The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The Quiet Pools

  Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The diaspora has begun: the spending of Earth’s wealth to send STL generation ships to distant stars. Starstruck volunteers queue up hoping to be selected for one of the five ships, but others condemn this dispersal of materials and people needed to help Earth recover from ecological damage. Jeremiah “for the Homeworld” leads the rebels with acts of sabotage calculated to slow the exodus and turn world opinion against it. Meanwhile, Thomas Tidwell, official historian of the Diaspora Project, is tracking down a dark secret that hides the true reason for the migration. Kube-McDowell ( Enigma ) presents the world of 2095 through the two viewpoints of Mikhail Dryke, a security agent trying to track down Jeremiah, and Christopher McCutcheon, a project worker and folk singer who gets caught in the gears. The society is believable, socially and technically, the writing keeps a steady pace, building toward the climax, and the secret proves to be quite imaginative.

  Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1991.

  The Quiet Pools

  by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

  CHAPTER 1

  —GAU—

  “This is Jeremiah…”

  From the elevated guard station at the main entrance to Allied Transcon’s Houston center, a young corpsec monitored the truck trundling up Galveston Road toward NASA Boulevard. With his televiewer, he could see that the rider cabin of the robot tractor was empty. The dull silver tank trailer bore the familiar logo of Shell Chemical.

  “Traffic on the board,” his watch partner said suddenly as the truck crossed the security threshold. His watch partner was an artificial intelligence personality named Isaac, one of eight personalities making up the center’s Sentinel system.

  “I’ve got it,” said the corpsec. A squeeze on the grip of the televiewer brought the reply to the station’s radioed interrogative into the finder in pale yellow lettering. “ID’s okay. Shellchem local hauler, running empty.”

  “I have confirmation from the National Vehicle Registry,” Isaac said. “The registry is valid and current.”

  “Okay.” The corpsec idly continued to track the tanker in the glass, trying to read the graffiti scrawled on its flanks. In the course of their four-hour shift, more than a hundred wheeled cargo vehicles would slide by on the old surface road, shuttling between Galveston and Houston. Except for the occasional burst of imagination or artistry in the graffiti, they were hardly worth notice.

  Besides, ground traffic was the least of Corporate Security’s concerns. It was far more likely that someone seeking to penetrate Allied Transcon would try to hop the triple fence in a flyer; far more likely that someone trying to destroy it would lob a screamer from the forest of scrapers downtown, or from a boat bobbing somewhere on the poisoned waters of Galveston Bay.

  And even those possibilities were hard to take very seriously at all—right up to the moment the Shellchem tanker suddenly veered right and roared up the ramp onto NASA Drive, accelerating all the way. At the top of the ramp, the tanker swept an unsuspecting two-seat flyer aside and hurtled down the entrance drive toward the barbican.

  “Jesus,” the corpsec said unbelievingly. “It’s going to crash the gate.”

  There was little else for him to do, for the silicon reflexes of Sentinel had already taken over. In less than a microsecond, the AIP declared the tanker a threat, activated the gate defenses, and transmitted an alert to corpsec throughout the grounds.

  “Now sending kill-Q,” said Isaac.

  A half dozen flyers were queued up in the accumulation lane outside the barbican’s tunnels. They settled to the ground as one as Sentinel abruptly took command of their pilot systems. But the tanker kept coming, its systems refusing the insistent commands. In seconds the tanker would smash into the stalled flyers and their human occupants.

  “It’s stall-shielded,” the corpsec realized.

  Sentinel had already drawn the same conclusion and made the only possible decision. With almost tangible reluctance, Sentinel exercised what control it had, and the flyers suddenly rose up and scattered like a flock of birds. That ended the risk to life. It also cleared the way to the gate.

  “Fire authority,” snapped the corpsec. “Blow it off the bridge.”

  “Road sensors show the tanker is fully loaded. There’s no way to know what’s in it,” the construct said. “Sorry.”

  The corpsec swallowed hard. “Jesus, I hope they built this tower good—”

  At the end of the bridge, spikes rising from the roadbed shredded the tanker’s tires, but could not halt it. The tanker reached the final concrete apron outside the twin tunnels of the barbican, now sealed by heavy doors, and abruptly slewed into a sideways skid. Moments later it slammed into the wall of steel and stone.

  The corpsec grabbed for a handhold as the tower shuddered and swayed. But there was no explosion, no alarming creaking and rending. The corpsec looked toward Isaac’s room scanner with a look of relief and drew a deep breath to clear the poison of fear from his lungs.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Isaac said.

  “No,” said the corpsec, going to the window. Peering down at the barbican, he saw the tanker crushed sideways against the entrance gates, bleeding a yellow-brown soup from its belly. The fast-running pool of liquid had already reached the east edge of the apron and begun to spread across the hard earth and brown grass.

  Grabbing his viewer, the corpsec trained it on the spill. Wraithlike white wisps played in the air above its surface. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

  “The HazMat team has been notified.”

  “Should I evacuate?”

  “No,” was the answer. “Remain at your station. You’ll be given further instructions when HazMat evaluates the situation.”

  The corpsec frowned. “I’m not settling for that,” he said. “Let me listen to E-l.”

  Emergency channel 1 came on the speaker just in time for the corpsec to hear the chatter of excited voices fade under a storm of static and then vanish beneath the clean white hum of a pirate jammer. Then a voice spoke, a solemn, sonorous male voice that commanded their attention and tugged somehow at the emotional chord labeled father.

  “This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homework!…”

  “Shit.”

  “This is an unauthorized transmission,” Isaac said.

  “Shut up, Isaac,” the corpsec said irritably. “I want to hear what they’ve done to us.”

  As always, Homeworld had worked hard to make certain that the corpsec, Allied Transcon management, and as many of Earth’s eight billion as possible heard.

  This is what they heard:

  “This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homeworld.

  “From the first, I have been a student of history. The truth of the present can be found in the past, if you seek it. Enemies hide their evils in the mists of the past, if you allow it. The winner is the player with the longest memory.

  “For more than a hundred years, the bandits of Allied Transcon have insulted the Earth, our gentle mother. The trail of Gaea’s pain begins with Allied Transcon’s sorry heritage, with names to which such shame attached that those names were abandoned and hidden.

  “We have not forgotten. Rockwell built weapons of war, abetting the mindless devastation of fragile ecologies. We have not forgotten. Exxon bled the earth of its precious stores and poisoned the waters and the air with chemical wastes. We have not forgotten. Mitsubishi supplied the tools to turn once-beautiful Japan into a mechanized warren and to ravage the grand tropical forests of Indonesia and the Philippines.

  “The bastard of the mating of these soulless parasites worships at the altar of the same shallow profit principle. I look on your works and weep. Thirty square miles o
f the Amazon Basin transformed from lush jungle to dead, sterile pavement. A dozen gigawatt power plants generating million-year poisons. An endless parade of LSD freighters ripping through the atmosphere, carrying away the riches of the Earth.

  “And the worst insult of all, that all this is done only so that we might reach out for more worlds to despoil.

  “Today, we have returned the insult. We returned to Allied Transcon a tiny fraction of the poisons it creates in a single day— a few seconds of death and disease. At six-fifty this morning, a tank truck emptied five thousand gallons of life-hating industrial pollutants at the main entrance to Allied Transcon’s American headquarters in Houston. We have rubbed their noses in their corporate excrement.

  “We have heard it said, even by those who agree with our goals, that we have committed a crime, and become like our enemies. We accept this judgment, with one distinction.

  “Allied Transcon’s crimes are crimes against Nature. They harm the body and spirit of Gaea, immanent in the fabric of life. Our crimes are crimes for Nature. We harm only those who bring harm to our common home. We steal their wealth. We destroy their tools. We stand against them, and for the silent Earth.

  “This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homeworld.”

  The jammer in the Gulf ran for just over six minutes, pumping two and a half repetitions of Jeremiah’s announcement out over E-l, G-l, and three Gulf State commercial bands before its power cells died. Float jammers in the South Atlantic off Brazil and the Mediterranean west of Sicily delivered the same message to Allied Transcon’s primary launch center at Prainha and the European administrative center in Munich, respectively. Off-planet, Aurora Sanctuary’s official broadcaster carried the announcement for the benefit of the sixteen satlands, following it with a two-hour debate on environmental activism.

  There were failures: A relay jammer located across the street from Allied’s Tokyo facility was picked up in a security sweep twenty minutes before the tanker reached NASA Drive. And a reliable old Homeworld trick finally played out its string: The remora on the main feed for ComNet 3 cut in on schedule, replacing the broadcast of “Personal Combat” with Homeworld’s earth-globe logo and Jeremiah’s voice. But a ready controller blacked the net before more than a few words could go out.

  A new trick, however, worked very well indeed. A routine stack upload into the Direct Information Access Network for North America suddenly showed itself to be a Trojan horse, commandeering nearly half of DIANNA’s data channels and piping Jeremiah’s announcement out through the terminals of more than six million surprised users.

  And the ComNet blackout and DIANNA incursion together ensured the kind of attention Homeworld craved: a minute on the Current News stack, and a moment in the lives and thoughts of uncountable millions of Earth’s children.

  On balance, Jeremiah was pleased.

  Christopher McCutcheon rose early, escaping from a restless and unrewarding sleep, hoping to escape from encountering either of his wives. He padded softly through the big house on Denham Street as though a trespasser. Which, in truth, was how he felt that Monday, even though he not only lived there but held four-tenths of the fractional mortgage.

  The door to Loi’s bedroom was still closed, which helped. It closed out the inevitable sounds of morning—running water and the muted voice of the housecom, the gurgle and hiss of the kitchen appliances. And it screened Christopher from the sight of Loi and Jessie together, though not from the memory of the sight of them last night.

  He had stood in that doorway a long time, hammered by the tangled limbs, murmuring voices, and the raw fragrance of sex. The rumpled sheets, tousled hair, and skin-glisten of sweat had told him that what was happening was not a beginning but an encore. He had been in Freeport since midday; they had had more than enough time.

  Stunned, silent, Christopher had watched Loi’s experienced hands exploring Jessie’s sleek secrets, her mouth ravening Jessie’s throat and breasts. He watched with pain, not pleasure, feeling as though he should be part of what was happening before his eyes, and yet knowing that he was not welcome. Waiting to be noticed, and yet knowing that to wait one moment longer was to invite more misery.

  And then he had been noticed, Loi catching sight of him as she turned her lithe body on the bed, opening herself to Jessie’s touch. Her eyes fixed on him challengingly, reproachfully.

  He did not withdraw. He could not move.

  “Chris is back, Jessie,” she had said finally. Her voice was empty of apology or embarrassment.

  Jessie had twisted her body toward where he stood, showed a mischievous smile. “Hi, Chris.”

  Loi gave him no chance to read a greeting as an invitation. “Chris, would you close the door for us? I think Mobius must have pushed it open,” she had said, naming the family’s elder cat. “Oh, and you have some mail on the com.”

  There was nothing in her words that he had not already foreseen, and yet he had felt sudden fury at being sent away. He remembered yanking the door shut with all the force he could muster, rattling the framed pictures hanging in the hall. And then fleeing to his room at the opposite end of the upstairs hall, expecting his distress to lure one or both of them to follow.

  But neither did. He lay in the dark fighting to close out the sounds of Jessie and Loi’s pleasure—never sure if he was hearing or imagining them—and bleeding from a wound he had thought had closed over forever.

  A miserable moment. A miserable night. And in both, more than enough reasons to avoid facing them that morning.

  Christopher satisfied himself with a speedshower and a muffin from the warmer, then slipped quickly into his gray two-piece. When he was ready to leave, the house was still silent, Loi and Jessie presumably still cocooned in Loi’s bed. But he felt too acutely that he was running away, and in rebellion against the feeling stopped in the family room to retrieve his mail.

  He was glad he had. There were five messages for him on the housecom, the last a brief notice from Allied informing him that the main entrance was temporarily closed, and asking that pools and dropoffs use the north entrance and that everyone else ride the tramline to work. Riding the tram was an annoyance, but less of one than reaching the main gate in his flyer and being turned away.

  The price of his rebellion was high, however. By the time he shut down the display, there were footsteps on the balcony behind him. He turned to see Loi descending the stairs in her robe, her eyes sleepy, her short blond hair robbed of its usual sculpted look by her pillow. It was only in the morning that Loi’s true age showed. On the lee side of breakfast and her morning rituals, Loi usually passed for ten years fewer than her forty-six.

  “Good morning, sweet,” she said. “I almost missed you.”

  “I have to leave,” he said defensively. “I’m riding the tram.”

  “You have time for a hug, don’t you?” But he was stiff in her embrace, and she drew back to study his face. “I wanted to see if you were all right this morning. I guess that tells me.”

  “You might have thought about it last night.”

  “Chris dear, you have no right to be angry with me, or with Jessie.”

  “You shut me out,” he said sharply.

  “As you do when you and Jessie take time together, as we do to Jessie at other times. Is there any difference?”

  He frowned sulkily. “I didn’t know you were interested.”

  “Jessie is a beautiful young woman, full of interesting energies,” Loi said. “How could you think I wouldn’t be attracted to her? And how could you not have noticed what’s been happening when the three of us are in bed together?”

  For a moment, Christopher was silent. “Look, I’ve got to leave.”

  “Not yet,” Loi said, grabbing his hand as he tried to turn away. “Yes, you met Jessie first. Yes, you were the one who suggested her as our third. But you don’t own her—or me, for that matter. I want a family in which we all share our lives and our selves, freely, without contracts, without artificial boundaries. I
thought you wanted that, too.”

  “I wasn’t expecting this,” he said angrily. “I didn’t think I’d have to fight her for your time. All I thought about on the way back from Freeport was coming home and making love with you. Except you were already busy.”

  “Did you think that being the only male in this trine made you the center?” Loi retorted. “We’re not going to work like this, Chris. Not with you reacting to our love with jealousy. If you can’t find a better place to be on your own, maybe you’d better make an appointment with Arty.”

  “I’ve got to leave,” he said firmly, pulling away.

  This time she let him go. “We’ll talk tonight, then,” she said, “all three of us.”

  “I’m not interested in a conversation on the subject of How Foolish Chris Is Being,” he said, his back to her. “Thank you very much, but no thanks.”

  She came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist, cuddling close and resting her head on his back. “I had in mind a conversation on how we can all help each other with the hard parts,” she said softly.

  Christopher shrugged out of her embrace. “It still adds up to Let’s Help Chris Adjust,” he said bitterly, pausing at the door. “And I’m just not sure that I’m the one who’s wrong.”

  Mikhail Dryke hated traveling almost as much as he hated being trapped for days on end in his office suite in the green-glassed administrative warren at Prainha. The former was pure impatience; the latter, the natural resistance of a hands-on field investigator who had been promoted too many times.

  The last promotion had left Dryke chief security officer, Diaspora Project, Allied Transcon. His first accomplishment in the new post had been to locate and hijack a triumvirate of lieutenants who could handle the administrative end without him. His second had been to acclimate the Diaspora Project Director, Hiroko Sasaki, to the idea that he would be absent from Prainha more than he would be present.