Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“Everyone’s in it.”

“What do you think it says?”

Discomfort stirred McCutcheon’s emotions. “Well—your birth will be in the Vital Records stack, linked to your parents and your brother, at least.”

“That’s all?”

“Could be worse—it could have your death, too,” he said. She did not laugh, and he quickly added, “Seriously, if any of your relatives is chosen, as far out as third cousins, there’ll be at least a short biography and a still picture.”

“Have all the selections been named?”

“About half of them by now, I think. It’s hard to find out.”

She shook her head, a quiver against him. “I guess it doesn’t matter. The only one in my family with an option is my uncle— my mother’s brother. And there isn’t any way that they’ll take him. He doesn’t know how to do anything. All he’s got is a head full of dreams.”

His answer sounded patronizing even to his own ears. “It’s a huge library, Jessie. You might be in it a dozen times. A sound-off in the New York Times —your Clean Teeth Club Award for sixth grade—anything.”

“Loi will be in it. They’ll probably have a whole set of her sculpts.”

“I suppose they’ll have a few.”

Jessica started to cry. She was a quiet crier, not even troubling to wipe away the tears that tracked down her cheeks and dampened his shirt. “I just know I’m not in it. And they’ll never even know I was here.”

“I know you’re here.”

He meant the words to be comforting, but they only cut deeper.

“It’s not fair,” she said fiercely. “Everyone ought to be able to go. Or no one should go.”

“Slow down, Jessie,” he said. “There’s no way that everyone could go. We couldn’t even get everyone as far as the Moon. It’s a seventy-five-year project just to build five ships the size of Angleton or Freeport. Everybody calls Memphis a city in space. It’s just a little town, about to become the ultimate one-stoplight rural Hicksville.”

She straightened up and pulled away from him, sending an indignant Mobius to the floor. “I don’t really want to go,” she said in a little voice. “I just don’t want to be forgotten.”

He reached out and touched her cheek tenderly. “Who knows us in Bangladesh, or even Boston? What does it matter if a few people on a one-way trip don’t have stories to tell about Jessica Alexis Cichuan or Christopher McCutcheon?”

Eyes cast downward, she folded her hands in her lap. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “But I don’t have to like it.”

Christopher smiled and tugged at her hands. “Come here.”

She returned to his embrace with a sigh of sadness and gratitude. “I just want to count for something,” she whispered.

“You count here, with us. With me.”

This time she accepted the comfort of his words. “You count with me, too.”

“One, two, three, four—”

She pinched him, and laughed when he yelped. They settled in comfortably together again like two pieces of molding clay, holding hands, Christopher planting soft kisses wherever he could reach without dislodging their position.

“Maybe we could watch a skinner,” he said presently. “What was the one you liked? Tantric Fusion?’”

“I don’t need to,” she said.

“My apologies, ma’am.”

“But I think I’d like to make love.”

He smiled. “My pleasure, ma’am. Comfort the crippled, I say. They’re so grateful—”

“But I might change my mind if you don’t shut up.”

“Shutting up, ma’am.”

Fingertips lightly grazed bare skin where it could be found, teased and combed hair. Lips met in soft kisses, not yet fired by the impatience of passion. Hands played, locked together. A thumb rubbed the center of a palm. Teeth nibbled an earlobe, the nape of a neck. Their bodies in harmony, riding the rising curve that would soon take them upstairs to the big bed—

“Christopher.”

“Mmm.”

“Will you make a baby with me?”

He felt his body suddenly go rigid, his connection with her break. Children had never been an issue with Loi, ten years past fertility. And they were not supposed to be an issue with Jessie yet. “Now?”

“We could,” she said. “I ovulated yesterday.”

“What happened to your implant?” It almost sounded like an accusation.

“It ran out last month, or went bad,” she said, and snuggled closer. “I didn’t notice until it was too late to replace it.”

Christopher’s emotions were screaming protest, his body recoiling from contact with her. Oh, no , they said, oh, no, you’re not going to turn me into a father for the price of a cuddle-fuck . He did not have time to analyze those responses, so he made an effort to subdue them. “You never talked about wanting a baby now.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’d love to have someone to take care of. I think we’d be terrific parents.”

“That’s a family decision,” he said, still desperately trying to back away from her proposition. “We can’t make it for Loi.”

“Let’s call her, then. We could call her.”

“Jessie, that’s a fifteen-year contract.”

She finally sat up, pulled away from him. “I didn’t ask you for a contract—”

“There’s an implied contract the minute we’re naked together with you fertile.”

“—I just asked you to make a baby with me.”

“That’s not something you ask in the middle of a cuddle that’s heating up. It’s something you talk about when the sun’s up and your head’s clear.”

“You don’t want to,” she said accusingly. “All these excuses just mean you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” he said plaintively. “Not this way. Not now. And I don’t understand why you do.”

“A woman who hasn’t had a baby doesn’t count.”

“You’re just taking a hormonal hit—”

“No, I’m not,” she said, struggling to her feet. “I’m not a machine. Even if you wish I was. That’s what you want me to be. A nothing. A fuck-pillow.”

That Jessie, soft-voiced and smiling Jessie, would use such language revealed the depth of the betrayal she felt. “Jessie—”

“No. I don’t want to hear it. I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Jess—”

“And don’t even think about following me. Sleep in your own damned bed.”

It was only after she was gone that, replaying the conversation in his head, he began to wonder if it had been woven from a single thread, if the dead men in Antarctica and the hyperlibrary and the cuddling and the baby they weren’t making that night were somehow all of one piece.

If he said he understood why they were, he would have been lying. But he knew that it was so all the same, and there was no shortage of time alone that night to wonder on it.

The Memphis hyper could be accessed from Christopher’s entry terminal, or even, in a limited way, from an ordinary graphics station—just as DIANNA could be accessed by a lowly DBS phone in a pinch. But it was best accessed from a hyper booth, with its desk-sized flat-table display, wraparound sound, digital holo tank, and full voice command.

The only hyper booths in the complex which were on the Memphis net were those belonging to the Testing Section, on the first floor of Building 16. There were twenty of them, and they were almost always busy. Besides Testing’s own staff of verifiers, the booths served a parade of outsiders recruited to test the hands-off interface or wring out the stacks in their particular specialty.

Only the fact that it was a Sunday gave Christopher hope of catching a booth free. Had he waited until Monday, he would have had to settle for using his entry terminal. But waiting did not seem like a good idea. Saturday night’s chill had persisted into Sunday, with Jessie vanishing without explanation soon after rising. He stayed in the house and spied on her, monitoring her skimmer’s locator and Jessie’s family subaccount long enough to follow her to LifeCare and see a health services charge appear.