Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“What about Ron?” asked Alicia.

That was a jolt, and her face betrayed it. “I guess,” she said slowly, “I guess the fact that I didn’t think of him all day until just this moment tells me something.”

“It should tell you that you haven’t thought this through,” said Michel.

“Or maybe that whatever needs Ron answered will be answered as well or better by going to Tau Ceti,” said Brett. “Can you answer me this, Malena? Do you understand yourself? Do you know what this means to you?”

“Did you know, when you bought the option?”

His expression turned inward, reflective. “It seemed like the most exciting thing anyone could do,” he said. “Like if you didn’t want to, there must be something wrong with you.”

“Would you go now?”

He looked at Alicia before answering. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not important.”

“It is important. Is it because you grew up? Because you see things more clearly now? Do you look back and think you were silly, naive? Do you think I’m naive?”

“Too many questions,” he said, shaking his head. “No easy answers. Sometimes I think it’s because I grew old, inside. You have to travel light to get anywhere. The more you’re afraid to let go of, the fewer your choices—until your only choice is to stay right where you are. My luggage got too heavy somewhere along the road.”

He looked up, taking in both Malena and Alicia sitting side by side. “I’m not unhappy, you know.”

Alicia smiled a sweet, sad smile. “I know,” she said gently. “I also know that part of your heart broke when Ur left and you weren’t on it.” She turned to Malena. “If you know your heart, and your heart says go, I think you should listen to it and not to us. I think you should go.”

Bright tears spilled down Malena’s cheeks. “I don’t know why I want to go,” she said. “I only know that I do.”

“That’s enough, sometimes,” said Alicia, reaching out and taking Malena’s hand.

It was not enough for Caroline, who came to her feet and stood, indignant, looming over her daughter. “Do you really think life’s as easy as that? That you can leave everything and everyone behind and be happy?”

“I don’t know,” was Malena’s answer. “I don’t even know how happy I am now.”

“You’re going to tell them yes.” Father Jack’s words were a harsh accusation.

Malena nodded and blinked back a tear. “I already have.”

If it seemed odd sometimes to outsiders that the director of the Diaspora hyperlibrary project was not a librarian but a historian, it usually seemed less so when they found out who the historian was.

Thomas Tidwell was that oddity which seemed to come along once in a generation—a popular writer-director who also had the respect of his more reserved peers. The British-born, Oxford-trained Tidwell had earned respect through more than thirty years of work on Millennial culture, including two standard reference works, Global Technocracy and Faith and Fear . But he gained notoriety with a single work, a series of nine videssays on the sexual mores of the last pre-AIDS generation.

Curiously, A Summer in Eden was seen as validation by both the most conservative and the most experimental elements of society. For the former, it was a cautionary parable, a warning of dire consequences if the rigid mores of the AIDS era were recklessly abandoned. For the latter, it was an exhilarating manifesto, an invitation to abandon now-irrelevant conventions and re-create a lost age of sexual freedom. The two poles had been fighting a war of opinion ever since—more than twenty-two years.

One voice that did not join the debate on either side was that of Thomas Tidwell. In an early interview, he said simply, “ Eden is no more important than any other of my works, and everything I have to say on the subject is contained within its nine segments. That was, after all, the point of making it.”

But that did not end the questions, nor restore to Tidwell even the tenth part of the blissful invisibility which he considered one of his two most important working tools. His next work, a serious study of the 2042 Amerussian “Peace Police” treaty, was mispromoted by a syndicator eager for another licensing bonanza and misreviewed by nearly everyone. Popular media condemned it for dullness; dull journals condemned him for his popularity.

Tidwell had no more to say about the reception of The Guardians than he had that of A Summer in Eden . And if the ego-crushing reception given the former was as painful for Tidwell as it would have been for any normal man, not even his friends were allowed to know it. A few, including his wife Marion, even suspected that he had deliberately and calculatedly set out to puncture the balloon of his own fame.

But for what happened next, they might have continued to suspect that.

In the preceding months, Tidwell had rejected two offers from Allied Transcon to become official historian of the Diaspora Project. But he had continued to listen with interest. The opportunity to write the definitive account of what would either be humanity’s greatest leap or its greatest stumble, to create what amounted to the cultural memory of an entire new community, was tempting. Almost tempting enough to coax Tidwell to surrender his other precious tool—his autonomy.

Almost, but not quite.

Then came The Guardians , and on its heels a new offer from Allied which contained new guarantees of access and independence. This time Tidwell signed, insisting, perhaps even believing, that it was the latter that swung the balance.

“I intend to take a thousand-year view of the Diaspora—five hundred years into the past and five hundred years into the future,” he had said at the press conference announcing his appointment. “I will be loyal to the truth and no one else. Allied understands this. I will have the full cooperation of the principals and the freedom to write what my conscience and professional judgment dictate.”

But guarantees were paper things, easily crushed by bureaucracies, frayed by time. It was periodically necessary to breathe life into the cold, precise legalisms. That was the task which faced Tidwell now, which had drawn him from his comfortable manor house near Halfwhistle, within sight of Hadrian’s Wall, to the executive suites of the Selection Section in Prainha.

Waiting for Karin Oker, Tidwell stood at the window and looked out at the spaceport. The contrast between the place Tidwell had left and the place he had come to could hardly have been sharper. The North Country was all rounded edges, a much-tramped land littered with history. Prainha was all hard edges, carved in relatively youthful memory from the Amazon forest.

The fairy-castle mountain of the Kare-Kantrowitz launch tower was a garish superposition on the denuded forest, the spacecraft which screamed away from its four-kilometer summit harsh substitutes for the parrots and macaws they had displaced. The blanketing rectenna, which sprawled across more than sixty square kilometers, was a metallic parody of the former jungle canopy. Spreading its “leaves” wide, it captured precious energy from space; in its shadow, a bustling ecology of technology thrived.

Tidwell wondered if they saw what they had done here, if they recognized the truth in Jeremiah’s charges. Someday I will have to ask Sasaki —

The inner door of the suite opened, and an olive-skinned man emerged, followed closely by a pale, willowy blond-haired woman. “Thank you, Raja,” she said. “We’ll take it up at the weeklies.” Then she looked past her companion to Tidwell. “Professor Tidwell?”