he wanted already.”

  “Of course. He wanted another Sharron. And that’s what I was. Or could appear to be.” She took his hand and held it tightly. “You see, in my mind, I didn’t agree to have William McCutcheon’s baby. I agreed to have Sharron’s. I did it for her, not for your father. That’s why I never wanted you to call me ‘Mother.’ Sharron had precedence. I was only finishing what she’d begun.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and his face showed his struggle to grasp the meaning, the cascading implications, of what she had said. Deryn wanted to leave then and let the solvent of that revelation work at softening the bonds of his comfortably patterned thoughts. But when she stood, saying gently, “I have to leave,” he clutched at her presence like a skirt.

  “Did she begin it?” he asked. “Or was it all my father, like Lynn-Anne believes?”

  “I wish I could answer that,” she said, her faint smile apologetic. “But I don’t know myself. Knowing him, I have to say he was probably capable of the theft. But I also believe she was capable of the gift. In the absence of proof, I chose to think the best.”

  “Thinking the best where my father is concerned isn’t the easiest thing right now.”

  “I know,” she said. “Christopher, I’m expected somewhere. I’ll come back when I can.”

  “I’m sorry.” He joined her standing. “Can I ask what you do here?”

  “I’m a storyteller. A kind of teacher.”

  He smiled in a foolishly pleased way. “Do you tell them about Coyote?”

  “But of course,” she said, smiling back. “The young ones seem to like the animal stories best. Heaven knows what they understand from them, though.”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing you tell them again,” he said. “Or would that only embarrass both of us?”

  Touching his cheek lightly, she shook her head. “All a good story requires is a good listener. But I’m late now. Perhaps when your petition’s been heard you can join us in the grotto—”

  The intrusion of reality dispelled the nostalgic haze for both of them, reminding them where they were and why, and there was an awkward distance in their good-bye. But as Deryn passed through the corridors on the way to her home, she found herself crying for William and Christopher both, and wishing she could find a way to cut the string that joined them.

  Anna X heard Christopher’s petition in the morning. Deryn supported it, the Shelter supervisor opposed it, and in the end the council approved it, grudgingly, and with restrictions—a fifteen-day admission, no renewals. But Deryn won the one point that mattered to her—permission for Christopher to come to her quarters on Summer Corridor.

  The other issue, of turning Sanctuary’s midwives to searching their records and Christopher’s cells for the Chi Sequence, was resolved in private between Deryn and Anna X. Here there was no compromise—the answer was an unequivocal no.

  “What tools we may have are for our purposes,” Anna X said. “Your son’s problem neither concerns us nor serves us.”

  She accepted the decision. Christopher’s narrow focus on mechanistic answers and deterministic choices was, it seemed to her, a final attempt to evade taking charge of his own life. The clockwork man, his future written in beads on a genetic string. Locus of control now internal—but unconscious. How can I be wrong if I’m only doing what I must?

  Anna X’s decision might actually be a blessing. Perhaps, Deryn thought, denied the midwives’ aid, he will be forced to find better tools with which to look within.

  Christopher did not see it that way.

  To Deryn’s surprise, Anna X allowed Christopher a chance to object in person. Deryn accompanied him to the Circle Room, though she made no attempt to either coach him or forewarn him.

  “Deryn presented your case to me,” Anna X said, sitting back in her comfortable bowl-cushion chair. She had covered up for the occasion, her high-collared full-sleeved long robe hiding all but her face. Deryn could not remember when she had last seen her so armored with clothing. “We are not interested in whether Memphis leaves or stays, whom it carries away, or why they go. It is completely without relevance to us.”

  “That’s not true,” Christopher said. “The Chi Sequence is relevant to the decisions your geneticists make. You can’t afford to ignore a script that powerful.”

  “We know more of genetic scripts than you realize,” said Anna X. “Male genetic scripts rule the planet beneath us— scripts which program men for destructive competition with their kind and destructive oppression of my kind. The modern era’s ethics, politics, and economics are all shaped to acquisition and domination, the ultimate goal of which is control of women’s bodies. Testosterone provides more than enough explanation for Memphis. You are still pawing the ground and marking the trees.”

  They might as well have been speaking Hindi and Urdu for all that they understood each other. He knew the words, but he could not grasp her context; she heard only her translations of his arguments. Deryn saw him growing frustrated, not only with his failure to persuade her, but also with their inability even to agree on the facts. But then, he had long had an unreasonable faith in the power of reason, and too little grasp of the power of emotions.

  “So what you’re really saying is that you won’t help me because I’m the enemy,” he was saying, his tone sharp and impatient. “I’ve got an outie, not an innie, so anything that helps me must harm you. It must, or I wouldn’t want it, is that it?”

  “No. Not the enemy,” Anna X said, ignoring the rest. “But your goals are not our goals, and we have the right to focus our resources on our own goals. Our midwives are busy enough with the work they have now. We accepted your presence here as a courtesy to Deryn. But this is our world, organized for our needs, guided by our choices. You cannot expect us to abandon that commitment to champion the cause of a visitor.”

  And as quickly as that, it was over.

  For the rest of the day, Deryn left Christopher alone in her home. She had obligations—a class in rhythmic language at the school, a meeting of the Code circle to set sentence in a minor case, a bit of healing work to which she had promised to lend her hands and energies.

  But even if she had not been obliged to leave him, Deryn would have tried to find a reason to do so. So difficult, so difficult, she thought. The balance within as precarious as the balance without. There was great danger that he would fix on her as the new object of his emotional fealty. She could not allow him to think that her life had stopped when he appeared.

  He was struggling to stand, burning from within. She could not catch him if he fell, nor protect him from the flames. She could not allow herself to treat him as her child, for he was all too ready to return to that comforting security. To love and say no is the hardest thing—

 
; That night, he talked about his family for the first time since he arrived. They were sitting in Deryn’s teaching ring, a circle of cushions in a carpeted corner of her flex space. He had picked a spot where he could lean back against a wall; she sat cross-legged and straight-backed a third of the way around the circle. Between them was a low table bearing a woven basket of dried flowers and brown field grasses.

  “This business about men and women—what Anna X said this morning,” he said. “Does everyone up here believe that?”

  “There’s nothing that everyone up here believes,” said Deryn with a half-smile.

  “Most, then? You?”

  “What we think is conditioned on what we know, and what we know best is our own experience,” she said. “My experience is that men and women are different enough that I can say I prefer to be with one and prefer not to be with the other.”

  “What kind of difference? Or is it one of those if-you-have-to-ask-you’ll-never-understand things?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t sexual, which is what everyone thinks. For me, it’s something about balance, or focus. Men make me jangle. They confuse me. I change around them, and I don’t usually like the changes. Their presence is a demand, somehow.”

  Smiling, she added, “We’re not angels, mind you, and Sanctuary is no Utopia. But I find it a very calming place to be. In fact, that’s how I think of it—a place to be, not a place to do. Which I suppose is part of what Anna X was saying. Do you think she’s wrong?”

  “I don’t feel like the kind of man she’s talking about,” he said. “But that’s nothing new. I had a friend who saw all his relationships that way. But I could never see mine that simply. They always seem so much more complicated than that, even when I think they’re going to be simple.”

  “Did that include your trine?”

  “And my marriage before that, and Vanessa before that, and Patti in Vernonia. They all started easy and ended hard.”

  “Your trine is still alive, isn’t it?”

  “Only a technicality. Only a matter of time. Jessie’s locked on someone new, and Loi—I don’t think I’m important enough to Loi for the amount of trouble I bring. Anytime I want, I can call and hear the death sentence. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Fields is already living there.”