The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  But there were no empty houses now, and the streets were again full of life. Once again, Nassau Bay belonged to the pioneers—one to a bedroom, two, three, or four to a house. There were few amenities, but diligent—if minimal—maintenance had kept the complex clean and livable. And the energy and joyful camaraderie of its occupants turned Nassau Bay into a community.

  “It’s like a college campus the weekend before fall classes begin,” Daniel Keith observed as he walked slowly down a Nassau Bay sidewalk with Thomas Tidwell. “Everyone’s starting with a clean slate. Everyone’s ready to meet and make new friends. It’s like they get here and say, ‘I know you.’ The bonding rate is incredible. The sociology team really has to scramble to keep on top of it.”

  That was what had brought Tidwell there: the promise of a more intimate glimpse into the mind and heart of the Memphis pioneers. It was old-fashioned, dirty-fingernails primary research, contemporary field anthropology of a sort that Tidwell had not resorted to in thirty years.

  “We’ve only got about four hundred pioneers in the center at the moment,” Keith said as he unlocked the door to a little house, “so we’ve still got some room. Your housemates are all ship’s staff. They’ve got a very intensive training schedule—don’t expect to see them from six to six most days.”

  The house was a few degrees cooler than the sultry air outside. “I understand,” Tidwell said, setting his small bag on the threadbare couch. “But I won’t be here if they aren’t. I intend to wait with them at the shuttle stops, sit with them in the cafeteria, huddle with them in whatever private spaces they’ve chosen. After all, I am Thomas Grimes, communications auxiliary—a correspondent for the ship’s log.” He smiled. “A flack for the ship’s morale officer, more to the truth.”

  “I don’t know that you’re going to be able to hide who you are for long,” said Keith. “There are people here who know you, Dr. Tidwell.”

  Tidwell nodded. “Perhaps not. I don’t believe it will take long.”

  Shaking his head, Keith held out the key he had used to admit them. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but I have to say that I think you’re looking under the wrong rock, Dr. Tidwell. You won’t learn anything from these people. They don’t know, themselves.”

  Tidwell took the key. “That defies reason. How can they make such a monumental decision without knowing their own minds?”

  “Because it isn’t reason that drives them,” Keith said simply.

  “If so, then that will be the lesson I’ll take from here.”

  “Will you know it when you see it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not like them. You’ve lived a life of the mind. You have more respect for the power of thought than most of us do for the power of God. I’m not sure that you can credit a motive that you can’t understand. I don’t know if you can see it in them if you can’t see it in yourself.”

  Tidwell’s gaze narrowed into a rebuke. “I’m familiar with the dangers of egocentrism.”

  “A story?”

  “If you wish.”

  Keith folded his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “I suppose you know that this used to be the headquarters for NASA’s astronaut corps. For obvious reasons, we were interested in their astronaut selection procedures, and so we acquired their records. We found in looking at them that every time NASA announced openings, they got hundreds of applications from people who had to know that they had no chance to be picked, who didn’t begin to meet even the minimum requirements.”

  “Dreamers and optimists,” said Tidwell. “This is not surprising.”

  “Maybe not,” Keith said. “One of our genetic historians got ambitious and traced the descendants of twenty of those dreamers. Every one of them has at least one blood relative in our selection bank.”

  “Chance. Each must have dozens of relatives. And millions held selection options.”

  “She traced two control groups from the same era as well. The correlation there was less than five in twenty.”

  “Which does not rule out chance. Nor the influence of the family environment.”

  “Skeptics can always fall back on chance,” Keith said.

  “Is there something wrong with being a skeptic, with insisting on evidence and causality?”

  Keith sighed. “No. Dr. Tidwell, I’m not here to convince you of anything. You asked us to make these arrangements, and we did. I’ll be available if you have any problems or needs.”

  “You are frustrated with me.”

  He shrugged. “Not my place to be.”

  “But you are. Why?”

  “Because it’s so clear to me, and you have so much trouble seeing it.”

  “Exactly what is clear?”

  There were voices in the street, and Keith glanced over his shoulder in their direction. “That they don’t really know why they’re going,” he said quietly. “They only know that they want to.”

  “What persuades you of that, Mr. Keith?”

  Keith turned back and showed a faint smile. “Because I want to go, too, Dr. Tidwell. And I don’t really know why, either.”

  When Keith was gone, Tidwell granted himself license to explore the house. The salutary effect of the house’s enfeebled air-conditioning vanished the moment he started upstairs. The air there was stagnant and hothouse stuffy. Unless the nights were markedly cooler, sleeping would be a challenge.

  He found the empty bedroom and, in it, his trunk of clothing, delivered ahead by the Selection office. Leaving for later the task of unpacking it, Tidwell extended his license to entering the other, already occupied bedrooms—two up, one down.

  Tidwell did not see it as a violation of privacy. Most of the pioneers’ personal belongings—250 kilograms each—would be shipped directly from their homes up to Memphis through Prainha or Kasigau. He reasoned that what his housemates chose to bring with them while camping out in Houston might reveal something of their personality, and so was germane to his purpose there.

  Still, he was careful not to disturb anything that might betray his trespass, contenting himself with what he could see. He peeked in a closet, but not in a suitcase; at the objects arrayed on a wobbly-legged dresser, but not in its drawers.

  He took note of several travel and geography volumes in a file of chipdisks—perhaps someone trying to plan how to spend their last days on Earth? He startled at finding candles and Wiccan icons in the single ground-floor bedroom—surely more appropriate to a Homeworlder than a pioneer?

  All data were preliminary, all conclusions provisional. He would not judge them until he had met them.

  The back windows of the house looked out on turgid Cow Bayou and the tall double fence running along its far bank. The fences marked the south boundary of the center; when he stepped out onto the small patio deck, he could see the south gate tower and bridge half a kilometer upstream.

  He also saw something that surprised him. Scattered along the outer fence, all the way from the tower to where the bayou emptied into Clear Creek, were dozens of people standing in ones and twos and threes, almost like statues. The phrase “outside looking in” popped into Tidwell’s head.

  Starheads, Tidwell thought. Those must be starheads. Some of the groups closest to Tidwell noticed him and began shouting something unintelligible across the water. He raised a hand in acknowledgment and salute. Perhaps I should talk to some of them as well, go and stand with them for a day—

  They were still shouting, but try as he might he could not make out the words, any more than he could make out their faces. He waved one more time and turned to enter the house. As he did, he caught a reflection of sound off the metallic siding, a shrieking high-pitched voice.

  “Bastard,” was what he thought he heard, “bastard pig bastard—”

  His head whipped around and he stared, unbelieving. The three figures nearest to him, almost directly across the bayou, were contorted by the body language of hostility, jumping, fists raised. Others were hurrying along the fence to j
oin them. Someone somewhere was beating on the fence itself, a metallic rattle like clashing swords.

  From the direction of the gate tower came the muffled roar of a gasoline motor; moments later, tearing his gaze away from the enraged, now fifteen or twenty strong, Tidwell caught sight of a small boat racing bow-high toward the commotion. When he realized that the boat carried the Allied Transcon logo and the grim-looking men aboard it wore Security armor, Tidwell, still bewildered, fled back into the house.

  Shaken, Tidwell watched from behind the heavy drapes shrouding the window of the onetime dining room as the Security boat slowly circled and the gathering slowly dispersed. Tidwell wished for some sort of binoculars; it almost seemed as though those beyond the fence were celebrating as they scattered, finding some sort of victory in the episode.

  Fifteen minutes later, all was as it had been before Tidwell pulled back the sticky sliding door and stepped outside. The boat stopped circling and returned upstream. The watchers—not starheads, certainly, though Tidwell was at a loss for what to call them—took up their stations along the fence.

  And Tidwell retreated to his room, where he hastily recorded an account of the episode and then began to unpack his luggage. From time to time, he would peek out through the drapes to see if the watchers were still there. They always were, and Tidwell found himself grateful when the first of his housemates returned and he was no longer alone.

  Tidwell met them all that night. The travel books belonged to Evans, a tall, barrel-chested judge-arbitrator from Chicago. Genial as he was large, Evans plied Tidwell with questions as he swept through the house, scooping up what passed for a meal and changing into fresh clothing before vanishing out the front door a half hour later.

  By contrast, Colas, the young Canadian environmental engineer, had as little personality as his room had revealed. His angular face had deep worry lines worked into it, and when he excused himself to go upstairs and study, mumbling something about having to work out calibrations for six systems, Tidwell made no attempt to deflect him.

  Last to return was the most interesting of the three, the bodywork counselor, Malena Graham. Her airchair was as much of a surprise as the altar in her room had been. Her spirit seemed as light as her limbs were leaden.

  Together they scouted the prepacks in the freezer, and then they settled together at the steel kitchen table to pick their way through the edible parts of their meals.

  “We’ll eat better than this on board, I trust,” Tidwell said, eyeing his rubbery lasagna with suspicion.

  “Never enough cheese in one of those,” she said. “I should have warned you. The cafeteria’s lasagna is better. But if you really like lasagna, I ought to try to get you some of Mother Alicia’s. Two inches thick and three kilos to a pan. It takes her all day to make enough for the whole family.”

  “My wife enjoyed cooking,” Tidwell recalled. “Not Italian. Her specialty was sweets—poisonously rich desserts.” He smiled. “A weakness that crosses all cultures.”

  “Real sugar and I have a pact,” she said. “It doesn’t jump into my mouth and I don’t make it live on my thighs. Just because I can’t walk around in high heels doesn’t mean I can’t be shapely.”

  “You are a very attractive young lady.”

  She clucked unhappily. “ ‘Young lady’—those sound like words you use to keep someone in their place.”

  “Habit of speech,” Tidwell apologized. “I meant nothing by it. Except the compliment.”

  She smiled acceptingly. “I’m actually the youngest old woman you’ve ever met. I’m a crone at heart, waiting to grow into her role. I can hardly wait to be respected enough to be listened to.”

  “Do you have to look the part?”

  “Or get paid for it. People take advice much better if they’re paying for it.”

  “I must confess I’ve never been to a bodywork counselor,” Tidwell said.

  “I know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can tell by the way you police every motion. I don’t think you’re very comfortable in your body.”

  “It serves me passably well,” Tidwell said, then his face reddened with embarrassment. “Forgive me—I didn’t mean—”

  “That’s all right, Thomas. Everyone asks eventually, so I’ll save you from working up to it,” she said easily. “Did you know that about three in a million contract polio from their vaccinations? I’m one of them. Our family health worker is a nice man but a rotten diagnostician. He missed the early signs and then sent me to a chiropractor when he should have been feeding me virus-eaters.”

  Tidwell cocked his head and gazed at her appraisingly. “Are you truly not angry, or do you simply hide it well?”

  “What would angry get me?” she asked. “I’m not a cripple. I can dress myself in the morning, fuck in three of the four most popular positions, and swim a 1:20 hundred-meters. But don’t ask me to rumba. It’s just not in my personality.”

  A surprised laugh fought its way through Tidwell’s tightly drawn lips. “Well said.”

  “I didn’t scandalize you? How disappointing.”

  The irony of attempting to shock the author of A Summer in Eden made Tidwell smile. “I’m afraid I’m no longer very easy to scandalize. But feel free to try again sometime.”

  “Veteran reporter has seen it all.”

  “Something like that,” he said, recalling the afternoon’s events. “But sometimes I can still be surprised.” He gestured toward the drape-hidden doors. “There were people outside the fence today—”

  “Ah, you’ve discovered the vultures. They’re probably still there, in fact,” she said. “Don’t worry, the curtains are Kevlar weave, and anyway, Security says the vultures rarely have any weapons. Just don’t tempt them by wandering around out back.”

  “So I learned,” he said ruefully. “Malena, who are those people? Are they there every day?”

  Her face took on a serious cast for the first time that evening. “Every day since I came here.”

  “There must be a hundred of them.”

  She nodded. “Fifty, a hundred, five hundred some days. The faces keep changing, but the expressions are always the same. There’s anger for you.”

  “But who are they? Not starheads, surely.”

  “No. Not starheads,” she said, shaking her head. “The starheads come to the west gate. They get protection.”

  “Then what?”

  Instead of answering, she backed her chair away from the table, dimmed the lights, and crossed the room to peek out through parted curtains. “When I first moved in, I could feel them all the way over here,” she said. “I had to ward the house so I could sleep at night.”

  “Feel what?”

  “What they’re sending at us.” She straightened and let the curtains fall closed, then turned back to Tidwell. “Didn’t you feel it when you went outside? There’s two kinds of people over there, Thomas. Those that hate us for leaving—and those who hate us for leaving them behind.”

  CHAPTER 15

  —AAA—

  “… this unwelcome intruder…”

  There was almost nothing Christopher McCutcheon liked about coming to see Eric Meyfarth, R.T.

  Christopher hated the ritual of signing Loi’s complaint and being called by Meyfarth for confirmation. He hated scheduling the appointment and leaving work in midday. He hated the walled canyons of downtown Houston, the warren-towers of plex and chrome.

  He hated the office manager’s earnest cheeriness, and the tight mouths and guarded eyes of the other clients waiting with him in the twenty-sixth-floor lounge. No, not clients—patients. Patients that belonged in a back-street clinic, seeking treatment for some embarrassing disease, deathly afraid of being asked why they were there. That was how they behaved—no help to Christopher, fighting against the same feeling. Up went the walls, driving Christopher back behind his own.

  The little man in the pinstripe cap and white bristle-brush moustache, raccoon eyes furtively glancing ar
ound the room, retreating to the window when Christopher spoke to him. The woman in the short white skirt and the glittery cascade of string earrings, paging hopefully through a glamour magazine in search of one more secret. The child-faced woman in the blue flower-print dress, her toddler on a tether, a faraway look in her eyes until she was brought back to her boredom by the tug of her charge.

  Never give them your eyes. There must a school which teaches that as a survival skill, Christopher thought. When by chance eyes met there was no contact. They stood mask-to-mask for the instant of surprise, before turning politely away. It was as though they held to their masks more tightly for knowing that beyond the door, they would be expected to let them fall.

  So Christopher waited, unhappy and uncomfortable, for the part he hated the most.

  Not that he had any personal enmity for Meyfarth. Referred by their former arty in Oakland, Christopher and Loi had come to see Meyfarth for baselining in the first weeks after arriving in Houston. They had come back a second time a few months later to introduce Jessie.

  Neither session had been particularly demanding, and Christopher had come away with qualified good feelings. He would have preferred they sign with a woman, but the bearded and round-bellied relationship technologist had a calming presence and, it seemed, a genuine heart.

  But then, Christopher had expected to see him only for periodic checkups and the odd arbitration, not with a major family crisis blowing. That pushed ugly memories to the fore, memories of the long, angry sessions when his marriage to Donald and Kristen was collapsing. Whether it was their arty’s incompetence or his own intransigence, all he learned from that episode was that he resisted being dissected, and resented being made to feel a failure.

  And there was no way that he would be able to escape either experience in the sessions to come.

  With the unerring accuracy of a master archer, Meyfarth went straight for that discomfort in the first five minutes.