Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

What good any of it would do the pioneers when they reached Tau Ceti was neither Benjamin’s nor Christopher’s concern. Their task was to help assure that the starship carried with it the most complete and most accurate library of human thought and experience available—a fully interlinked hyperlibrary drawing on sources neglected even by DIANNA and her counterparts DIANE in Europe and DIANA in Asia.

There were a hundred scavengers in the field, supported by a public appeal campaign paying finder’s fees to donors of material on the team’s Red List. More than two hundred of Allied Transcon’s Houston complement were working part- or full-time on the library, including forty archaeolibrarians.

Adding in the staff in Munich and Tokyo, as well as the scratch squad on Memphis herself, more than a thousand people were devoting their energies to building the pyramid. The Memphis library was already forty percent larger than that which had sailed with Ur , and exponentially more complex.

Even so, there was a crisis atmosphere in Building 16, a sober urgency which belied the fact that the target sailing date was still fourteen months away. Part of the urgency came from the realization that larger did not necessarily mean better. More than a quarter million errors had been found in the Ur library in the years since it sailed, and management was determined to produce a cleaner product the second time around.

The balance of the urgency came from the knowledge that Memphis’s sailing date was an absolute deadline. Data time on the starship’s thousand-channel laser link and the five-channel neutrinio was too precious for all but the most crucial corrections and updates. There would never be room for the likes of Infantry Drill Regulations 1911 , the novels of Michael Hudson, or Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy .

“Excuse me, Chris,” said Benjamin politely.

Christopher pressed the black bar. “Yes?”

“I see that the current volume is marked ‘Part One,’ and there are references in the text to a Part Two, a Part Three, a Part Four, and the topics covered in those volumes. Are those sources also available at this time?”

“No,” Christopher said. “Like I said, it’s almost two hundred years old. We are lucky to find this one—it turned up at an estate liquidation in Michigan. Nineteenth-century science texts are about as welcome as acid-based paper at the Library of C.”

“I’ll make secondary entries for the missing volumes with the information available,” Benjamin volunteered.

“Do that,” Christopher said.

“Shall I add them to the Red List as well?”

“No. But you can find me a current hydraulics instructional. A lot of these nulls look like demonstration gadgets. They may correspond to some of the computer models used later on.”

The instructional came up on a blank display a moment later. Christopher leaned on the red bar and began navigating through the full-color animated sequences with half-whispered commands, seeking a match for the pen-and-ink drawing on the adjacent screen. It was several minutes before he noticed the blue mail window up on display ten, and the one-word message therein:

LUNCH?—DK

“Send to Daniel,” Christopher said, touching the white bar. “Sure. I’ll come there. I can use the walk.”

The mail window dissolved into Daniel Keith’s sandy-haired and smiling visage. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. I need to get out of this zoo for an hour a lot more than you need to exercise. I’ll come to you. Twelve-fifteen.”

“Food’s better at the central cafeteria,” Christopher reminded his friend.

“If you get a chance to eat it,” Keith said dryly. “It’s three weeks until the first batch of selection notices. A selection counselor’s got about as much chance of enjoying a quiet lunch as Jeremiah has of being named captain of the Memphis .”

“Read and understood,” Christopher said with a grin. “I’ll see you downstairs in a bit.” He touched the black bar. “Ben, show me the Bramah Press again, will you? And let me know when it’s ten after.”

The rumble of a departing Pelican echoed in the garden courtyard just as Christopher McCutcheon and Daniel Keith were settling at a small table shaded by a broad-leafed tree.

“I’m serious,” Keith was saying. “It’s like they think the rules are different now than they were a year ago. I’ve had all kinds of offers this last month—and that’s from our people. God help me if anybody outside finds out what I do.”

“If you want to keep the secret, you’d better watch where you flash this,” Christopher said, reaching across the table and tucking the bottom half of Keith’s ID inside his shirt pocket. “We know what goes on in Building 37, too. You’d probably get accosted just on general principles.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Keith said, cracking his soup container open.

“So, did you report the offers?”

“A few. The serious ones. The scary ones.”

“Take any offers?”

Keith’s mouth worked wordlessly, then turned up in a sheepish grin. “No. And I don’t know if that makes me a saint or an idiot,” he said.

“Depends on the temptation in question, I guess,” Christopher said, amused.

“Ranged from truly sad to died-and-gone-to-heaven.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll have to show you. One woman mailed me sixty seconds of very—uh, wet video. On reconsideration, I am a saint,” Keith said. “Look, you must have something to talk about that doesn’t have anything to do with Memphis . Tell me about Jessica. Tell me how wonderful it is to wake up next to something like that.”

“Don’t tell me you want her, too,” Christopher said dourly.

Keith shrugged. “Hair down to here, tits out to there—what did you expect?” Then he caught the unhappiness in Christopher’s eyes, and his demeanor changed. “Don’t tell me there’s a problem already.”

“Yeah. Me.”

“Huh?”

He toyed with a spoon before answering. “I found out I don’t like sharing Jessie.”

“No surprise,” Keith said. “Nobody does. Your woman lies down with someone else and your genes start screaming at you for not protecting their interests. No matter how noble and rational you’re determined to be, there’s a little program running in the back of your mind saying, ‘No, you idiot,’ and worse.”

“I know.”

Keith went on, “This can’t have been a surprise, though—even though she’s only been living with you for, what, two months? A woman like that’s going to attract a lot of attention, and you three aren’t contracted. And hasn’t Loi had other lovers all along?”

Christopher nodded. “I couldn’t do anything about that. That was clear going in. That’s why she wouldn’t go for a closed contract.” He paused, then added quietly, “I guess that’s part of the reason I wanted Jessie in the house. I thought she was going to be all mine.”

“While she had to share you with Loi?”

“I said it was what I wanted. I didn’t say it was fair.” He sipped at his iced tea. “So maybe it’s justice, after all.”

“What’s justice? What exactly happened?”

“Loi and Jessie happened. While I was playing my usual Sunday gig down in Freeport.”

“Oh-ho.”

“Which means?”

“Which means I could have seen that one coming.”

“This makes sense to you?”

“Sure,” Keith said. “My moms were closer to each other than to either of my dads. Same thing happened with Brenda and Jo. As far as I can tell, if there’s two women in the house, they either form the strongest bond in the family or they split the family apart scratching at each other. Mostly the former.”