The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Meyfarth said slowly, “I think that’s a piece of something important, Christopher.”

  “Do you?” asked Christopher, hugging himself as he stood facing the trees. “I don’t. I don’t even know that it’s true. I have this habit of rewriting what I feel so it sounds more dramatic. And then when it comes out of my mouth it doesn’t touch me at all.”

  Gently, the arty said, “I don’t think this was one of those.”

  Christopher turned to face Meyfarth. “I don’t think it matters,” he said stiffly. “I don’t think it has anything to do with what I’m here to work on. Damn you, I told you once already I didn’t want to talk about my father. Can we get back to the main program, or are we finished?”

  There was a long moment of silence. He felt Meyfarth measuring him.

  “All right,” said the arty. “My apologies.”

  Christopher frowned and waved a hand dismissively. “Listen, I’m not stupid. I know I’m going to have to look at it sometime. But I don’t think I have enough banked just now that I can afford to make this the time. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Meyfarth said. “Can we talk about children?”

  “Okay,” Christopher said, returning to his seat. “I guess we have to.”

  “Loi has a son?”

  “Einar. He’s in San Francisco. Twenty years old.”

  “More like a brother, then.”

  “To me? I wouldn’t know. I never had the experience.”

  “But you knew Einar?”

  “I knew him. I didn’t like him, but I knew him.”

  “Oh?”

  “We had incompatible anatomies. He was an asshole.”

  Meyfaith’s laugh was easy and genuine.

  “Loi agrees,” Christopher added.

  “Enough of Einar, then,” Meyfarth said, smiling. “Tell me about the last child under ten you liked.”

  Christopher shook his head. “I don’t see many children. I’m not sure I like any of the ones I do see.”

  “No friends with adorable seven-year-old girls? All neighbors with brats?”

  “Our upstairs neighbor in San Francisco had a boy while we were living there,” said Christopher. “Cute, I suppose. Little odor factory, though. And they leak.”

  “That they do.”

  “Sometimes I see a two- or three-year-old toddling along with a parent and it’ll make me smile. But a little older and I don’t know how to talk to them. A little older than that and I don’t trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was one, remember?”

  “What kind of kid were you?”

  Christopher laughed, surprised. “You’d have to ask someone else. I was busy being the kid.”

  “You don’t have any notion?”

  Frowning, Christopher considered. “A pretty good one, I guess. I wasn’t much of a problem, wasn’t much in the way. I liked learning, liked my ed plan and my schools. I spent a lot of time in the woods.”

  “Tell me what kind of father you think you’d be.”

  A wry smile. “Not a very good one,” Christopher said. “I’m dividing myself too many ways already. I have an A job and my music and my family, and they all need more than I seem to be able to give them. If I divide myself four ways, I’ll have even less for everybody.” He shook his head. “I have too much growing up still to do. Look at why I’m here talking to you. Maybe someday. But I’m not ready now.”

  Meyfarth pursed his lips. “Christopher, the nastiest secret in life is that there’s never a time when you understand it all, never a time when it’s as easy as you were sure it was going to be. If that’s what you’re waiting for, you’ll never be ready.”

  Blinking, Christopher stared at Meyfarth blankly. “I’m only twenty-seven. Jessie’s twenty-five. We have lots of time.”

  “Every year you wait, you’ll find more reasons to say no. Why not have the child and just let Jessie worry about it?”

  “It’s not fair—”

  “I think if you ask Jessie, you’ll find out that would suit her just fine—”

  “No,” Christopher snapped. “You’re not listening. It’s not fair to the boy. If I have a son, I’m going to be there for him. I’m going to be part of his life, not a sidelight to it. I’m going to watch him grow and make sure he knows how much I love him. I’m not going to raise him by remote control, turn him over to some kind of secondhand mom-for-hire.”

  “Like your father did with you?” Meyfarth asked gently.

  There was a moment of soft-eyed surprise, a glimmer of hurt, a tinge of puzzlement, and then Christopher’s face closed down hard. “Damn you, I told you I didn’t want to talk about my father,” he shouted, jumping to his feet and waving clenched fists. “I told you and you kept pushing me back there. My father’s one person, and I’m another. And what I do has to do with me, not with him.”

  Meyfarth did not flinch or shy from Christopher’s angry demonstration. “Then why did you start talking about a ‘son’? Who were you thinking of when you spoke so passionately about the right and wrong way to parent? It wasn’t a friend. It wasn’t a neighbor. Wasn’t it your father?”

  “You said that,” Christopher insisted. “You said ‘son.’ ”

  Meyfarth stood, half blocking the way to the trail, holding the younger man’s eyes with his gaze. “No. I said ‘child.’ You’re lying to yourself, Christopher. You brushed up against something that hurts and now you’re lying to yourself.”

  “I don’t have to explain my father. I don’t have to apologize for my father. And I fucking don’t have to talk about my father if I fucking don’t want to.” As he spoke, he shouldered Meyfarth out of his way and stalked down the trail toward the elevator.

  Meyfarth caught up with him there. “You have to look at it, Christopher.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You said you were willing to risk discovering yourself.”

  “Some other time, thank you,” he said sarcastically.

  “This has been playing in your head for twenty years. Don’t you want to have a chance to decide if it belongs there?”

  The doors opened. “My father loves me,” Christopher said, backing one step into the car so that he blocked Meyfarth from entering. “Why do you want to make me think he doesn’t?”

  “This is about loving yourself, Christopher.”

  “What floor?” asked the elevator.

  “Then what’s my father got to do with it, goddammit?”

  “Because he’s inside your head. It’s his voice you hear when you think you have to make your life perfect, yourself perfect. Did you hear yourself? You were a good kid because you liked school and stayed out of the way? I’ll tell you why you don’t want to have a child with Jessie. You’re afraid that your son will disappoint you the way you disappointed your father. And you’re afraid your son will think of you the same way you think of him.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Answer that question yourself, and the answer will be worth something.”

  Christopher’s bitter rage, which had momentarily faded as he listened, flowered in full blossom. “Goddamn you assfucker,” he snarled, one many-syllabled word. “Otis—lobby.”

  The doors closed, the car began to drop, and Christopher closed his eyes in relief. I’m not coming back, he thought angrily. We can find someone else. Or Jessie and Loi can find someone else. I almost don’t care which. But I’m not coming back to have more tricks played on me.

  That resolve helped calm him. But he could not release all his anger, for the infuriating thing was that Meyfarth had been right. Christopher had brushed up against something that hurt, a black wraith that lived in an ugly place inside him. And try as he might to escape it, it shadowed his consciousness all the way back to the compound.

  Work proved no amulet, anger no talisman. The wraith shadowed him all through the afternoon and into that early winter night, fragments of the session playing tag-gotcha! in his head until half a flask of Loi’s Glenfiddich
finally silenced what lies and bluster could not.

  CHAPTER 18

  —GCA—

  “There is only one history…”

  It was ten days until the end of ground training, and excitement was building in the village at AT-Houston. It was obvious to Thomas Tidwell, still sharing a house with three Memphis colonists. But it seemed to him that even a casual visitor to the compound could not fail to notice, would see it in the self-delighted smiles, the surreptitious winks and thumb-in-fist salutes.

  Soon, the winks and smiles and salutes said, soon.

  Soon the staff would scatter across the globe and throughout the orbiting worlds on a last sojourn home, for a final farewell to family and familiar. Even though the sailing date was still three months away, it seemed to Tidwell that the whole planet must soon echo with the ache of the tearing away, that the pain of those good-byes would surely more than cancel the giddy pleasure he was seeing on the faces of the villagers. But if that were so, he was the only one who saw it. When Evans or Colas said, “Ten more days,” it was said with potent anticipation, as a promise and a bond between the elect.

  The selection sociometricians had explained their strategy to Tidwell in effusive detail—how the ground training had less to do with technology than with psychology, with forging emotional links through shared homes, shared labors, shared goals. The demanding schedule only intensified the effect, an old workshop leader’s trick carried off on a much greater scale. The colonists would part on the last day saying, “See you on the ship.” and that vow would help assure that most would keep the appointment.

  Ten more days, they said. Ten more days until tomorrow begins. Ten more days until we can finally close the old book, open a new one.

  And for Tidwell, ten more days until he could return to Half-whistle, the episode over, his mission concluded, though far from complete. Evans and Colas and Graham, reunited on Memphis, would count him as one who had faltered, who surrendered the dream in exchange for a tamer security—if they noted his absence at all.

  No, he thought, they would not question it, or even be surprised. They had to know, just as he had come to know, living with them, that he was not one of them, one with them. They had to sense that he was deaf to whatever music pounded in their blood. There had been no lapse in civility, no attempt to exclude him. But they had to wonder why he was struggling, wonder if in his case Selection had made a mistake.

  Tidwell would have thought they would shy from him, fearing that their own certainty would be contaminated by doubt. Instead, they had wrapped him in a gentle cocoon of silent sympathy and support, and went right on.

  From within that cocoon, he watched them. He saw their naive energy and marveled as a parent marvels at the boundless energy of a child. He saw that they were helpless in the grip of their own dimly apprehended need, and happy being so. That selection counselor, Keith, had been right. Everything Tidwell had learned in his brief career as Thomas Grimes he learned that first day, except that he had rejected the wisdom.

  They burned. He did not.

  With each day, that gulf seemed wider, his estrangement from their passion more complete. They were leaving. He would stay. And in recent days it had become more important to consider what that meant to him than what it meant to them. New questions intruded on his thoughts: What becomes of the nest when the children have flown? What sort of world would the last of Allied Transcon’s starships be leaving behind? How much energy of will, how much love of life, could five ships, a mere sixty thousand people, carry away with them?

  For the first time, Tidwell wondered darkly if those who remained would have enough dreams to sustain them.

  These were thoughts which would not have seemed out of place in a tirade by the mythical Jeremiah, and Tidwell was discomfited by hearing them rattle, homeless and unclaimed, around his own skull. He had gotten too close; the charade had gone on too long. He had lost perspective, lost the surety of his own judgment. It was past time to withdraw, to regain the balance, to become the observer, to begin the synthesis.

  And still not yet time. Ten more days.

  Lying wide awake in his darkened room, the thinnest of sheets covering his nakedness in the clammy warmth, Tidwell stared ceilingward and tried to make sense of his day. I no longer know what questions to ask, he thought. I no longer know what matters.

  Point: his interview that morning with Carl Miller, the University of Texas systemist whose theory of “bioeconomics” had caused such a flap in the popular media since October. The most common spin on Miller’s work was that it offered the first authoritative scientific support for Jeremiah’s claim that Allied Transcon was “bleeding” the earth.

  Tidwell had put Miller on his schedule merely to fill time, to occupy a block when “Thomas Grimes” was scheduled for meaningless proficiency examinations. But Tidwell was unable to put away what Miller had to say, unable to render it meaningless with logic or counterargument.

  “I’m not a Homeworlder, Dr. Tidwell,” Miller kept repeating. “I’m as excited about the Diaspora as anyone—I even subscribe to the Ur journal, Frontier. All I’ve done in my paper is analyze some of the issues in macroeconomic terms. And I think I’ve demonstrated that this is, in fact, a one-sided transaction, building and outfitting these starships. In fact, I think that it’s time to revive the notion of the altruistic act.”

  “On whose part?”

  “On the part of the entire species,” said Miller. “I’ve heard Sasaki claiming that Allied has paid its own way on this. But that balance sheet is missing a lot of entries. If Sasaki wants to amortize the cost of the Project against the entire future of the colonial units, that’s fine. But what about the knowledge that these ships carry? What about the technical expertise required to build them? That’s an unvalued transaction. The cumulative cost of that intellectual capital is by far the single largest cost item on the ledger.”

  “Come now,” Tidwell said dismissively, “that ‘capital’ can be spent a thousand times over and never exhausted. It goes on Memphis’s ledger as a gift of great value and no cost. Every bit of knowledge that went into its conception and construction remains available to this community—perhaps even more available, considering the effort which we’ve put into collecting and organizing it. You’re grandstanding, sir, with meaningless hypotheticals.”

  “I understand your defensiveness,” Miller said. “I can’t say it often enough—I’m with you, not against you. But where does intellectual capital come from? It’s the product of an even more precious emotional capital. And emotional capital can be spent, because one of the multipliers is time. Is spent, every day, as we choose what to do with our opportunities. With our lives.”

  “You are inventing realities again.”

  “Are you familiar with CFS, Mr. Tidwell?”

  “CFS?”

  “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” said Miller. “It’s a useful one-organism model for bioeconomics. CFS victims are achievers, ambitious, inventive. And then they reach a point where they can’t keep the pace they’ve set for themselves. They’re weary. They sleep too much. They’re always sick, little nagging draining kinds of illnesses. The ambition vanishes. In short, they just don’t care anymore. It happens to individuals. It happens to communities. It happens to civilizations. I think it’s happening to us.”

  “This is not economics,” said Tidwell. “This is political metaphysics. And you are aiding the Homeworlders, whether you consider yourself one or not.”

  “Do you expect me to stop talking about this? We have a right to know what’s coming. I think that Jeremiah is right about the price we’re paying, about the decline to follow. But I think that he’s wrong to try to stop the Diaspora. Because the decline will come anyway. The capital is spent.”

  “We have survived the worst of our problems,” said Tidwell. “The human race has a long and fascinating future ahead of it.”

  “Yes,” Miller said. “But not on Earth. For us, this is the end of the race. This is t
he finish line, coming up on us now.”

  Point: the afternoon briefing from the Memphis mission planners.

  It was not as though there was anyone in the Building 2 auditorium who didn’t know where Memphis was headed. Sasaki’s predecessor had announced the Tau Ceti system as the provisional choice for prime rendezvous eleven years ago, and Sasaki had reconfirmed the choice three years later, long before staff and community selection had begun. The Tau Ceti of New Moon Over Barridan and other popular fictions was well ingrained in the public mind.

  But Training was fond of bringing the staff together, 300 people in a 270-seat hall, for this conference or that presentation, a seminar here, a briefing there. Never longer than a fast ninety minutes, the gatherings figured in Training’s “unitary identity” strategy, a product of the best available sociometric and sociodynamic models. And an update briefing on the latest information on “T.C.,” as Anglish slang rendered it, was as good an excuse as any.

  The briefing was brisk and well organized. The lecturer, a polished presenter, recalled the relevant astronomical history, with the big Publook imager above him providing three-dimensional visuals. Listening idly as he watched the pioneers watching the show, Tidwell absorbed some details to which he hadn’t attended during any previous exposure.

  One of the nearest naked-eye stars, Tau Ceti had apparently been singled out early as a prime candidate for, in order, terrestrial planets, intelligent life, and Diaspora colonization. The first question was settled last, with the Hawking Space Telescope finally confirming seven planets in orbit around the G-class yellow star shortly after it went into operation in 2028.

  An optimist could have taken a bet on the question of intelligent life more than a century ago, as the star had been a target of Frank Drake’s unsuccessful OZMA, the first radio-based SETI search. Every extrasolar study since had yielded the same negative result. And that included the ongoing Allied-sponsored studies employing the big scopes on Einstein, the new U.N. research station in polar orbit around the Sun.