The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “I wondered why you hadn’t wanted to call out,” she said. “Now I’m wondering why you’re content to just let it happen. Is it over for you, as well?”

  He gazed into the basket of curled leaves and crisp petals. “Jessie was so—so agreeable, so accommodating, at first. It seemed like she was happy making us happy. I guess I never thought she was going to want more. I don’t even know how to win her back, because I never had to win her in the first place. Does that make sense?”

  He had been spoiled by easy answers, she saw, by mind mechanics who pronounced their verdicts as quickly and shallowly as an on-air psychologist. Even if they were right answers, he lost the chance to learn from them—they meant nothing to him because they were won so easily.

  “What do you miss?” she asked.

  There was no hesitation. “Cuddling with her,” he said. “I never knew anyone so willing to cuddle and so comfortable to do it with. Loi could never sit still that long. She’d have to talk, or plan, or get up and go do something that needed doing. Jessie has a way of melting into you. We shot a lot of evenings on the couch, just wrapped together and humming along at warm.” A wan, sorry smile flickered across his lips. “She made me feel good inside. It was easy and I thought it’d always be there.”

  Deryn nodded understandingly. “Is she happier now?”

  He nodded glumly. “It seems so.”

  “Then let her be.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me what she wanted at the beginning?” he said with sudden anger. “Why did she let me think she was happy the way things were?”

  Deryn made a bowl of her hands between her knees. “Years before I met your parents, I was in love with a man twelve years older than I,” she said. “He was very sure of himself and very much in command of his life, both things I admired then. He was an executive with a company that took very good care of him, so he could take very good care of me. We went to Hawaii, to Rio. He surprised me with presents, never extravagant, but thoughtful, perfect.

  “We’d been together six months when he asked me to go with him to a doctor in New York. He wanted me to have an operation so that I could give him more pleasure during sex. He’d had such a woman in London, in one of the Triangle clubs. I didn’t even know such things were done.

  “I can hardly believe it now, but I almost said yes. He was, I thought, a wonderful man. He loved me, he was giving me so much, why shouldn’t I do this for him? The closest I got to the downside was thinking, ‘Even if we break up, whoever comes next will appreciate it—’

  “But when he left the next morning and it was just me by myself, everything changed. I had never had any surgery, never even broken a bone—no medical problems more serious than the flu. But I was going to volunteer to let someone cut and sew my body in the name of better orgasms. I was angry that he wanted me to do it. I was hurt that he wanted what a joybird had given him more than what he and I had shared—which up to that point I had thought was pretty wonderful.

  “So I called him at work and told him I’d changed my mind,” she said. “I never heard from my ‘wonderful man’ again. He moved on to someone else, a friend of a friend of a friend. A few months later, they went to New York for two weeks. When they came back, she was so happy with herself that she couldn’t wait to tell everyone. I was still so miserable that I was actually jealous. And I had no idea why.

  “It took me fifteen years to forgive myself for almost giving in and to understand how he managed to find someone who would. It’s the dirty little secret Anna X leaves out of her speech—that female scripts are just as destructive in their way.

  “We’ll do anything when we think we have to have a man—trade any favor, tell any lie, take any edge. I said we weren’t angels. Most women are just like most men—trying to get what we want, trying to strike a bargain. It sounds to me as though you and Jessie just couldn’t agree on terms. Don’t wish you could make her be different than she is. If you do love her, wish that she’ll be happy.”

  Christopher had been silent, amazed, through Deryn’s long unburdening. “I guess my heart’s been too small for that.”

  “Hearts can grow, with proper care,” said Deryn with a gentle smile.

  He nodded, lips pulled tight in a frown. “It’s almost time to take me back to the Shelter.”

  “Almost,” she said, uncrossing her legs and rising gracefully to her feet. “But not quite. Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

  The Moon Chamber lay wheel-out below Spring Grotto, thirty meters of stairs and a double pressure hatch away from the corridors and compartments. Dimly lit and chapel-quiet, the chamber was a great open square bonded on all four sides by catwalk. The pale light seemed to rise up from the center space, like the glow from a fire pit.

  Deryn led him by hand to the edge of the catwalk, and he looked down, unsuspecting. His breath caught, and he held her hand tightly as he swayed with sudden vertigo. Below their feet were the stairs, slipping past as the great wheel of Sanctuary turned. The transparent wall of plaz a few meters below their feet was invisible, except for the diffraction of dust pits and scratches.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she murmured. “There’s one below every grotto—one each for Sun, Moon, Earth, and stars.”

  The dark limb of the Earth had appeared, dotted with spiderstrings of fuzzy light which outlined continents. It sliced across the field of stars like a shadow.

  “Look,” she said, “the forest fire in East Russia is still burning.”

  Following her lead, they stretched out prone on the carpeted catwalk, heads propped on hands and peeking over the edge, like kids looking down from an upper bunk. The Earth rode past and was replaced by more stars, their glory and plenty and variety unguessed by any earthbound viewer. Ninety seconds later, the satland’s spin brought the planet into view again.

  “And I didn’t think I liked riding a Ferris wheel,” he said with a breathless joy.

  “No view like this one anywhere on Earth.”

  “Which way is north? I should know the constellations.”

  “It took me weeks to learn to spot them up here,” she said. “There’s thousands more stars to fill in the patterns and spaces. There—Orion, off to the right. Can you see it? That reddish star is the shoulder—”

  “I see it. Oh, God, this is beautiful—”

  They stayed as long as their time allowed, through half a dozen reruns of the panoramic movie, each fractionally different from the last as Sanctuary spun along in its orbit. Christopher left the Moon Chamber reluctantly, and part of him stayed behind, still caught in wonder. The proof of that was the smile that lingered on his face all the way to the door of Shelter 24.

  “It gives you a different way to look at things, doesn’t it?” he said when he had hugged her.

  Deryn did not know just what he spoke of, so she simply agreed. But when she came to get Christopher that next morning, he seemed more at peace, and his first words were to ask how he might arrange to call home. She thought that a heartening sign, never dreaming that chaos was following close on the heels of the new calm.

  CHAPTER 31

  —CCC—

  “… worlds to know…”

  Christopher had come to Sanctuary knowing that he would not be allowed to stay. But almost from the moment he arrived, the thought began forming that he also did not want to stay.

  The suspicion was strengthened when first Deryn, then Anna X, shrugged off the Chi Sequence as inconsequential. It crystallized into a certainty in the Moon Chamber when, watching the darkened globe and the brilliant stars roll by, he suddenly understood that Anna X was right.

  Earth had seemed so far away, the bustle of its billions shrunk to a pattern of lights in the night. And the stars that Memphis would soon reach for were unimaginably, unbelievably more distant. In the blink of the mind’s eye, scales shifted, values changed. What was Earth to Sanctuary? A foreign land in the grip of unfriendly forces. What was Sanctuary to Earth? Even less—a carnival ride in
history’s sideshow. What happened on Sanctuary did not matter except to those few who called it home.

  I don’t watch the news. It’s never about me. How many more felt that way, not only around the wheel, but around the world? It was the turning away, the turning inward. Daniel Keith had described it, and Jeremiah had feared it. Sanctuary was the vindication of a prophecy, the anticipation of the human prospect. It would spin along in its orbit year after year much as it was now, growing older rather than growing, ever more fragile in structure and frail in spirit. And someday, it would fail.

  It was the future of the Earth, in microcosm. He required no further proof from Daniel, Deryn, or the midwives—from Sharron’s memory or his father’s legacy. Synthesis was his art and his magic, and the synergy was clear. The twilight of the will was approaching.

  That being so, what was the best use of a life? The curtain would not ring down for decades, perhaps centuries. In that time, billions would pass through the whole cycle of existence, and most of the passages would be made in pain. Against that background, what was the moral act? Was it enough to simply take a turn on the wheel and then step aside?

  In a life of watching, Christopher had learned to measure his expectations. Wanting little placed the goal within reach. Wanting nothing too badly mitigated disappointment. The path of least resistance beckoned. If he could not be happy, he could at least hope to temper the pain.

  But that, too, was a turning away, into emptiness, into numbness. There was a better choice at hand. I’ll gladly trade choice for destiny and purpose, Daniel had said. Better still to choose destiny and purpose, to negate the tail-chasing pointlessness with a summary act of will. The moral act was the same in either conception of the world. A quiet life ending in a quiet death was a song sung in silence. To have meaning, it had to be heard.

  In that light, the choice was easy, inevitable. Mercifully, there was still a chance to choose. He would go home and apply what tools he had to rebuild his family and rehearse his song. There was time for a child, for the treasures of his father’s world. And then, Gaea willing, he would join Daniel on Knossos in the first breath of the new century.

  The phone in Deryn’s apartment was a simple videocom, barely smarter than an interactive TV, meant only for local messaging. To call out required the help of a tech in the Sanctuary communications center, which required in turn the permission of both Deryn and the station censor. And though Deryn left him alone with her blessing once the arrangements were complete, the censor remained on the line.

  He had been off-net long enough that skylink greeted him with almost effusive cheeriness and a subscriber-update menu when he signed in. There were a dozen messages waiting, including blue-bar mail from Loi, Daniel, and the Vernonia District of the Oregon State Police. “Too many to wade through now,” he murmured. “Give me Loi’s.”

  It was so long since Christopher had seen her face that he almost failed to listen, savoring the sight of her.

  “I got your message, Christopher. I’m sorry so much has come down on you,” she said. “Take what time you need and do what you need to do. Come home when you can.” There was some tenderness in her tone, if not in the words.

  He smiled to himself. “Call reply,” he said.

  A dozen or so seconds later, Loi’s face returned to the screen. She was tousled and raccoon-eyed, and a beautiful sight.

  “Hello, Loi.”

  “Christopher?” She squinted off-screen. “Prodigal lover, it’s after four in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Never mind. Bad manners to do it, worse to complain. Where are you? How are you?”

  “On Sanctuary. I didn’t think about the time difference. I’m not even sure what standard we’re on.”

  She did not seem to need any explanation about his whereabouts. “Chris, this is showing a conference call. Who else is on?”

  “The station censor. Probably being looped, too—I don’t know if this lag is normal.”

  “Special treatment?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said. “I’ve missed you, Loi.”

  “The house has been empty. Jessie moved out this weekend.”

  “She went to John’s?”

  Loi nodded, then rubbed an eye. “Kia was here last night, but mostly I’m alone here now. Are you coming back soon?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. I haven’t talked to the Entry staff about openings on the shuttle yet. And I may have to borrow a nickel or two for the fare.”

  “It’d be worth a nickel or two to have you back,” she said. “Let me know. Chris, have you been avoiding Daniel Keith?”

  “Why?”

  “He came by the house tonight, late, wondering if I knew how to reach you. He said he had to reach you before seven tomorrow morning. I mean this morning. He must not think me very bright, because he said it three times.”

  “Everyone’s off-net up here. You need special permission just to order out for nachos,” Christopher said. “I’m surprised that Daniel tried to get me, though.”

  “You’ve been popular with the oddest people. The Oregon State Police called. A lawyer in Portland. Roger Marshall even asked about you.”

  “Who’s Roger Marshall?”

  “The L.A. developer. He called to talk over a commission for the lobby of Daley Tower. He said he was sorry to hear about your father, wondered how you were doing.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Christopher said. “How did he hear about that? Unless they moved faster than I thought—Loi, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to find out what this means, and this phone can only do one thing at a time.”

  “You’re still in trouble, aren’t you, Chris?”

  “Some. It’ll all sort out. Maybe it already has.”

  She knew the optimism was misplaced. “I have a lot of friends. Come on back and let’s fight it together.”

  “I like that idea,” he said. “I like it so much I had it myself a few hours ago. Look, when did this Marshall call?”

  “Ah—Friday. Three days ago. Chris, I think you’d better talk to Daniel first. It’s almost five o’clock. And he seemed upset. Angry might be a better word.”

  “Do you know what he was upset about?”

  “No. If I was going to guess, I’d say it had something to do with what happened to Memphis.”

  A chill touch prickled the skin on the back of Christopher’s neck. “What happened to Memphis!”

  “You don’t know?” Her expression turned grave. “Homeworld hit it with some kind of missile yesterday morning. A hundred and six dead, twenty percent destroyed, two-to-three-year delay, according to some reports. Some are saying she’ll never leave.”

  It was there on all the services, just as Loi had described, complete with Takara-supplied pictures of twisted metal and construction plastic. The list of the dead had not been released yet, but the reports showed their bagged bodies stacking up in Takara’s medical stations.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no,” he breathed to himself, angry tears welling as he watched. “Not Memphis. Why couldn’t you have just let them go? Why couldn’t you have just let her be?”

  With a full day already passed since the event, the live coverage had deteriorated into talking heads debating in a vacuum. No reporters had been admitted to Takara, Memphis had been turned away from prying eyes, and the flow of information from Prainha had tightened down to a trickle. That helped Christopher escape becoming a prisoner of the screen.

  “Did you pick this story up for local use?” he asked the censor.

  “They did two hours on it yesterday morning.”

  While I was still on vacation, he thought.

  Time was slipping away, but he was not ready to face Keith, knowing what he must be thinking. Instead, Christopher went back to the mail stack and tried to focus on problems he could touch, and to answer a nagging question raised by his talk with Loi.

  The first message from the Oregon State Police informed him that there’d been a fire on the ridge, that his fa
ther could not be located, and would he contact Detective Brooks with any information he might have? The second, the one with the receipt tag, was only a day old, and a bit more terse. An investigation into William McCutcheon’s disappearance had begun, and Christopher’s participation was considered crucial—would he please make himself available within the next forty-eight hours to answer questions?

  But still no fugitive warrant or grand-jury subpoena, which meant no body. Which meant no way for Marshall to know that William McCutcheon was dead—except hearing it from either Allied or Homeworld.

  Christopher could not tap DIANNA from orbit, and he was not welcome in Sanctuary’s library, which probably didn’t contain the data he needed in any case. But he sent a query through to Codex, a subscription information service, and had an answer in a few minutes: Roger Marshall was a member of the Diaspora advisory committee.

  Surprised as he was by that discovery, it explained plainly enough how Marshall knew. But the rest of it made no sense. Was there some kind of message in Marshall calling Loi? An apology? A confession? Or just a bit of carelessness? Christopher could not make the picture come together.

  The clock caught his eye, warning him that he was running out of time to reach Keith. Keith’s message gave him a clue what to expect: It was short and foul, beginning with “You shit-mouthed son of a bitch—” and going downhill from there. It was time-stamped several hours before Loi would have seen him; Keith’s emotions had apparently cooled, though his judgments had likely hardened at the same time.

  In the end, Christopher could not let those judgments stand unchallenged. He was surprised to find Keith on the move, in his flyer rather than his bed. But Keith’s cold tone and hard words were no surprise. “Fag off. I don’t want to talk to you.”