Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“I would imagine we can make do with something less than the full library,” Tidwell said. “Perhaps the selection algorithm and the scoring of the successful candidates will prove sufficient. And you might wish to designate a contact person with authority to answer inquiries, not evade them.”

Reluctantly, she said, “I think that could be arranged.”

He nodded. “Then I’ve taken enough of your time. The details can be worked out by staff. Thank you, Dr. Oker.” He bowed slightly and withdrew toward the door.

He had taken just five steps when she called after him. “Dr. Tidwell—”

“Yes?”

She was standing, and her eyes were clouded by an emotion Tidwell could not quite define. “You wouldn’t do anything to harm us, would you?”

“Pardon me?”

“The Project. You wouldn’t endanger Memphis .”

Puzzlement wrinkled his brow. “What could endanger it?”

“The truth,” she said. “Sometimes the truth can be a very dangerous thing.”

Tidwell retraced his steps. “What will I find if you open your files?”

She looked down at her hands, out the window at the spaceport, everywhere but at him.

“Privacy Level One,” she said at last, lifting her head and gazing levelly into his eyes. The offcom chimed. “Sit down, Dr. Tidwell. I’m going to rewrite your history for you.”

Tidwell listened for nearly an hour, growing paler and smaller with each passing minute. He did not interrupt or quibble, protest or resist. Nor did he make any sign of acknowledgment. He listened so passively that presently Oker interrupted herself to ask if he was all right.

“You’ve asked me to declare my life’s work irrelevant,” he said with a sad smile. “If what you’ve said is true, I’ve been a charlatan. I’ve built a career describing the symptoms of history while the cause went undiagnosed.”

“You’re hardly alone in that,” Oker said. “Less than a hundred people know.”

“Sasaki.”

“Of course,” Oker said. “She was the one who told me, six years ago.”

Tidwell shook his head. “I thought I understood the impulse. That part was written years ago. The unsuccessful search for extraterrestrial life. The sense of cultural mortality created by AIDS. The rechanneling of a post-Cold War economy.”

“All true. Just not the whole story. Another layer, lying underneath.”

“Yes—the curiosity! The unflagging, insatiable curiosity. The challenge to the spirit. From Lucretius to da Vinci to Tsiolkovsky to von Braun to Armstrong to Morgan. The dream they shared.”

“No,” Oker corrected. “The genes they shared.”

“I thought I was tracing the history of an idea. Now you claim that all I’ve done is track an infection.”

“Too harsh a word,” Oker said. “We are what we are.”

“Biology is destiny.” It was said with a cynical scorn.

“Hardly. We might have failed. Might still fail. Others did.”

“Others?”

“We’re not the first species to carry the Chi Sequence. Only the latest.”

“How far back?”

“To the beginning, perhaps. Life is a chemical reaction with audacity. And the meaning of life is to make new life. Nothing more. We just never understood the scale on which the drama was being played.”

“It isn’t our story. It never was,” Tidwell said hoarsely.

“It is now.”

Tidwell retreated, regrouped. “There is no proof.”

“No. Not for the past. But enough for the present.”

“Enough to make machines of us? Enough to make a joke of the will?”

“No. Do you know how hard it is to link complex behaviors and simple genes, even now? The Chi Sequence is a challenge, a call—you used the word impulse . We answered because we could.”

“Not because we chose to. You make my point.”

“No,” Oker said forcefully. “A marriage of choice and destiny. Dr. Tidwell, I didn’t accept this easily or happily. I did not want to be convinced. I was a Catholic. This has cost me my God.” She showed a faint frown. “You don’t have to believe, Dr. Tidwell. But the world is as it is. It doesn’t much care what we believe.”

“This is guiding policy?”

“Yes.”

Tidwell paused. “I want to talk to Sasaki.”

Oker nodded. “I’ll call her.”

The closest thing to an expression on Hiroko Sasaki’s face was a slight knitting of her thin black eyebrows.

“You lied to me,” Tidwell said plaintively.

“I did not.”

“She said you knew about the Chi Sequence,” he insisted, gesturing at Karin Oker, who was orbiting about him in Sasaki’s huge office at a psychologically safe distance.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

There was no hesitation. “Nearly ten years.”

“Since before you recruited me.”

“Yes.”

“Then you lied to me.”

Sasaki looked across the room and pinned Oker with her eyes. “Doctor, what instructions did you have concerning Dr. Tidwell and the Chi Sequence?”

“To tell him what I knew—no, I think you phrased it ‘what I believed’—if ever he should ask.” She looked at Tidwell. “I thought that was a mistake.”

“To keep it from me?”

“To tell you. Even now that it’s done, I’m not sure that it wasn’t a mistake. It’s nothing personal, Doctor. But if this gets out, everything we have planned is in danger.”

“Why is that?”

“You have the degree in sociology, Doctor,” Oker said. “Is it that hard to see? To brand ourselves the elect—”

“Yes,” Tidwell said, recalling the promise she had tried to extract from him. You wouldn’t hurt us, would you ? “Yes, of course.”

Sasaki rose from her cushion. “Thank you, Dr. Oker. Would you leave us now?”

Nodding, Oker moved toward the door. “I’m sorry, Dr. Tidwell,” she said, pausing. “I really am. I didn’t enjoy waking you.”

“I know,” he said.

She left, and Sasaki turned to Tidwell. “Thomas, will you sit with me?”

They sank to the cushions together. “I hope that you can understand,” she said. “Karin must believe. I must question. I need to know if I am making decisions for one generation or for all generations.”

“Does it matter?” asked Tidwell. “Can you do anything different for knowing?”

“Yes. I already have,” she said. “Thomas, I know that your pride has been hurt by what you view as deception—”

“Why should she know?” he burst out. “You tell her—you tell a hundred—and keep it from me . I considered you a friend, Hiroko.”

She reached for his hand, covered it with her own cool skin. “Karin is a talent, a gift, in her field. Her work for the Project required that she know. Yours required that you not know. I could not tell you, not if you were to do what I needed you to— what I still need you to do.”

“You presume too much.”

“That is pique speaking,” she said. “Thomas, I asked you to write our history because I knew that if this thread was there, you would find it on your own. That if the history you wrote and the history Karin has built coincided, that I would have my proof.”

“So what do you want?”

“Read your own writing. Ask yourself if reason and hubris and lebensraum and frontier fever are enough to explain it, to carry us from Olduvai Gorge to here. Or whether those are all synonyms for some other cause. Whether what we have done makes more sense or less for what you’ve heard today.”

“You think you know the answer.”

She bobbed her head in disagreement. “You misread me, Thomas. I hope that Karin is wrong.”

“Why?”

A faint smile. “Because I do not know that I am equal to a billion-year burden.”