Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“Director Sasaki—” Minor began.

“Gone,” said the Skylink operator, shaking his head. “Nothing up or down.”

Minor looked helplessly at Sasaki. “Director, believe me when I say that we had nothing to do with any of this.”

“I do believe you,” she said, rising.

“I can give you a chance to make a closing statement.”

“Thank you. It’s not necessary,” Sasaki said.

“You’re going to give him the last word? This story’s going to be in the A queue for the rest of the week.”

She turned and met his perplexed look with a gentle smile.

“My mission is not to win converts. My mandate is to build starships.”

“Mandate?”

“Have you ever tried to push a string, Mr. Minor?”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“Do you think that the Diaspora Project is something that was created from the top down?” she asked chidingly. “This is not something that we are doing to the Earth. This is something I do for the Earth. Those who can, already understand. Those who do not, never will.”

When Sasaki rejoined Dryke and Donovan in the inner office, the latter greeted her with a disapproving look.

“I should have been told,” Donovan grumped. “The board should have been told.”

“Told what, Mr. Donovan?” All sixteen cells of the display were occupied, and she began to scan them.

“Listen, I’m not an idiot. You set up this interview to sucker Jeremiah. Mikhail here spent the whole time itching and fidgeting like he was waiting for the main act to go on stage.”

She glanced at Dryke, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Jeremiah is his own master.”

“Bullshit. You were laying for him. You used the Singapore business as cover for changing your colors. The only thing I can’t figure is what you got from doing it.”

“I appreciate your help in preparing for the interview, Mr. Donovan,” Sasaki said, gliding toward the display. “Please thank the board for making you available. You can relay to them that I do not expect to be granting any further interviews in the near future.”

Donovan frowned. “Yeah,” he said as he stumped out. “I’ll tell them.”

As the door was closed behind Donovan, Sasaki asked for Privacy One. “Well, Mikhail?” she asked. “How did we do?”

Dryke pulled the plug from his ear and broke into a smile. “We have a piece of him,” he said. “A good piece.”

“Tell me.”

“The Jeremiah image was synthesized with a Palette HI broadcast animator. Images, I mean. There were three different ones.”

“Three!”

“An equal-opportunity air pirate. He blanketed Europe and North Africa with a vaguely Mediterranean synth through SIRIO, fed the Far East with an Oriental bounced up through AUSSAT, and gave us the mountain man through Hiwire.”

“All things to all people,” Sasaki said wryly.

Dryke continued, “The video lab says that if all three had the same root image, they may be able to correlate them and back-form a fair picture of the real Jeremiah.”

“Is that all we have—a hope?”

“No,” Dryke said. “More than that. You know, you can route a call to your neighbor around the world if you know how, and by ten thousand different routes if you want to be creative. Jeremiah knows how, and he was creative. All three images were scatter-routed to the uplinks in short bursts—too short to track back. Jeremiah used one hundred and eighty routes—good for three minutes. But thanks to Mr. Minor, he stayed on for seven. And with a second and a third look, we were able to map six of his routes back to a common entry node.”

“Which is—”

Dryke looked up at cell 4, which contained a map of North America. “Monterrey, Mexico.”

“Monterrey! Is that his base?”

“Almost certainly not,” Dryke said, shaking his head. “He’s not that foolish. But it makes the odds very good that his base is in the Americas. He needs land-line access to the node. Jeremiah’s a neighbor, Hiroko.”

“Or an insider?”

“Perhaps,” Dryke said. “Can’t rule it out.”

Sasaki crossed her arms and nodded. “This is very heartening, Mr. Dryke. I can see progress at last. I am comforted that I did not endure Mr. Minor’s questions and Mr. Donovan’s molding in vain.”

“I’m not finished,” Dryke said. “There’s one piece more. The best piece.”

“Oh?”

“We always thought that Jeremiah’s voice was synthesized. Nothing exotic to it,” Dryke said. “But there’s one kind of solution for a canned track like we’ve seen before, and another for a live exchange like we just had.”

“The difference is important?”

“Very. For live work, the easy way is to give an AI translator—maybe an IBM Traveler—a cross-file of another voice, just like you’d give it a cross-file for French, say, and let it do the substitutions on the fly. But something interesting happens when you throw a word at a translator that it can’t find in the file. It passes that word through unchanged.”

Sasaki looked suddenly hopeful. “Did that happen?”

“Yes. With Julian’s name. Your name. And ‘starships,’ near the end,” said Dryke. “All different from the rest. All in Jeremiah’s own voice.”

“Can you do anything with so little?” Sasaki asked. “A few syllables—”

“It’s as good as a fingerprint. It’s enough to do a cross-match search in the Memphis hyper. Enough to set up a monitoring program on the corporate com net.” Dryke smiled, a smile full of threat. “You know, you can’t hardly work for Allied without saying your name or ‘starship’ now and again. If Jeremiah is an insider, we’ll find him very soon.”

“And if he’s not?”

“A little longer. But not much longer. We’re coming up behind him in the dark. One more gag and we’ll have him.”

“What will it take this time?”

Dryke thought for a moment. “A sacrifice.”

It wasn’t working.

“Why do you want to go on Memphis ?” Thomas Tidwell would ask the pioneer in the facing chair.

And more often than not, the person he was interviewing would freeze, as though seized by the sudden fear that the fix was not yet in, that somehow they could still lose what they thought they had gained. Anxious. Nervous. Defensive. It didn’t matter if it was the first question or the last, whetfler he was friendly or formal, whether it was Tokyo or Munich or Houston.

“This is not a test of any sort,” he would assure them. “Nothing you say to me can affect your standing in the Project.”

And they never quite believed him.

“My name is Thomas Tidwell. I am supervising the definitive history of the Diaspora Project, including the personal histories of every pioneer. We need to understand what kind of people took up this challenge, what they wanted, what they hoped.”

That helped a little, except that it tended to elicit the kind of answers he had found in the file of application essays—rambling anecdotes with the flavor of personal myth, inadequate and unconvincing except to the mythmaker. Why had they chosen to exile themselves from the only world they’d ever known? The answers remained buried in their individual psychologies.

A fifty-two-year-old American named Peg: “My great-grandfather was a mission specialist for NASA, flying the Shuttle back when it was all new. Joe Allen. He wrote a book about it—I read my mother’s copy when I was ten. But I was never much interested in space until the Project came along. It was all about as exciting to me as brushing your teeth. But this is different. This is like it was when my great-grandfather wore the blues.”