Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

The human Diaspora, by contrast, was the rough-and-tumble marriage of romance and hubris, blessed by the twin gods of technology and opportunity. Choice was the key variable—a minority’s choice, it was beginning to appear, but choice all the same. In evolutionary terms, Memphis was merely a whim, no more essential a part of the human pattern than the colonization of the Americas by the Asiatics or the subsequent invasion by the Europeans. Economics and natural resources, national and international politics, greed, glory quests, idealistic visions— surely they were enough to explain humanity’s mythical “frontier spirit.”

Conation on the one hand. Choice on the other. It was ludicrous to think that they could be part of the same thing. And yet his father had believed it, and his father was not a fool. His father had believed it, and that belief had killed him.

Christopher’s questions pointed back toward the Project, and he could only think of one person there who might be both able and willing to answer them.

As soon as he cleared the Bonneville flight control zone, Christopher gunned the Avanti and pointed it skyward.

“Lila?”

“Yes, Christopher?”

“Would you see if you can get through to Daniel Keith at AT-Houston?”

“Secure or direct?”

Christopher considered. “You still know some of your routing tricks?”

“Yes, Christopher.”

“Secure.”

“Calls into Allied Transcon should be assumed to be monitored. A voice-only connection should be untraceable for three minutes.”

“Do your best. Put it through.”

It took but a second for the green bar on the dash to glow. “Keith,” said a voice.

“Daniel, this is Chris.”

An ominously long silence followed. “I don’t think I can talk to you, Chris.”

“I’ll call you later, then. At home.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I think you know.”

Christopher had been half prepared for this. “Daniel, you have to know that whatever they’re saying about me is a lie.”

“Then why did you resign?”

“Who says I did?”

“Chris, Loi called me last night, worried about you. She asked me if I knew where you were.”

“Why didn’t she call me?”

“She did. You’re off-net. The call just came back to the house,” Keith said.

Christopher looked at his bare wrist dumbly. “I lost my band.” Lange or the sentries must have taken it from him, but he had no memory of that.

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, I asked a few people a few questions, as a favor. My curiosity wasn’t exactly rewarded.”

“Damn it, Daniel, corpsec murdered my father.”

Another long silence. “I can’t discuss that,” Keith said finally.

It was such a surprising answer that Christopher’s mental wheels stalled as he tried to embrace it. “I need to see you.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith said curtly. “I can’t help. Call Loi, will you? She deserves better.”

Calling Loi was a duty which had tugged at him more than once since Dryke and his people had left the ridge. Something had always intervened—most often the sobering finality of being severed from his life in Houston, paired with the stark futility of trying to reclaim any part of it. Thinking about Kenning House only evoked feelings of helplessness and rootlessness. He wanted to go home too much to be able to admit to Loi—even to himself—that he could not.

Instead, he called Skylink Customer Service and changed his residence pointer to the Avanti, which had a comsole almost as powerful as the one in Houston. The next distraction was replacing his personal phone—now that he had noted its absence, he felt naked without it.

Lila steered him to an executive supplies retailer in one of Portland’s older mail-malls, who offered him a Brazilian-made four-channel wrist phone at Pacific Land Management’s customary generous discount. Outside in the car, he completed the process, initializing the phone with his account number and checking that his directory was intact. When the confirming message came back on the bounce, his last excuse was gone.

“Lila—Skylink is owned by Tetsu Communications?”

“That’s correct.”

“Which is a corporate sibling to Takara Construction, Allied’s primary contractor for Memphis .”

“Yes. Both are subsidiaries of Kiku Heavy Industries, Ltd., a Tokyo-based private stock corporation.”

“How hard is it for Skylink to listen in on the traffic that they’re carrying?”

“It is quite easy, Christopher. Mr. McCutcheon used it only as a last resort, and always with encryption,” Lila said. “If you need to send a message, I can handle it more safely.”

“That’s all right,” Christopher said. “I just wondered.” He touched his phone, and the command bar glowed. “Message to Loi Lindholm. Hold to end, then send,” he said, then paused. “Begin.”

“Hello, Loi. This is Chris.” His heart was racing, even though he did not have to fear her response. “Daniel said that you were worried,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m sorry. I— these last few days have been the hardest days of my life. Allied’s thrown me out. They think I’m a security risk. And my father—” The tightness threatened to return, and Christopher found other, safer words. “I’m staying at my father’s for a while. I need to figure out what to do.

“I miss you. I wish to God I could come home.” He swallowed hard. “End of message.”

The delivery acknowledgment came back on the bounce.

“Well, Lila—do you know anywhere I can buy a life transplant, cheap?”

“I’m sorry, Christopher. I do not.”

He sighed and squeezed the throttle. The Avanti edged forward. “Then I guess I’ll just come on back to the house.”

For no good reason he could divine, only twice during the drive did he think about crashing the car at full throttle into an approaching ridge.

Curled up on the couch in front of the high-D TV, propped up by pillows and a flask of Puerto Rican rum, Christopher let the sounds and images wash over him.

The TV came up with a pop station out of Los Angeles preselected. But he made no effort to search through the channels, for he was no more interested in one offering than another. He was escaping, and he knew it—and it hardly mattered where he escaped to, so long as he got away.

So a chat show on lesbian incest, with a bioethicist, a Catholic Reform priest, and the national director of Family Love dueling at close quarters, was as good a diversion—no better, no worse— as the seven thousandth rerun of a medical comedy. He remained a passive observer of both, asking no questions and voicing no opinions during the former, declining his part as a heavily bandaged patient in the latter.

He was feeling a bit more participatory during a half-hour pitch for the Because You’re a Woman diet, drawing gargoyle faces on the men and undrawing the clothing of the women. Even the insanity of Denali Devil’s Downhill amused him, at least until a grinning Irish skier missed a gate at the seventeen-thousand-foot level and fell off the mountain at what the announcer straight-facedly called a “high terminal velocity.”

Emboldened by liquor and pity, Christopher risked a glimpse at Current Events, morbidly curious about what they were saying now about him, about Malena Graham, about Jeremiah. He was almost disappointed to find that Current Events wasn’t saying anything at all—not so many as five of the nine hundred stories in the Current Events stack had anything to do with the Diaspora.

Displacing them was a juicy drama—the collapse, just after midnight, of a centuries-old room and pillar salt mine a thousand feet under the trendy Melvindale section of Detroit. Sixteen square blocks had subsided ten meters in a jolt, dropping short-stack condos into their own basements and folding a crowded spin club flat.