The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  She nodded. “Mikhail.”

  “Yes, Director.”

  “If he ends his broadcast now, bring him to me.”

  All eyes in the room were on Christopher. He sought out Deryn’s with his own.

  “It’s a good beginning,” she said, answering the question in his look. “And I know how to finish it. If you can’t, I’ll tell the story, when the time is right.”

  He nodded. That was enough. “I’d like a promise of safe conduct from Mr. Dryke,” he said to Sasaki.

  A moment later, he had the promise. He hugged Deryn and thanked Anna X, then turned and left, his steps curiously light. Alone, he climbed up to Entry and walked out through the door of Shelter 24 with his shoulders straight and his head high. As he did, the two staff women rushed by him, escaping into the safety of Sanctuary.

  “You don’t have it yet,” Dryke said, glaring across the room.

  “Wrong,” Christopher said. “I always had it. I was just the last to know.”

  Christopher did not try to talk to Dryke in the shuttle, not even to ask where they were headed. Instead, he thought about the questions he wanted to ask Sasaki. There were fewer than he would have expected. Confirmation, correction, validation— those he still needed. But the unknown detail was irrelevant. The synthesis embodied the detail. The general implied the specific.

  The flight was long even in objective terms, long enough that it could have only one destination. Finally, they docked at a satland which, from the glimpse Christopher got through the pilot’s port and the kanji signage in the transfer chute, could only be Takara.

  “The Director’s on Memphis!” Christopher asked, turning as he walked and throwing the question back over his shoulder to Dryke. Dryke’s only answer was a straight-arm, flat-palm shot to the middle of Christopher’s back, shoving him forward.

  Dryke and two of the soldiers escorted Christopher to a med station, where he was stripped, scanned, sampled, searched inside and out, and, finally, given new clothes—a rigger’s pajamalike skinsides. He endured the exercise stoically, refusing the humiliation he might have felt.

  Then he was bustled aboard another spacecraft, this one cavernous and buslike, with low, extra-wide seats that were actually uncomfortable without the work suits they had apparently been designed for. Their party of four was scattered among the forty seats—Christopher and Dryke at opposite sides of a middle row, the soldiers at opposite ends of the center aisle.

  As on the shuttle, Dryke never took his right hand off his shockbox or his eyes off Christopher. The level, unflinching gaze had in it something of a carrion bird’s hopefulness and something of a timber wolfs watchfulness.

  For the most part, Christopher ignored him. All of his surroundings were new, and he managed enough curiosity about them to divert himself by attending to the novelty. But he could not stop his mind from thinking, from trying to weave in the last few threads. And one of those threads involved the security of Memphis, which meant it involved Mikhail Dryke. It was hard to offer anything, even a thought, to the man who had shot down his father. But Sasaki might not be the best to face the question he wanted to ask.

  “Is Roger Marshall coming up to Memphis, too?”

  Dryke’s gaze never wavered, and his expression never changed.

  “He never went through Selection, you know.”

  Still there was no response.

  “I hear that a lot of people are going to be on Memphis who never went through Selection or Training. If Marshall’s one of them, you might want to pay attention to whether his freight gets here before him. And if it does, you might want to make sure it gets the ‘A’ inspection—the kind you’d give something belonging to me.”

  Almost five minutes passed in silence.

  “Why?” Dryke said, as though a complicated equation had ground through his mind without generating a solution.

  “Because I’m not the new Jeremiah—which means that someone else is.”

  Another long silence. Christopher understood that it was as hard for Dryke to accept anything from Christopher as it was for him to offer it.

  “Why Marshall?” Dryke asked finally.

  “Do you know a good reason why he would call my home and wonder to Loi how I was dealing with my father’s death?”

  “Do you?”

  “Maybe. It was two days after I disappeared, and two days before the attack on Memphis. Maybe he’d lost track of me and needed to make sure I wasn’t on board somehow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of a promise to my father.”

  Dryke looked away, raising a hand to scratch the bridge of his nose. “A lot of maybes.”

  “Then he is coming,” Christopher said.

  The gaze firmed and found Christopher again.

  “Has it occurred to you that the attack on Memphis was a successful one, after all?” Christopher asked. “The real damage was done to security. This panic plan puts hundreds of people on the ship who would otherwise never have gotten there, apparently including Marshall. And I’m guessing it overwhelms your normal screening procedures, too. Are you streamlining things to get people processed faster? Giving anyone a pass? Top management? The committee? Roger Marshall? Don’t answer, I can’t do anything with the information. Just questions.”

  Something had awakened in Dryke’s eyes. His head tipped back slightly, and he stared at Christopher with something closer to—fear?

  One last card. “Tell me—Marshall wasn’t involved in drawing up this plan, was he?”

  There was a suspended moment, in which Christopher could almost see the picture in his mind replicating itself in Dryke’s. Then there was a bump as they docked with Memphis, and the all-clear tone.

  This time, Dryke preceded him down the aisle. He seemed to be in a hurry.

  The suite in which Sasaki received him was neither large nor grand, but it bore a stamp. A pale-tinted hanging scroll sandwiched in translute was strung between ceiling and floor as a room divider; in lighted display recesses on the wall were a bronze horse, a gleaming metal-paper origami of a dragon in flight, and a deep-rubbed mahogany Buddah, surrounded by flowers and candles, smiling within at some untold amusement.

  Other recesses were empty, but there were two trunklike shipping casks stacked in a corner of the outer room. Furniture seemed sparse until Sasaki showed him a pair of facing chairs that slid out from an inner wall as though they were drawers. She settled in one and invited him to the other with an open hand. She was smaller than he had expected, and braver—they were alone, Sasaki having sent his escorts back.

  “You said that you wanted the truth,” she said. “Are you equal to it?”

  “How do you know, before you’re tested?”

  She nodded. “A good answer. Ask your questions.”

  “Is Memphis ready for space?”

  “It will be, very shortly.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “From Takara, a matter of days. For Tau Ceti, a matter of a few weeks. We will go out for our certification flight with full crew and manifest. If the systems are sound, we will not turn back at Pluto.”

  “Who will be governor?”

  She smiled slightly. “That duty will be mine, for now.”

  “And what happens here? Who takes over? Or will there be anything to take over?”

  “No,” she said. “This is the end of the Diaspora, as we have suspected for some time it would be. After Memphis sails, the Project will fall into bankruptcy. But the vultures will find very little meat on the bones. The money is all here, in Memphis and Ur. We have bought two starships for the price of five. Many promises will be broken, and many bills left unpaid. Not even Allied has ever seen an honest accounting.”

  “Why that way?”

  “Because it was time. Because it was the only way the flower would blossom,” she said.

  Dryke joined them then, entering the suite quietly and standing with crossed arms beside the hanging scroll. Sasaki looked up past Christopher w
ith a questioning glance.

  “Marshall missed his flight from LAX,” Dryke said. “He apologizes and says he has to have more time to wrap up business. His personals didn’t miss their flight. I had the casks pulled out of the line on Technica and checked. The one that was supposed to be art and books was two hundred and eighty kilos of underwater explosives.”

  Christopher closed his eyes, the rush of relief carrying away the strength from his limbs.

  “I should have wondered why a man like that wanted to go,” Dryke said.

  “Sometimes perfection is found in the result, not in the method,” Sasaki said. “And sometimes perfection is only possible in thought.” She looked to Christopher. “Now a question for you,” she said. “Do you want to come on Memphis?”

  Her words encircled his heart and tightened until he could hardly breathe. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. The reasons were all turned around inside each other, connected at odd places, sometimes not connected at all. His motives were all suspect, shallow, trivial—or else so deep and fundamental that he could not wrap sentences around them. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  To his surprise, Sasaki smiled warmly. “Then come.”

  He drew a hard breath. “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Explain?”

  “There’s someone else who belongs here before I do. A friend. Daniel Keith. He works in Selection—a BC-positive. He’d be up here now if it wasn’t for me.” He was fighting with tears. “If you’re going to give me a discretionary space, I—you have to let me give it to him.”

  She was studying him closely. “Mikhail, do you know anything about this?”

  “Keith was on the list,” he said. “He was sent to Prainha because of contact with Christopher. He’s under arrest there.”

  “He was clear except for his friendship with this man?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, looking into Christopher’s eyes. “You don’t know how extraordinary I find it that you would give up your place to your friend.”

  “I made him a promise.”

  “Even so, that would be rare selflessness, even here.” She sat forward in her chair. “I think that we can find two places as easily as one.”

  A shuddery sob escaped through the smile that sprang onto Christopher’s face. He pressed his palms together almost as though praying, and puffed away the rush of discordant emotion in hoarse breaths.

  Rising, she smiled and touched his shoulder. “I will give you some time. Then there will be much more to say.”

  He twisted in his chair as she started away. “You had me tested for the Chi Sequence. On Takara. Didn’t you?”

  “That was the question I expected first,” she said. “Yes.”

  “What am I?”

  “Young,” she said. “But you will grow.” Guiding Dryke ahead of her, she started again for the door.

  Christopher stood and called after them. “That’s not enough,” he said.

  She turned and looked back. “Most of those who will make this trip will know no more.”

  Shaking his head, he said, “I still need to know—do I belong here?”

  Her gaze appraised him. “Not if you still need that question answered by me.”

  He considered that for a long time, then laughed a little laugh, the joke a silent secret. “No. I suppose I don’t. But did any of us really have a choice? Did you?”

  “No,” she said. “And still, I did what I wanted.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you know T. E. Lawrence?”

  “A little.”

  “The epigraph from Seven Pillars.” She quoted, “ ‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars, to earn you Freedom—’ ”

  “Yes,” Christopher said, throat suddenly tight, thinking not of Lawrence, nor of Sasaki. “I have one more question.”

  She waited.

  “For him,” Christopher said, looking at Dryke.

  Dryke met his gaze with a look absent of apology—which, for the first time, Christopher could accept. “What?”

  “Where is my father?”

  There was only the briefest hesitation. “Where we found him.”

  Eleven days later, fulfilling a promise by Sasaki, an Allied screamer took Christopher down to the ridge.

  It promised to be his last hour on Earth, and he had hoped Loi could meet him there and share it. He had envisioned a tidy closure—fierce, fervent hugs, murmured I love you’s, blessings and forgiveness. But it was not to be. The day before, when he called her to ask, he found her half a world away in Osaka, promoting a new timesculpt, arranging for an exhibition. She could not get away.

  Her regret seemed sincere, but he could not tell her that there would be no more chances. She already knew he was leaving— he had been transferring his libraries up from the housecom all week, and a Project gofer had been by to retrieve Claudia and his other possessions. He was moving on, and so was Loi, and if it was not tidy, it was still going to be all right, in time.

  Just as it was somehow right that he had ended up coming to the ridge alone.

  Overhead, clouds like black lace curled down to form a dome. The house was little more than ashes, and the ashes were already dotted with green fronds. Christopher moved slowly across the charred foundation, marking where each room had been, toeing the ashes here and there but finding nothing he recognized, much less anything he wanted. Hands buried in his pockets, he wandered a short way into the woods, drawing in the familiar scents, looking skyward into the crown and watching the firs dance their slow dance in the wind, listening to the delicate sound dead needles made falling to the soft carpet of the forest floor.

  Then it was time to do what he had come there to do.

  The grave marker had been made on Takara, formed of the compacted lunar soil used as satland shielding, etched with energy captured from the Sun. In silence, Christopher carried the heavy tablet from the screamer and placed it in the wet ashes above his father’s tomb.

  JEREMIAH MCCUTCHEON, it said.

  Non Omnis Moriar.

  “Good-bye,” said Christopher. And as the rain began and his tears ran, Loi, his father and the verdant hills all released him with their blessing.

  UAG STOP

  Caravan to Tau Ceti

  For one day short of five weeks, Memphis nursed its wounds, real and feigned, in a polar orbit high enough to shrink the blue-white globe below almost to the size of a memory.

  Inside, training continued as time and space allowed, with impromptu classes held at all hours, all over the ship. With the manifest at 218 over the design maximum of 12,000, staff and citizenry both faced relentless settling-in pains, as though the ship were a shoe and a half size too small. But, in an unfolding miracle, each day Memphis seemed to grow larger, as its inhabitants learned where elbows rubbed and how best to use the spaces that they had.

  While the techs and mechs tuned the ship’s systems, the counselors tried to tune its community. Nearly two hundred Selection mistakes were quietly corrected before the sailing day arrived, each case reviewed by Sasaki before the offenders were sent down to Takara for holding. A hundred more went out on their own through the door that Sasaki held open for them to the very last.

  But at last the ship was ready, and the door irrevocably closed. There was no announcement—Memphis was still officially disabled, departure indefinitely postponed—and yet somehow there were anticipations in the ether. On the day that Memphis sailed, 56,000 massed in London at a Muslim prayer rally aimed at pulling the starship back down from the sky. In the hour Memphis sailed, a judge in Delaware granted an injunction barring the starship from leaving and ordering Allied to show that the son of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy of Wilmington, missing now for nearly two months, was not aboard.

  But neither the power of prayer nor the power of law would be enough to stay the captain’s will or s
till the starship’s drives. And so, in the minutes before Memphis sailed, two friends spoke one last time across a void wider in space than in spirit.

  “I’ve already written my essay for tomorrow’s History Today,” said Thomas Tidwell from his house in Halfwhistle. “Do you want to hear how it begins? ‘The starship Ur left Earth in the sunlight, to children’s cheers and the sound of summer bands. The starship Memphis stole away in the night, in the silence of a pricking conscience.’ Nicely turned, don’t you think?”

  “Well enough—but whose conscience?” said Sasaki from her suite on Memphis. “Mine is clear.”

  “I use you only as a bullfighter uses the cape, to draw them in, unsuspecting. I go on to make many profound observations, the meaning of which will likely escape nine in ten listeners.”

  Sasaki smiled. “I look forward to hearing it all tomorrow, from somewhere in the neighborhood of Jupiter.”

  “That will be a good distance to listen from, I expect,” said Tidwell. “Have you told Governor James on Ur?”

  “I plan to put up a dispatch when we cross out of the solar system.”

  “Good,” said Tidwell. “Perhaps then they won’t feel so alone. Perhaps it will help them take some courage and pride in what they’ve embarked on.”

  “Perhaps. But I intend to concern myself only with Memphis,” said Sasaki. “Thomas, Captain Powell is calling me to the bridge.”

  “Never let your people forget that they are messengers as well as travelers.”

  “I will try. I trust you have no regrets, Thomas.”

  Tidwell shook his head. “I no more regret refusing your offer and staying than you regret leaving. And I am curious to see if knowledge of the prophecy of our genes will allow us to defy them.”

  “I will wish you the best in that,” Sasaki said. “Thank you for your service, Thomas.”

  “Thank me? I should rather thank you. I was privileged to stand in the shadows beside you while you drew to yourself all the forces of a moment in time,” Tidwell said. “Everyone over the age of five in 2083 remembers where they were, what they were doing when Ur sailed. Everyone over the age of five today will remember as vividly where they were when they heard that Memphis had skipped away. And you, Hiroko Sasaki, will go down in history as one of the great criminals of all time.”