The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

Nowhere in the sky had they found the handiwork of intelligent life. Nowhere but on Earth had they found the signature of biological systems, past or present. Life, it seemed, was precious and rare, and the universe a lonelier place than many had once believed. Every indirect evidence, every reasoned analysis, said that Memphis might find a Venus, a Jupiter, if they were lucky a Mars or Titan, but no lush garden worlds, no alien Earth.

  “We’ll go to Tau Ceti with a pocketful of options,” said the lecturer, “and write our own story as we go. If we find an interesting planet with an unfriendly climate, we might establish a research colony of a few hundred volunteers and then continue on. If the parameters are marginal, we could found a terraforming colony of up to a thousand inhabitants before leaving.

  “And if they’re downright agreeable, we’ll likely all go down, keeping Memphis in orbit as a lifeboat for a few dozen years until a new generation comes along to carry on where we left off. Because you can be sure that some of them will inherit our wanderlust, and you can be just as sure they’ll think we’re as stuffy and settled as some of us consider our parents.” Laughter rippled through the room, self-knowing. “And they’ll have us as proof that it can be done. Won’t that be a moment to remember, when the first colony sends out its own colony ship?”

  The question was answered by a swell of appreciative applause. Waiting it out, the lecturer smiled, nodded acknowledgment, and gave the thumb-in-fist salute. In a heart’s breath, the applause doubled, and scattered members of the audience came to their feet.

  “I want to leave you with the best new picture of Tau Ceti, which we received from Einstein just this morning,” the lecturer continued as the applause faded. Above him, the Publook offered a dramatic image of a ghostly yellow star matted with the shadowy disk of one of its orbiting worlds.

  “The best so far,” he said, as the applause picked up again, at first scattered, growing as he continued into an almost tribal drumming of hands. “But there’ll be better, and they’ll come from us. No one will know Tau Ceti better than we will.

  “I’m glad for the pictures Starwatch feeds us. It’s amazing what additive digitizers and enhancers can do with a few photons captured ten light-years from their origin.”

  He paused and swept the room with his smile. “But I’m looking forward to seeing Tau Ceti for myself, without benefit of technology. And if wishes are horses, some morning I’ll get to see it rise over a world that never knew life until you and I and the rest of the ten thousand arrived to make it our home.” He stepped down from his dais, signaling the end of the assembly, as cheers and whoops and defiant cries punctuated the fevered ovation.

  How gently he plucked their strings, Tidwell thought as he sat in his seat, politely applauding. Yet how strongly they respond. Just a few months ago, Tidwell would not have wondered at the scene. He would have written it off to passionate emotion and a skillful orator—no more mysterious than a preacher exhorting his flock, or a revolutionary inspiring his followers. No different.

  We shall be delivered. The message was the same. And perhaps the passions were also the same. A ready well of courage, of commitment, waiting to be drawn on. Missionary zeal, waiting for a moment in time. Had the speaker spoken knowingly of inheriting a wanderlust or merely reached for a resonant idiom? No matter. The idiom recurred in the words of many speakers.

  There is only one history, but there are many historians. Where was the truth written? The fire was lit. Where did it burn? In the hearts of men? Or in the cold nucleic chemistry of their cells?

  Floating in and out of consciousness, Tidwell heard a sound in the hall and then at the open doorway. He was asleep enough to be puzzled, awake enough not to startle. Looking toward the sound, he saw a moving shadow, heard a breeze, or was it a whisper? The door swung shut with a hiss.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, rising to his elbows.

  “It’s me, Thomas.” Softly, a woman’s voice.

  The shadow became a shape alongside the bed. The breeze carried the faint scent of flowers and something more to Tidwell’s nostrils. “Miss—Malena—I am—”

  A match flared in her hand, showing him the young girl’s face. The black chemise she wore showed him more, even in the flickering light. She touched the match to the wick of a stout red candle, then set the candle on the end of Tidwell’s trunk, which he had pressed into service as a nightstand.

  He stared, and she smiled. “You told me to try and shock you.”

  The airchair’s mounting bar silently telescoped upward and out over the bed, and Malena reached up and gracefully lifted herself onto the bed beside him. Her hand touched his hip, scalding him through the light sheet. “Have you ever made love with a woman like me?”

  “No,” he said, too dumbfounded to challenge the premise of the question.

  “Well,” she said with a flame-lit twinkle in her eyes, “I may not be as agile as some, but I’m not fragile, and everything else is just as you’d expect. I like to touch and be touched,” she said, her fingertips moving, burning a line across his abdomen. “I’ll need to hold on to you or the bed or my bar when I’m on top, or I won’t have any leverage. But we can take that as it comes.”

  He reached out and caught her hand, firmly but not harshly. “Malena, this is—I’m afraid you expect too much from me.”

  She brought his hand to her mouth and bit the ball of his thumb. Startled, he flinched and pulled his hand free, not in pain, but from the sudden charge of sexual energy, so alien and unfamiliar now.

  “Please,” he said, “it has been years—”

  “I know,” she said. She reached up for the bar again, and a moment later she was no longer beside him, but astride him, straddling his waist, the sheet still between them like a frail chaperone.

  His breath caught, his hands shook. “Malena, please—you are a lovely girl. But how can I—you cannot understand the difficulty—”

  Clinging to the bar with one hand for balance, she reached forward and pressed her other hand over his heart. She closed her eyes, as though listening intently, as though taking his measure.

  “Let it back into your life,” she said gently, opening her eyes. “You’ve waited long enough, invented enough fears. You don’t have to hold yourself apart, Thomas. You have a right to permit yourself pleasure.”

  What door she had thrown open he did not know, but he suddenly felt naked before her, and panic began to rise in his chest. She sensed it in an instant and caught his face in her hands.

  “Just be with me,” she said gently, making him meet her eyes. “Just be here and let go of the rest. It will be all right.”

  “I don’t know if I can—”

  “Of course we can,” she said, touching a finger to his lips and sitting back with a little smile.

  Tidwell closed his eyes and sighed away his quailing, then looked up and beheld her in the candlelight. “You are lovely,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said with a hint of a blush. Purposefully, almost theatrically, she slipped the thin straps of her garment off her shoulders, one at a time. A fetching wriggle, and her chemise slid down to bunch about her waist, baring her young breasts, her upturned nipples. Tidwell swallowed his breath as he admired her.

  “Do you like them?” she asked softly.

  His drawn breath an anticipatory sigh, Tidwell confessed, “Yes.”

  Malena leaned forward, propping herself on her hands on either side of his shoulders, and lowered herself down to kiss him. Her lips were soft, yielding, melding, her taste the fresh-sweet peppermint of a too-recent brushing or candy.

  “If you touch them, I can enjoy them, too,” she said as she broke away from the kiss.

  By then, Tidwell had caught enough of her playfulness that he could take it as an invitation, not a critique. “You did warn me you would expect that,” he said, and reached for her.

  Cooing happily as he caressed her nipples, Malena slid her body backward a few inches, until the bulge of his growing erection was trapped beneath h
er. She rocked her hips, rubbing herself against him, until the thin fabric barrier was velvet-slippery with their wetness, until Tidwell rose up, tore the sheet away, and took Malena to her back in an adolescent rush.

  That was the first time: affirmation for her, release for him. The second time, with the knifelike edge of need gone for both of them, was a more leisurely, more playful ballet. Climbing a gentler curve of sensuality, fingers and mouths exploring, they became truly lovers. Her touch was new on his body and knowing on her own, their bodies sweat-slick in the heat, the humid air.

  And though a second orgasm was beyond him, a second erection was not. When she straddled and rode him, leaning on his chest with one hand, being close to her and feeling the sensuality radiating from her was like being an old cat soaking up a spring sunbeam. When her body shook and clutched and she cried out her pleasure, his body was indistinguishable from hers, and he was part of what they made together, drawing from it a peace almost as profound as hers.

  “You see,” she said, blowing out the candle and snuggling against him, “I knew it would be all right.”

  And it was. But it could not last. When the moment was passed, the connection broken, all the thoughts which had been driven away while he lived in that moment, in a world of senses and sensation, returned to him. Joining them was an uncertain flavor of guilt and confusion, the deception which stood between him and the young woman in his arms tainting the contentment he might otherwise have felt.

  “You’re still troubled,” she said, disappointed, as they cuddled together, legs entangled, Her cheek on his chest. “I wanted to take that away from you.”

  Tidwell smiled in the darkness, wry and sad, as he stroked her hair reassuringly with his aged fingers.

  “You took me away from it, at least for a while,” he said. “And even that is more than I would have thought anyone could do.”

  CHAPTER 19

  —CCA—

  “… the illusion of purpose.”

  Wonders Upstairs, said the sign at street level.

  It seemed an outlandish claim for such an unprepossessing structure—a barnlike two-story wood frame building on a commercial street ten blocks from the Rice University campus. Downstairs was the Small Planet Grocery, a busy food and drug co-op which seemed to have an exemption from every licensing law and packaging code. Above, under the gambrel roof, was Wonders.

  Daniel Keith recognized on first sight that the three-hundred-seat club was organically one with the co-op below—that is, Spartan, quaint, and inexplicably successful. Everything that wasn’t handmade seemed secondhand. Half the seating was comprised of unpadded wooden benches, the other half of uncomfortable plastic chairs packed too closely together.

  Most surprising, the only performance support was a twelve-channel sound system and an autospot. There was no net feed, no audio optimizer, no prompter—to say nothing of such cutting-edge technologies as a SyncScreen or harmonizer. But, as Keith learned when he editorialized aloud, that state of affairs was the result of the owner’s philosophy, not his poverty.

  “What fun is it if there’s nineteen layers of insulation between me and the performer?” snorted Bill “Papa” Wonders, he of the great white beard like an Elizabethan ruffled collar. “That’s like putting a tourist in a six-axis harness and a thrill-ride helmet and calling him a gymnast. My musicians work without a net.”

  The audience had somewhat better support: A little bar and food counter in a glass-walled annex sold bottled drinks, light polypep, and a smattering of desserts—all of the crunchless variety, out of consideration to the performers.

  But it was the music, not the menu, which filled the seats in Wonders at fifteen dollars per, six nights a week. Techjazz, English vocal, electric filk, revival rock, antitonal—everyone agreed that Papa Wonders had eclectic tastes. Most agreed that he also had good taste.

  Which is why only Tuesdays were free for sampling new performers, two on a split bill, an hour set each with a break between. Tonight, the poster in Wonders’s narrow stairway read:

  Tuesday

  December p.m.

  CHRISTOPHER McCUTCHEON

  Traditional Guitar

  + + +

  BONNIE TEVENS AMBIKA

  Synth Moods

  At a quarter to eight, Keith slipped into the little room that served as the performer’s warm-up room and found Christopher bending over his instrument with surgical concentration.

  “What’s up, guy?”

  “Broke a string.”

  “Ah. Better here than on stage, eh?”

  “Better,” Christopher agreed. “How are things outside?”

  “Greg has the recorders all ready to roll. The multi is audience center, fifth row, so he can do splits on your fingering, and the tank camera is front row left. And he’s doubling sound with a digital MIDI.”

  Christopher shook his head. “God. He really went overboard.”

  “You ask a techie to help, you let them do it their way,” Keith said with a shrug. “Nobody’s going to think it’s strange.”

  “No? Fifty thousand dollars of hardware and fifty people in the audience?”

  “Says who? The room’s filling up nicely. I think it’ll be close to full.”

  Christopher was taken aback. “Really. Bonnie and Ambika must have a following.”

  Keith shook his head. “If they do, they’re gonna have to stand in the back. There’s a good dozen archies out there, and at least half the other faces look familiar. Looks like word got out around the center.”

  “That Greg’s doing, too?”

  Grinning, Keith said, “Well, not exactly. I didn’t think you’d mind a friendly audience, after all the work you’ve been banking. And with graduation Friday and winter holiday coming up this weekend, I didn’t have to twist any arms. We even got a few out from Noonerville.”

  Christopher sat back, the neck of the guitar held loosely between his knees, and looked sideways up at his friend. “Thanks, Daniel,” he said. “I don’t mind. I just hope I’m up to it.”

  “Just have some fun,” Keith said. “They’ll enjoy it if you do.” He nodded. “You’d better finish with that.”

  “It’s tuned,” said Christopher. “You know, I’ve never done a whole set with just the Martin before. But that’s what Bill asked for.”

  “High time,” Keith said. “All that synth fill and bangbox stuff is for cowards.”

  “Who told you to say that?”

  “Papa Bill did.”

  “He would.” Christopher’s expression darkened. “Just to save me from looking—I don’t suppose Loi or Jessie—”

  “Sorry. No,” Keith said. “Not unless they came in while I’ve been in here.”

  Tight-lipped, Christopher shook his head. “I didn’t expect them.”

  “Still at war?”

  “Trenches and mortars. They won’t pick a new counselor, I won’t go back to the old one. We lob words back and forth at each other a couple times a day.”

  “Bad juju. But save it for later,” Keith said, glancing at the clock behind Christopher. “Five minutes. I’m going to get out of here and let you collect yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You all right?”

  “Nervous,” confessed Christopher.

  “Nervous is good, I hear.”

  “I’m not used to playing for people who’re there to listen instead of to get laid.”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, I can try to get laid.”

  A laugh broke through the nervousness. “Oh, gee, Dan, it’s awfully nice of you to offer, but I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “Sure you could,” Keith answered with a grin. “Anything for a buddy. Break a string, huh?”

  An hour alone on stage can be an instant or an eternity. For Christopher McCutcheon that night, it was an eternity, and Daniel Keith’s heart ached for him.

  The worst of it was that it was no one’s fault but Christopher’s. Papa Wonders kept his introduction low-key an
d discreet, careful not to oversell his inexperienced opening act or splash Christopher with the taint of Allied Transcon. And the friendly crowd gave Christopher a warm reception as he came down the aisle. The portents were all good. All he had to do was rise to the moment.

  But when Christopher went to mount the small stage at the narrow end of the hall, he stumbled and nearly fell, cracking his guitar sickeningly against the steps. Collecting himself, he crossed to the stool at center stage and worriedly inspected his instrument.

  “Is there a luthier in the audience?” he murmured, almost to himself, as he fingered a spot on the edge of the body. Finally satisfied, he looked up and out at the audience. “Good thing I don’t have to walk and play guitar at the same time.”

  The honeymoon was still in effect; the weak joke got a stronger response than it deserved. Keith could only imagine what it felt like to look out from there and see more than two hundred people looking back at you expectantly.

  “Anyway, thank you for the welcome. I’m going to try to give you about six hundred years of music in about sixty minutes,” he went on, speaking quickly, “so I won’t waste too many of those minutes talking. Just sit back and let me drive the time machine. And remember, if the scenery gets dull, you can always take a nap for a hundred years or so.”

  The laughs were noticeably weaker for the second jest. They had come to be entertained, and Christopher was parading his self-doubt before them like an anxious youth drafted for a recital before the relatives. His shaky confidence was understandable, but letting it show was a mistake.

  So was the first number, a movement from the Bach cello suites, though Christopher forgot to announce it as such. Elegant and coldly precise, it seemed to Keith to steal the energy and enthusiasm from the room. It did not matter that Christopher played it well. The audience settled back into show-me mode, and though that was what Christopher had asked for, Keith wondered if he would be able to bring them back up to the higher pitch when he wanted.

  If he wanted. Keith studied Christopher’s face carefully, trying to read his emotions. It wasn’t easy. Christopher rarely looked up, rarely made eye contact beyond the front edge of the stage. It occurred to Keith that perhaps Christopher was so uncomfortable with the audience that he preferred them at a distance, that he had to hold them down to hold himself together.