Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

Tidwell blinked, and the face changed.

A handsome, earnest young Tanzanian named Zakayo: “When I was twenty, I climbed to the Kibo summit of Kilimanjaro with an expedition of Australians. I thought I had done a great thing until night came and the stars came out to show me I had not climbed high enough.”

Tidwell blinked again, and the room changed. Munich, not Houston. A blink. Tokyo, not Munich.

Realwadee, a Malay Thai woman, barely a woman at nineteen: “My option was a gift from King Adulyadej on my admission to Ramkhamhaeng University. My selection honors my father, my family, and my sovereign lord. Can I do other than go?”

If he questioned them further, probed for the reasons and emotions underlying the words, he lost whatever measure of trust and goodwill he had managed to manufacture. Either they were telling him what they believed was the truth, and resented his questions as a slight on their honor, or they were telling him what they believed they must, and retreated before his questions to protect their fictions.

It was not working, and Tidwell was frustrated. The immaculate synthesis of a lifetime’s work had been smashed that afternoon in Sasaki’s office, and he had been unable to reconstruct it.

He remained unwilling to revise it. Tidwell’s private briefings with Selection’s geneticists and counselors, arranged by Oker, had left him unsatisfied. It was too much like going to church with True Believers. And Tidwell did not believe.

Could not believe. He was the silent observer, the fair witness, the impartial analyst. He could not embrace anyone’s passion. He was beyond or above or one step removed from passion, from this particular passion. When the great ship sailed, he would stand on the dock and wave good-bye without the smallest pang of regret.

But Tidwell could not suffer the thought of waving good-bye with the root question still unresolved. So when Oker’s geneticists were finished with him, Tidwell had launched himself on a globe-spanning quest for answers. In the month since his visit to Prainha, Tidwell had spent all but four days away from Halfwhistle, continent-hopping like a tourist on a seventeen-city holiday.

After more than two years of reclusion, it was too much too fast. By the time he reached Tokyo to interview a selection of pioneers being processed through that center, Tidwell was sick of travel, of strange beds and sleeping poorly, of fighting a balky biological clock. His health was faltering, and with it his concentration.

At the end of the Tokyo sessions, Tidwell retreated to Half-whistle, his thoughts in disarray. In his garden he pruned away neglect and worried over faltering shrubs and flowers. In his journal he wrote:

I fight against myself not to cast out this unwelcome intruder before he speaks another word in my ear. His voice is the voice of the banished—Lamarck and Baer, Spencer and Miller, Crick and Corning. There is only one history of the world. It begins with the rejection of mystery, with penetrating the illusion of purpose. The notion of purpose is meaningful only in the context of individual lives. Beyond that there is a synergy of chance and fate and individual purpose which is ultimately stochastic.

Nothing is as it was meant to be. Everything is as it happened to be. We flatter ourselves with notions of progress. But progress is merely opportunism seen in hindsight. We salve our burning conscience with visions of Gaea, God become goddess become cybernetic superorganism. But Gaea is merely wish fulfillment, the newest clothes for an old craving. We await the return of the greater power to enforce the greater good, to save us from our selfishness.

I have already written this story. This is the story of the power of a dream. Of that which is quintessentially human—the tug of curiosity, the spur of ambition, the heat of passion, the drive of hubris.

Now Sasaki seduces me with a new delusion embracing an old and discredited idea. Where and when did purpose arise in a world of chance? At the beginning. Before the beginning. Purpose preexisted history. Purpose preordained history. All sins are justified by the imperative command. All crimes are forgiven in the name of necessity.

This ground bears the footprints of lost souls. I must walk carefully.

The houses in the Nassau Bay residential complex were aging, inefficient frame structures, survivors from an earlier century’s winding-street waterfront suburbia. Once a satellite community to the Johnson Space Center, Nassau Bay was now inside the fences, absorbed into Allied’s Houston facility as a sort of decentralized dormitory.

Three score of the better houses were being used as residences by center staff, including the center director and several other Building 1 types. Two of the largest houses, one overlooking narrow Nassau Bay, the other on little Lake Nassau (now a captive lagoon) had been converted into pilots’ hostels. And in the years between Ur and Memphis , several of the empty structures on Nassau Bay’s quiet streets had been used as illicit lovers’ rendezvous, giving the complex its nickname of “Noonerville.”

But there were no empty houses now, and the streets were again full of life. Once again, Nassau Bay belonged to the pioneers—one to a bedroom, two, three, or four to a house. There were few amenities, but diligent—if minimal—maintenance had kept the complex clean and livable. And the energy and joyful camaraderie of its occupants turned Nassau Bay into a community.

“It’s like a college campus the weekend before fall classes begin,” Daniel Keith observed as he walked slowly down a Nassau Bay sidewalk with Thomas Tidwell. “Everyone’s starting with a clean slate. Everyone’s ready to meet and make new friends. It’s like they get here and say, ‘I know you.’ The bonding rate is incredible. The sociology team really has to scramble to keep on top of it.”

That was what had brought Tidwell there: the promise of a more intimate glimpse into the mind and heart of the Memphis pioneers. It was old-fashioned, dirty-fingernails primary research, contemporary field anthropology of a sort that Tidwell had not resorted to in thirty years.

“We’ve only got about four hundred pioneers in the center at the moment,” Keith said as he unlocked the door to a little house, “so we’ve still got some room. Your housemates are all ship’s staff. They’ve got a very intensive training schedule—don’t expect to see them from six to six most days.”

The house was a few degrees cooler than the sultry air outside. “I understand,” Tidwell said, setting his small bag on the threadbare couch. “But I won’t be here if they aren’t. I intend to wait with them at the shuttle stops, sit with them in the cafeteria, huddle with them in whatever private spaces they’ve chosen. After all, I am Thomas Grimes, communications auxiliary—a correspondent for the ship’s log.” He smiled. “A flack for the ship’s morale officer, more to the truth.”

“I don’t know that you’re going to be able to hide who you are for long,” said Keith. “There are people here who know you, Dr. Tidwell.”

Tidwell nodded. “Perhaps not. I don’t believe it will take long.”

Shaking his head, Keith held out the key he had used to admit them. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but I have to say that I think you’re looking under the wrong rock, Dr. Tidwell. You won’t learn anything from these people. They don’t know, themselves.”

Tidwell took the key. “That defies reason. How can they make such a monumental decision without knowing their own minds?”

“Because it isn’t reason that drives them,” Keith said simply.

“If so, then that will be the lesson I’ll take from here.”

“Will you know it when you see it?”