The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Dryke shook his head. “It’s being done.”

  There was confusion in the outer room. The monitor at hand still showed Sasaki’s face, but Minor was on his feet and demanding explanations for something he had heard through his earpiece.

  “Are we on or off? Off? How—then give it to me here, goddammit, so I can see what’s going on.”

  The image of a gentle-eyed bearded man replaced Sasaki’s puzzled expression on the monitor.

  “Sound,” barked Minor. “I want sound.”

  “—it is arrogance, arrogance in the service of imperialism, which forgives such plundering,” the man was saying. “They want, and so they take. They call their wants needs and justify their greed with necessity—”

  “Jammed? From where? Are you sure this isn’t their doing?” Minor demanded. “No—who? Are you sure?” He stared at the monitor. “Jesus,” he said, turning to his crew. “Let’s go back live.”

  “Nothing’s getting through,” the engineer protested.

  “Do it,” Minor snarled.

  “—what do they want? More, always more. For those who are empty inside, there is no such word as enough. Never enough power, never enough wealth—”

  The engineer shrugged. “On three. But you’re talking to yourself. Three—two—one—”

  Minor looked into the lens. “Jeremiah? Jeremiah, this is Julian Minor of Newstime. Can you hear me?”

  “—never enough to satisfy the unsatisfiable need.” Then he paused. “Yes, Julian,” he said. “I can hear you.”

  “You’re Jeremiah, leader of the Homeworld?”

  “I am Jeremiah,” said the pirate.

  “Would you answer a few questions?”

  The bearded man nodded. “Ask your questions.”

  “Some have called you the John Muir of the Earth. You use an Old Testament prophet’s name—a reluctant prophet with a flair for theater and an uncompromising message of danger and destruction. Do you see yourself as an oracle for the twenty-first century—”

  “I am not important. Ask another question.”

  Minor blinked in surprise. “Very well. Jeremiah, why do you oppose the Diaspora?”

  “It is those who support it, not those who oppose it, who must explain themselves,” said Jeremiah. “Ask Hiroko Sasaki to explain. Explain by what right you squander your inheritance, the Earth. Explain what you have bought at such a dear price. The choking summers. The burning forests. The rising oceans. The killing rays of the Sun. You have trampled the Earth underfoot in your headlong rush to the stars.”

  Sasaki held her head high as she answered. “We are all collaborators in that crime. Not Hiroko Sasaki alone. Not Allied Transcon. But I, and you, Jeremiah, and you, Julian Minor, and each of those listening, and ten generations dead and departed. The Amazon forest was burning, the river poisoned by mercury, long before Allied began to build at Prainha. The Earth was warming, the ozone vanishing, when starships were only engineers’ dreams.”

  The Starlink technician was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not going through.”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t want an answer,” Sasaki said quitely. “He only wants an audience.”

  “Jeremiah, this is Julian Minor again. I still have Director Sasaki here, on camera just as I am. Are you stopping her answers from being heard? Are you afraid of what she might say?”

  “Hiroko Sasaki is programmed with lies,” said Jeremiah. “She is abducting ten thousand of our brightest and best to send on a modern Children’s Crusade. What can she say that we can believe?”

  Minor looked to Sasaki. “What about that, Director? Have you taken a look at what the effects of giving up that many people of that quality might be? From a human resources standpoint, it seems that Jeremiah has a reasonable case.”

  “Jeremiah controls the airwaves. What point is there in answering?”

  “We’re recording here,” Minor said. “If we have to, we’ll put it together and rebroadcast it later. Director Sasaki, one way or another, I promise you that your answers will be heard.”

  She frowned, looked to the floor as she marshaled her thoughts, then up at the camera. “The pioneers are a select group of very special people,” she said. “They have to be, to face and triumph over the challenges ahead. But they’ve chosen this for themselves, earned it for themselves. No one is being abducted. Thousands more would join them if there was only room.

  “Even so, Memphis won’t be leaving the Earth poorer. The Diaspora Project has been the single greatest stimulus to education and self-development since the invention of the computer. It’s motivated people of three generations across every continent to say, ‘I want to contribute,’ and work to better themselves. Most of those people, and all of that human capital, will remain here.”

  Minor turned back to his camera. “Jeremiah, you can’t dispute the fact that millions worldwide bought options for the Diaspora Project. The pioneers are volunteers, the lucky few. Why not let them go? Why is it important to you to stop them?”

  “It is important to all of us,” Jeremiah said. “We need what they represent. We need their will and energy here. There is so much work left to do, so much damage to repair. We need to focus on stewardship, not starships. Otherwise this endless expansionism will exhaust us and leave us empty. We have a choice between living in the Sun and dying in the dark. We must raise our voices. We must reclaim the choice from the corporations and their collaborators. It is our future.”

  “Director Sasaki—” Minor began.

  “Gone,” said the Skylink operator, shaking his head. “Nothing up or down.”

  Minor looked helplessly at Sasaki. “Director, believe me when I say that we had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “I do believe you,” she said, rising.

  “I can give you a chance to make a closing statement.”

  “Thank you. It’s not necessary,” Sasaki said.

  “You’re going to give him the last word? This story’s going to be in the A queue for the rest of the week.”

  She turned and met his perplexed look with a gentle smile.

  “My mission is not to win converts. My mandate is to build starships.”

  “Mandate?”

  “Have you ever tried to push a string, Mr. Minor?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

  “Do you think that the Diaspora Project is something that was created from the top down?” she asked chidingly. “This is not something that we are doing to the Earth. This is something I do for the Earth. Those who can, already understand. Those who do not, never will.”

  When Sasaki rejoined Dryke and Donovan in the inner office, the latter greeted her with a disapproving look.

  “I should have been told,” Donovan grumped. “The board should have been told.”

  “Told what, Mr. Donovan?” All sixteen cells of the display were occupied, and she began to scan them.

  “Listen, I’m not an idiot. You set up this interview to sucker Jeremiah. Mikhail here spent the whole time itching and fidgeting like he was waiting for the main act to go on stage.”

  She glanced at Dryke, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Jeremiah is his own master.”

  “Bullshit. You were laying for him. You used the Singapore business as cover for changing your colors. The only thing I can’t figure is what you got from doing it.”

  “I appreciate your help in preparing for the interview, Mr. Donovan,” Sasaki said, gliding toward the display. “Please thank the board for making you available. You can relay to them that I do not expect to be granting any further interviews in the near future.”

  Donovan frowned. “Yeah,” he said as he stumped out. “I’ll tell them.”

  As the door was closed behind Donovan, Sasaki asked for Privacy One. “Well, Mikhail?” she asked. “How did we do?”

  Dryke pulled the plug from his ear and broke into a smile. “We have a piece of him,” he said. “A good piece.”

  “Tell
me.”

  “The Jeremiah image was synthesized with a Palette HI broadcast animator. Images, I mean. There were three different ones.”

  “Three!”

  “An equal-opportunity air pirate. He blanketed Europe and North Africa with a vaguely Mediterranean synth through SIRIO, fed the Far East with an Oriental bounced up through AUSSAT, and gave us the mountain man through Hiwire.”

  “All things to all people,” Sasaki said wryly.

  Dryke continued, “The video lab says that if all three had the same root image, they may be able to correlate them and back-form a fair picture of the real Jeremiah.”

  “Is that all we have—a hope?”

  “No,” Dryke said. “More than that. You know, you can route a call to your neighbor around the world if you know how, and by ten thousand different routes if you want to be creative. Jeremiah knows how, and he was creative. All three images were scatter-routed to the uplinks in short bursts—too short to track back. Jeremiah used one hundred and eighty routes—good for three minutes. But thanks to Mr. Minor, he stayed on for seven. And with a second and a third look, we were able to map six of his routes back to a common entry node.”

  “Which is—”

  Dryke looked up at cell 4, which contained a map of North America. “Monterrey, Mexico.”

  “Monterrey! Is that his base?”

  “Almost certainly not,” Dryke said, shaking his head. “He’s not that foolish. But it makes the odds very good that his base is in the Americas. He needs land-line access to the node. Jeremiah’s a neighbor, Hiroko.”

  “Or an insider?”

  “Perhaps,” Dryke said. “Can’t rule it out.”

  Sasaki crossed her arms and nodded. “This is very heartening, Mr. Dryke. I can see progress at last. I am comforted that I did not endure Mr. Minor’s questions and Mr. Donovan’s molding in vain.”

  “I’m not finished,” Dryke said. “There’s one piece more. The best piece.”

  “Oh?”

  “We always thought that Jeremiah’s voice was synthesized. Nothing exotic to it,” Dryke said. “But there’s one kind of solution for a canned track like we’ve seen before, and another for a live exchange like we just had.”

  “The difference is important?”

  “Very. For live work, the easy way is to give an AI translator—maybe an IBM Traveler—a cross-file of another voice, just like you’d give it a cross-file for French, say, and let it do the substitutions on the fly. But something interesting happens when you throw a word at a translator that it can’t find in the file. It passes that word through unchanged.”

  Sasaki looked suddenly hopeful. “Did that happen?”

  “Yes. With Julian’s name. Your name. And ‘starships,’ near the end,” said Dryke. “All different from the rest. All in Jeremiah’s own voice.”

  “Can you do anything with so little?” Sasaki asked. “A few syllables—”

  “It’s as good as a fingerprint. It’s enough to do a cross-match search in the Memphis hyper. Enough to set up a monitoring program on the corporate com net.” Dryke smiled, a smile full of threat. “You know, you can’t hardly work for Allied without saying your name or ‘starship’ now and again. If Jeremiah is an insider, we’ll find him very soon.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “A little longer. But not much longer. We’re coming up behind him in the dark. One more gag and we’ll have him.”

  “What will it take this time?”

  Dryke thought for a moment. “A sacrifice.”

  CHAPTER 14

  —ACA—

  “I fight against myself…”

  It wasn’t working.

  “Why do you want to go on Memphis?” Thomas Tidwell would ask the pioneer in the facing chair.

  And more often than not, the person he was interviewing would freeze, as though seized by the sudden fear that the fix was not yet in, that somehow they could still lose what they thought they had gained. Anxious. Nervous. Defensive. It didn’t matter if it was the first question or the last, whetfler he was friendly or formal, whether it was Tokyo or Munich or Houston.

  “This is not a test of any sort,” he would assure them. “Nothing you say to me can affect your standing in the Project.”

  And they never quite believed him.

  “My name is Thomas Tidwell. I am supervising the definitive history of the Diaspora Project, including the personal histories of every pioneer. We need to understand what kind of people took up this challenge, what they wanted, what they hoped.”

  That helped a little, except that it tended to elicit the kind of answers he had found in the file of application essays—rambling anecdotes with the flavor of personal myth, inadequate and unconvincing except to the mythmaker. Why had they chosen to exile themselves from the only world they’d ever known? The answers remained buried in their individual psychologies.

  A fifty-two-year-old American named Peg: “My great-grandfather was a mission specialist for NASA, flying the Shuttle back when it was all new. Joe Allen. He wrote a book about it—I read my mother’s copy when I was ten. But I was never much interested in space until the Project came along. It was all about as exciting to me as brushing your teeth. But this is different. This is like it was when my great-grandfather wore the blues.”

  Tidwell blinked, and the face changed.

  A handsome, earnest young Tanzanian named Zakayo: “When I was twenty, I climbed to the Kibo summit of Kilimanjaro with an expedition of Australians. I thought I had done a great thing until night came and the stars came out to show me I had not climbed high enough.”

  Tidwell blinked again, and the room changed. Munich, not Houston. A blink. Tokyo, not Munich.

  Realwadee, a Malay Thai woman, barely a woman at nineteen: “My option was a gift from King Adulyadej on my admission to Ramkhamhaeng University. My selection honors my father, my family, and my sovereign lord. Can I do other than go?”

  If he questioned them further, probed for the reasons and emotions underlying the words, he lost whatever measure of trust and goodwill he had managed to manufacture. Either they were telling him what they believed was the truth, and resented his questions as a slight on their honor, or they were telling him what they believed they must, and retreated before his questions to protect their fictions.

  It was not working, and Tidwell was frustrated. The immaculate synthesis of a lifetime’s work had been smashed that afternoon in Sasaki’s office, and he had been unable to reconstruct it.

  He remained unwilling to revise it. Tidwell’s private briefings with Selection’s geneticists and counselors, arranged by Oker, had left him unsatisfied. It was too much like going to church with True Believers. And Tidwell did not believe.

  Could not believe. He was the silent observer, the fair witness, the impartial analyst. He could not embrace anyone’s passion. He was beyond or above or one step removed from passion, from this particular passion. When the great ship sailed, he would stand on the dock and wave good-bye without the smallest pang of regret.

  But Tidwell could not suffer the thought of waving good-bye with the root question still unresolved. So when Oker’s geneticists were finished with him, Tidwell had launched himself on a globe-spanning quest for answers. In the month since his visit to Prainha, Tidwell had spent all but four days away from Halfwhistle, continent-hopping like a tourist on a seventeen-city holiday.

  After more than two years of reclusion, it was too much too fast. By the time he reached Tokyo to interview a selection of pioneers being processed through that center, Tidwell was sick of travel, of strange beds and sleeping poorly, of fighting a balky biological clock. His health was faltering, and with it his concentration.

  At the end of the Tokyo sessions, Tidwell retreated to Half-whistle, his thoughts in disarray. In his garden he pruned away neglect and worried over faltering shrubs and flowers. In his journal he wrote:

  I fight against myself not to cast out this unwelcome intruder before he speaks another
word in my ear. His voice is the voice of the banished—Lamarck and Baer, Spencer and Miller, Crick and Corning. There is only one history of the world. It begins with the rejection of mystery, with penetrating the illusion of purpose. The notion of purpose is meaningful only in the context of individual lives. Beyond that there is a synergy of chance and fate and individual purpose which is ultimately stochastic.

  Nothing is as it was meant to be. Everything is as it happened to be. We flatter ourselves with notions of progress. But progress is merely opportunism seen in hindsight. We salve our burning conscience with visions of Gaea, God become goddess become cybernetic superorganism. But Gaea is merely wish fulfillment, the newest clothes for an old craving. We await the return of the greater power to enforce the greater good, to save us from our selfishness.

  I have already written this story. This is the story of the power of a dream. Of that which is quintessentially human—the tug of curiosity, the spur of ambition, the heat of passion, the drive of hubris.

  Now Sasaki seduces me with a new delusion embracing an old and discredited idea. Where and when did purpose arise in a world of chance? At the beginning. Before the beginning. Purpose preexisted history. Purpose preordained history. All sins are justified by the imperative command. All crimes are forgiven in the name of necessity.

  This ground bears the footprints of lost souls. I must walk carefully.

  The houses in the Nassau Bay residential complex were aging, inefficient frame structures, survivors from an earlier century’s winding-street waterfront suburbia. Once a satellite community to the Johnson Space Center, Nassau Bay was now inside the fences, absorbed into Allied’s Houston facility as a sort of decentralized dormitory.

  Three score of the better houses were being used as residences by center staff, including the center director and several other Building 1 types. Two of the largest houses, one overlooking narrow Nassau Bay, the other on little Lake Nassau (now a captive lagoon) had been converted into pilots’ hostels. And in the years between Ur and Memphis, several of the empty structures on Nassau Bay’s quiet streets had been used as illicit lovers’ rendezvous, giving the complex its nickname of “Noonerville.”