Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“That’s for Dola Martinez,” Dryke said quietly as a furious Lieutenant Alvarez and several other Transit cuffs burst into the room.

“I promised him he’d walk,” was all he said.

They held him for more than an hour, first while they unraveled the status of a Russian-born British citizen carrying Brazilian diplomatic credentials, then while Lieutenant Alvarez balked at accepting the conclusions of that inquiry. He walked out of the station knowing that he had made no friends by what he had done.

But he also knew that only Mikhail Dryke and Hiroko Sasaki could rightly judge him, and that at least one of them believed that he had done nothing wrong.

Yotama Kimura led Dryke to the back of the clean room, where the jammer lay in pieces on a tear-down table. “This is Anna Romay,” he said, introducing the technician hovering over the dissected machine. “Anna, please show Mr. Dryke what you found.”

The technician reached for the articulated arm of the micro-viewer and pulled the screen forward. “There were three identifiers. The first was on the controller chip. The chip had been fried, of course, but they must have used an off-the-shelf bracket—see, here,” she said, turning it over under the lens of the viewer.

Dryke studied the screen, the block lettering stamped into the foillike metal. “Yes, I see it. ‘Inex, S.A.’ South Africa?”

“No. Inex, S.A., is a chip shop in Mexico City. An old Intel subsidiary, specializing in standard X-ray burns. They have a lot of customers, but the South Africans aren’t among them.”

“So this points toward Taiwan or Chile. Or one of the guerrilla shops in California or Arizona.”

“If you’ll be patient, I can do better.” She reached for another component. “Standard hardened hex-head lock screw. Eight-millimeter, forty-thread. Taiwan uses ten-millimeter, forty-thread.”

“So it’s from the West.”

“I thought so as soon as I saw the controller chip. This was the clincher,” she said, punching up a graph. “I did a mass spec on the casing. It came up with a mix that’s in the base as U.S. Government bronze, spec H. Very old formulation. There’s only seven mills around the world that still make it—three of which are owned by the Chilean government’s National Metals.”

“So it’s Chile.”

“I’d say so. Probably right out of military stores.”

Thoughts tumbled through Dryke’s mind. Could be a straight sale, which won’t take more than a bribe to track. The Chileans don’t worry about much past seeing that your money’s good. Or it could be black market, same reason. Or a sympathizer. That’d be the toughest. Give me greed over idealism any day —

“I hope that is adequate, Mr. Dryke?” asked Kimura anxiously.

Dryke nodded, a satisfied expression on his face. “That’s all I needed,” Dryke said. “One step closer to Jeremiah. One step at a time. I hope that you’ve pointed me in the right direction.”

“We share that hope,” Kimura said.

“I want you to document what you’ve shown me, then pack up the jammer and send it down to Brazil for safekeeping.”

“Immediately,” Kimura said. “Is there anything else that I can do?”

In the last five minutes, Dryke’s body had begun to remind him that he had had no sleep in thirty hours. “You can point me toward a bed,” he said.

Kimura smiled. “There are sleep tanks in Flight Operations and in Building 7.”

“Flight Operations, please,” he said. Because when I wake up, I’ll be leaving for Santiago .

It was the voice of authority vexed, carrying down the corridor of Syncretics’ suite and through the open door of the small counselors’ lounge.

“Malena? Is Gregory here yet?”

Inside the lounge, Malena Graham looked up from her book. She was not pretty, but art and artifice had made her attractive. A spill of chestnut hair framed a young, mannish face. Her blue flower-print dress was long enough to hide her useless legs.

“I haven’t seen him,” she called in reply.

The owner of the unhappy voice appeared in the doorway. “Didn’t he say he was coming in this morning?”

“I don’t know,” Malena said. “I ran late with my three o’clock regression, and he was already gone when we were done.”

A petulant look crossed the facilitator’s face. “I swear he said he was going to resculpt Mr. Barton’s cues.” She shook her head and gestured past where Malena sat in her airchair. “When you get a chance, try the Normandy water—I swear it tastes sweet this time.”

“I did,” Malena said. “It tastes like they didn’t flush the line. Or like what they used to flush it.”

The facilitator made a face and disappeared.

Malena returned to the book that she had been reading—a fantasy about the vengeful return of the Inca gods. Reading was the best way to forget where she was, to absorb the minutes remaining before her first appointment. Reading demanded her full attention. At times, it was hard work. Unlike with dyna-books and vids, she had to build all her own pictures from the author’s sketchy words. Sometimes it seemed more like her book than theirs. Distractions from life, Mother Caroline called them.

But Malena thought that she had every right to her distractions. Twenty years old, and no part of her life was what she wanted it to be. She was still a prisoner of both the airchair and her family’s solicitude, and the continuing lesson of her employment seemed to be that, in the real world, excellence was not always rewarded.

She had excelled in the personal development track, then chosen the thirty-month intensive at Adrian College (over the five-year relationship technology program at Virginia Technical) as the best and fastest route to employment and independence. At Adrian she learned that she could use her differently abled body as a wedge to crack open her clients’ emotional windows. At Syncretics, she often succeeded with those whom other counselors had pronounced truth-deaf.

I’m good . The largest regulars list on the staff, in just three years—so many that she could rarely take any walk-ins. She had no knack for channeling, but she was the best spiritual motivator in the branch, better even than Kirella. She could find the spark inside them and blow it into flame. They leave me better than they came to me .

And yet she was still here, in the smallest Syncretics franchise in the South Bay area. The counselor’s lounge itself said everything that needed to be said. It was no bigger than one of the five little encounter rooms at the front of the suite, half the size of the therapy rooms at the back—and six of them had to share it.

Nor did the lounge earn points for luxury. Its appointments consisted of a few soft chairs arranged around the periphery and a drink tap with waters, juices, and one choice from a rotating selection of caffeinates. That was the price of working for a franchise branch. The price of working for Syncretics, the McDonald’s of mind and body training .

At the company-owned Virginia Beach office, on the other hand, each counselor had his own Network cube, the charge pool was reserved for their use from eight to ten every morning, the sense therapy room from four to six every evening. But one Syncretics branch wouldn’t hire a counselor away from another—professional courtesy. (Bondage by conspiracy.) And the facilities at Interdynamics—she could only dream. You had to be a full R.T. to even think about working there.

That would come, three or four years down the road. It always took longer to catch up when you’d taken a wrong turn.

Kirella breezed into the lounge. “Hi, Malena,” she said, dropping a bulging armbag and herself into adjacent chairs. “How did things go Thursday?”