The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “A successor has already been selected.”

  The words stung, even though his offer had been more an arguing point than any serious intention. “Selected by who? You?”

  “Mr. McCutcheon made the selection.”

  Not good enough. Still not good enough to earn his respect. Was that the real message of the secrets? He had spent his whole life trying to be the best. I never would have guessed how little being good at what I do would matter—

  “Lila, why didn’t my father tell me what he was doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t know.”

  No easy answers. He had allowed himself to hope someone from Homeworld would appear to offer kindly explanations and refuge, to acknowledge a debt and pledge a bond of kinship. But he saw now that it was not going to happen. He was not going to be embraced by his father’s friends—by Jeremiah’s friends. If his father had not welcomed him, had not trusted him, how could he expect that anyone else would? He would have to find answers to his other questions on his own.

  “Lila, what’s the status of the house library?”

  “The house library is empty.”

  “Hidden files? Protected files?”

  “I’m sorry, Christopher.”

  “Is there anything left? Anything from my father? Anything about my father? About my family?”

  “Mr. McCutcheon kept personal files in off-line storage, not as part of the house library,” said Lila.

  Reason to hope, however feeble. “Then Dryke may have taken them. Where were they? What medium?”

  “Books,” Lila said.

  Christopher did not have to be told where to look. He went directly to his father’s bedroom, to the long shelf below the west-facing window and the long row of hardcover books atop it. He had noticed them during his imprisonment, even picked one up and glanced briefly through it.

  He had noted them as curiosities, both because books in general were rare and because the particular form of these books was unusual. For, with one or two exceptions, the books were all Portables—traditional print volumes with their contents duplicated electronically in the binding for access by a computer. The Portables were designed to be shelved on special bookcases, “plugged in” to smart ports, although the shelf in his father’s room was not one such.

  It was a transitional technology, predicated on the notion that traditional readers would resist surrendering their words-in-boards for slates, but might welcome having the contents of their libraries on-line for quick reference. Never more than a modest success, the Portables had all but vanished from the marketplace before Christopher was born. They survived only as collectibles, and he had not known his father was a collector.

  Scanning the titles, Christopher found historicals, art books, Locke, Eiseley, Kant, a biography of John Muir, and one fiction best-seller, Wolf’s Lord of Sipán. And that was all. “Nothing personal here. Dryke must have taken them,” Christopher said. His voice was heavy with disappointment.

  “Did you find any books?”

  “Yes—”

  “Would you count them, please?”

  Christopher’s eyes skipped down the line. “Thirty-one.”

  “Then none are missing. They are all there.”

  “But I don’t see any journals, any diaries, any albums—”

  “There are none to find, Christopher. The bindings are standardized. The texts vary in length. So there is always unused space in a Portable’s chipdisk. Each of those books contains more than its cover admits to,” said Lila. “As much as several hundred kilobytes per book.”

  “That isn’t very much.”

  “It is when you are only storing words, Christopher.”

  Shaking his head, Christopher said, “I didn’t know this was possible, and cultural media are supposed to be my specialty.”

  “If you had known, then probably Mikhail Dryke would also have known, and the books would be gone.”

  Christopher’s face screwed up into a mystified frown. “Lila, how did you know about this? It had to be in the restored files.”

  “Yes, Christopher.”

  Tentatively, he reached out and pulled Clark’s Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest from the ranks. “But only some of your files were restored.”

  “Yes, Christopher.”

  He looked up from the book in the direction of Lila’s voice. “Then this was important. He wanted me to know they were here. He wanted me to read them.”

  “Yes, Christopher,” said Lila. “After he was dead, and only if you asked about them.”

  “Who else?”

  “I am not allowed to show them to anyone else.”

  “Not even Lynn-Anne?”

  “No.”

  He pulled more volumes from the shelf, carefully making a stack in his arms. “I want to see them now.”

  “There is one condition. Mr. McCutcheon asked that you read them all, or not at all.”

  That brought him up short. “Why?”

  “I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t know.”

  Though the archive had been opened to Christopher, he saw very quickly that it had not been created for him. Save for a few decades-old “letters” from a father to his new son, it was not even addressed to him.

  And instead of the systematically organized, theatrically perfect deathbed soliloquy Christopher had expected, the archive was a fragmented and incomplete potpourri, a scattering of the thoughts and reflections and memories of a man of complexity. It was his attic, the bottom drawer of his rolltop desk, the notes scribbled in the margins of his days.

  Together, they said, “This was my private world, which I never shared with you in life. This is who I was.”

  Christopher rooted himself in the seat for two hours, reading his way through the first six volumes of archiviana. Then, as dusk was settling over the ridge, he pushed back from the desk and retreated to the kitchen to fortify his body with its first food since breakfast.

  He also needed the break to fortify his determination. Reading William’s private archives was akin to raking a mine field in search of a lost treasure. Dangerous forces were concealed beneath the surface. Inevitably, he would stumble on them. There was no way to predict when, no way to prevent the intersection, no way to protect himself. Not if he wanted to reclaim the treasure. Not if he was to honor his father’s final request.

  So far, there had been more wonder than pain. He had found nothing about Sharron, nothing about Deryn. He did find a self-conscious episodic letter which began “Dear Christopher” and spanned more than four years. The contents of the letter explained little and illuminated little more. But it was fascinating all the same, for it was filled with details of a sort that he would not have thought his father would take the trouble to notice.

  But he had taken the trouble, not only to notice, but to record.

  The letter began two years after Christopher was born, and the tone was both self-conscious and oddly apologetic, as though his father felt he had been caught procrastinating. It was written in simple language, as though his father was speaking to the child he was, not the adult he would be.

  But it offered a snapshot, all the same: a portrait of a cheerful, self-amusing two-year-old who knew the alphabet and could count to thirty, and who liked to “play a game”—saying words and seeing them appear on the screen—on the old computer in Lynn-Anne’s room.

  Because such things were important to his father, Christopher expected the catalog of the hundred and one landmark achievements of childhood—the ever-changing answers to a parent’s “Do you know what my boy can do now?” But he was surprised to hear about the soft-stuffed gray mouse that went everywhere with him until it disappeared on a family trip to Long Beach— and about Traveler Pup, the bow-tied hound who succeeded Friend Mouse.

  Friend Mouse was beyond remembering. But Christopher remembered Traveler Pup with a twinge and a tug. He could see it, worn and worried, its bow tie gone, its golden fur gone gray with handling, lying in the ba
sket of toys in the corner of his room on B Street. But he could not remember what had become of it. Surrendered without a thought during a housecleaning, most likely, the emotion imbued in it leached away by time.

  The letter’s entries were spotty, tantalizing, maddening. Snapshots. An imaginary friend named Birdy, who flew away in the winter and then came back to live in a ground nest Christopher built for him beside the house. Christopher forming letters on the white brick of the backyard patio from twigs collected in the yard and broken to size. Even his own words, unremembered but resonant:

  “Do you know what, Dad? It takes a long time trying to grow up. It goes age to age, and I want to skip some ages.”

  That was the one that drove him away to regroup, that threatened to upset his precarious balance. The dirty little secret of growing up, Meyfarth had said. And Christopher had been in such a hurry to learn it.

  Presently, he returned to the comsole and read through the last of the letter. It ended without explanation or closure in the middle of Christopher’s sixth year, its last anecdotes—of his trials with an older and more aggressive neighbor child—offering no clue as to why the project was abandoned. The next item Lila presented was date-stamped a full three years later.

  “Wait—what’s going on here?” Christopher said in surprise. “Isn’t there anything between this and the last?”

  “No, Christopher. I’m proceeding in strict chronological order, as Mr. McCutcheon directed.”

  “Show me a file directory.”

  “I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t have a directory available.”

  Lila’s mechanical politeness was becoming an annoyance. “I can take these somewhere else, you know.”

  “Yes, Christopher. But you would not be able to read the files without my assistance.”

  “Then I’ll take a can opener to you first and see how you do it,” Christopher said irritably, coming up out of the chair and then kicking it out of his way.

  He walked to the window and stood looking out through his own reflection, his hands tucked into his back pockets. House rules, he thought. Still his father’s house, still his father’s rules.

  “All right,” he said finally. “He wants you holding my hand, I guess that’s the way it has to be. Tell me this. Is there more like what I was reading coming up? More addressed to me? If so, I want to skip ahead to it.”

  “Christopher, there are very specific restrictions on how I may access this material. I may not look ahead, skip ahead, or redisplay already viewed sections. I may not store, mail, or copy any part of it, or allow it to be filmed off the display.”

  He sighed and made a reluctant pilgrimage back to the chair. “Do you have any idea why there’s such a gap?”

  “I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t. Is it important?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “Continue, please.”

  Before long, Christopher was convinced that it was important. For, in everything that followed, he found himself discussed in the third person, rather than addressed in the first. It seemed that—for some reason—any thought of him ever seeing his father’s words had vanished in the interim.

  But, curiously, Christopher discovered his father spoke most clearly when he was not speaking to Christopher directly. His father’s voice became a more familiar one, his language liberated from the prison of childspeak. And though there were as many gaps and mysteries as before, the thoughts he did record seemed less guarded, closer to the heart.

  I can see Sharron in his eyes and hear Deryn in his words. They are both inside him, pulling at him to follow, his father had written just weeks after Deryn broke her contract and left for Sanctuary. Christopher thought he read both fury and fear in his father’s words, the latter an unexpected complexity. His father afraid. It was nearly an oxymoron, as bewildering as burning water.

  Infuriatingly, that brief entry was the only allusion to Deryn’s departure. It was, in fact, one of the few times either woman was named, and—to that point at least—the only time they were spoken of together. For all their presence in the archives, it was almost as if Christopher’s mothers had never existed.

  He had waited in vain for the kind of reminiscence of Sharron that he had sought from Lynn-Anne, for the kind of reassurance that would erase his sister’s bitterness—and his own ambivalence—from his mind. Through the long hours leading up to midnight, he had kept wondering when something would touch his still-untapped pain and break loose the logjam of anger and grief he could sense but not reach.

  But before that happened, he was ambushed by a simple, self-knowing confession:

  I have loved one cat, one woman, one child. They’ve all left my life, but they haven’t left my heart. And the cats and the children and the women who hover on the edge of my world can’t get in. That space is already taken.

  The cat was Dorian, the big gray who had owned the B Street house until the day he simply failed to return from a winter walk. The woman could only be Sharron, for Christopher could give damning witness to the way his father had kept Deryn at arms length.

  And though he tried desperately to find a reason to believe otherwise, Christopher knew in the first moment the words fell under his gaze that the child his father spoke of was Lynn-Anne.

  In that moment, hurt and alone, he hated both his father and his sister more than he had known possible.

  This time, the kitchen was not far enough away. Christopher retreated outside, to the wooden deck which squared off the curves of the twin domes at the back of the house. Overhead, thin high clouds were making a ghost of the gibbous moon.

  It was not that Lynn-Anne was first in her father’s heart which cut so deeply He granted her that as right of precedence. It was the thought that she had won from their father something that Christopher never could, that she had stood in the way of his having any standing at all. It was the realization that his father had knowingly imprisoned him in a losing game.

  There was no comfort in knowing that Lynn-Anne’s jealousy had blinded her to her real status, costing her exactly what she blamed Christopher for stealing. There was no joy in the contemplation of how much her defection had cost William McCutcheon. That they, too, had been cheated only made the whole muddle more tragically foolish.

  His father had changed after Lynn-Anne left, though at the time Christopher had not seen it. There was proof of the change even in the spotty record of his father’s notebooks. It explained the end of the long letter. It explained the three-year silence, coinciding with the trips east, now seen as attempts to win his aaugnter back. It explained the emotional distance when the entries resumed.

  The picture was clear. For his first five or six years, Christopher had been an intimate part of his father’s life. But after that time he was never more than an important part. And he had spent the succeeding years trying to earn back something he had once had, without ever grasping exactly what was missing—or why it had been taken away.

  So much of Christopher’s history with his father finally made sense. His own eternal sense of inadequacy. The paradox of his father’s studied indifference and his obsession for control—the endless auditions for an approval he would never give. Even his father’s curious relationship with Deryn, by his choice alone less than it could have been, an arrangement rather than a marriage.

  Numbly, he wondered—was this the whole point of the exercise, for him to learn that his father did not love him? If so, then it was a cowardly act, and a cruel legacy. And there was no reason to mourn such a man.

  The high clouds were blowing off, and scattered windows of star-dotted sky were starting to open. Christopher sat on the railing, back resting against the wall, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, looking up into the fragmented sky for pieces of a pattern he could recognize.

  It struck him then that his father had left him neither a gift nor a message, but a final test. See what you can do with these, his father was saying. He had bequeathed Christopher the task of assembling into a picture the tho
ughts and moments captured in the archives, and the harder task of drawing out the meaning. What more fitting legacy could there be, considering his profession? Christopher had performed the same synthesis a hundred times on the lives of strangers.

  There was something of love in the challenge, as there had always been. Never the unconditional embrace, never the final security, but always something of love, nonetheless. His father had tried to love him without ever making himself vulnerable. And because his father did not trust him, he had tried to control him.

  Was still trying. Read it all or not at all. Why? Because his father had feared that Christopher would stop before seeing everything of importance, would draw the wrong conclusion or be led to too harsh a judgment. The same manipulation as always, coming from an even colder, safer distance.

  The temptation to answer with rebellion was strong. But such a rebellion now would be an empty, self-defeating gesture. William McCutcheon was gone, immunized by death against Christopher’s venom. And there were seventeen volumes left.

  There has to be something more, he thought as he went back inside the house, something meant for him. There has to be some reason for the exercise beyond destroying the last illusions of a twenty-seven-year-old child.

  These fissured cliffs, grading from brown to white to red, appear to me as a great wound carved across her face, as the wrinkled features of the crone. How could such feeble rivers cut such canyons? The wind is a ghost, water a chimera. The element that escapes our eyes is time—time in such measure that only the earth herself is witness.

  Who remembers these tablelands rising from a dying sea? Only Gaea. Who recalls the march of life preserved in these canyon walls? Only those to whom the gift has been passed, whose substance preserves the fragile past in a precarious present. We have left our mark here as surely as have wind and water. My heart beats in rhythm with the land. I am its eyes, shaped from the clay and touched with the spark.

  There were dozens more like it, and a yawning, eye-weary Christopher hardly knew what to make of them. Prayerful poetic reveries to the experience of nature seemed hardly to belong to his picture of William McCutcheon.