The Quiet Pools Read online

  It was at that moment that someone seized the strap of her binoculars where it rested on her neck and yanked violently. The hard-shelled glasses flew out of her hands and smashed against her face, the pain as sharp as it was unexpected. Dola cried out, her nose and mouth bloodied, as she ducked and twisted to escape. A moment later the binoculars vanished, torn away as she collapsed to her knees.

  “Take them,” she pleaded blindly. “I don’t care.”

  Her vision clearing, she looked up and saw one of the virgins standing atop the first row of the bleachers, whirling the binoculars over his head like bolas, his face a grim and twisted mask of hate. A few feet away, his companion shoved Archie, harmless little Archie, facedown on the concrete platform and then trampled him underfoot in pursuit of Eleanor. She quickly went down under a hail of punches.

  “Fucking starheads,” the youth with the binoculars snarled, and leaped forward. “Fucking starheads.”

  Dola ducked away from the whirling weapon and started to scramble toward the tram platform. It was then that she saw the girl standing in the exit, blocking the way with the aid of the black-tipped scrambler in her right hand. Her eyes were glowing with excitement, challenging, daring Dola to try to flee.

  Then a kick exploded in Dola’s midsection, and she sprawled flat on the platform. The binoculars whistled through the air and came down on the back of her skull, driving her face down hard against the concrete. The snap of breaking teeth and the pop of shattered cartilage blended with the screaming, animal and angry, that filled the observation deck.

  As Dola’s attacker looked for other prey, blood began to puddle beneath her, running freely from her torn and battered face. A sick, queasy chill raced through her, sucking the strength from her muscles, the spirit from her heart. She tried to raise her head once, a foolish, futile effort. Then, vision graying, she let go, escaping into unconsciousness, only realizing at the last that the most wrenching screams had been her own.

  Mikhail Dryke stood rigid, arms wrapped across his chest, body vibrating with barely contained fury, as he watched the transit medics roll the last of the injured past him to the waiting flyer. The bloody parade had included four women, three middle-aged men, a handicapped teen, all battered and bewildered.

  “What did we do?” one woman had asked beseeching as she was led away. “Why did they hate us so much?”

  Because you still have dreams, Dryke had thought impulsively. The medic attending her did not attempt an answer. His soothing words were empty balm, and, in that, were doubtless kinder.

  Jim Francis stood silent and uncomfortable beside Dryke, vacillating between empathy for the victims and concern for himself. The report had come in from the north gate as he and Dryke were reviewing system security. On his own, Francis would have merely acknowledged it and carried on. His office was his domain; the gates and fences belonged to those who worked for him.

  But Dryke had insisted on responding, and Francis had been obliged to trail along. The moment they were close enough to read the streaky red lettering smeared across the observation deck’s plex, Dryke’s countenance darkened. When they mounted the platform, hard behind the first medics, and saw the litter of bodies, he had gone white.

  The ambulance lifted and roared away toward the city, and Francis took a step forward. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do here,” he suggested.

  With a wordless look of contempt, Dryke started down the platform toward the observation deck and the trio of city police still working the scene.

  “Officer,” he said, accosting the nearest, “I’m Mikhail Dryke, Allied Transcon security.”

  “You folks made the call on this?”

  “Yes. If there’s something we can do—”

  “You did it.”

  “Did the medics give you any report on the injured?”

  “Nobody’s dead, if that’s what you mean.” He checked the screen of his slate. “The Martinez woman is about the worst of them—ribs, spleen, facials, concussion.” The officer shook his head. “You’d think the word’d get around,” he said. “You’d think they’d learn.”

  Dryke’s brow wrinkled. “This has happened before?”

  “Third time I know of. First for that, though,” he added, gesturing at the plex and the sun-baked graffito FOR THE HOMEWORLD.

  Dryke stared. “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “Well, this should be the last. City manager’ll probably recommend we close this up,” the officer said. “We can’t have someone here all the time, after all.”

  “We can,” Dryke said firmly. “Would that step on anyone’s toes?”

  “Not mine,” the officer said with a shrug. “You’ll want to check with Lieutenant Alvarez. Transit Division.”

  “I’ll do that,” Dryke said. “Excuse me.”

  Francis saw Dryke returning and brightened; he was eager to leave the platform. Then he saw how Dryke’s expression had hardened and began to quail.

  “Your office,” Dryke said curtly as he stalked past.

  But Francis’s office could not contain Dryke’s rage. It spilled over into the adjacent hallway and the Building 1 courtyard, into a cascade of whispers and gossip.

  “Why didn’t our people respond?” Dryke demanded, backing Francis toward his desk. “They were right there—they could have stopped it.”

  “The observation deck’s not Allied property,” Francis said defensively. “It’s not our responsibility.”

  Dryke balled his fists as though he were about to strike Francis, then caught himself and turned away. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  “Besides,” Francis went on, emboldened, “it could easily have been a diversion aimed at getting through the north gate. In fact, we don’t know that it wasn’t. The standard gate complement is three. If two of them go racing up to the platform to play hero, that’s as good as throwing the gate wide open. And considering what happened this morning, prudence—”

  Whirling, Dyke raged, “What about the last time? And the time before that? What excuse do you have for them? And why the hell didn’t I see something about this in your monthlies?”

  “That’s not Allied property,” Francis began bravely. “None of our people were involved—”

  “They should have been, goddammit, aren’t you listening?”

  Francis tried to stand his ground, though it had turned to sand beneath him. “I don’t believe that these incidents are properly the concern of Corporate Security.”

  ” ‘For the Homeworld’ painted in blood and it’s not our concern? Christ, would I have even heard about this one if I hadn’t happened to be here?”

  “These incidents are off-site, only outsiders are involved, and there’s been no threat to our people or our operations—”

  “A moment ago you were trying to convince me that there is a threat,” Dryke said coldly. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  Francis surrendered, the resilience leaving his body as he slipped down into his chair. “There were three incidents before today, not two,” he said. “The first time, a woman alone up there at night was raped. We didn’t know about it until it was over. The second time involved a couple, about thirty, who got roughed up a little. The third time, a couple of thugs scattered a pretty good crowd with pepperguns. I didn’t see where any of it touched us. If I was wrong, I was wrong.”

  “You were wrong,” Dryke said curtly. He flexed his shoulders and sighed. “All right. We’ve got some making up to do. Find out who those people were. I want flowers in their rooms by visiting hours. Sympathy and our sincere regrets. And if any of them have exposure on the medical bills, I want them to know we’re going to cover it.”

  Francis squinted questioningly at his superior. “Mr. Dryke, I understand the gesture, really I do. But isn’t that just going to make it seem like we’re admitting responsibility?”

  “We are responsible,” Dryke said. “If you don’t see that yet, you’re even denser than I thought.”

  “I w
as just concerned about liability—”

  “Let them sue us. We should have done more. Will do more. I want two of your people stationed on the ob deck around the clock, starting immediately. In uniform. I want them to be a presence,” Dryke said. “But a friendly presence—find some people with personality. Those folks that come to watch our ships fly are our friends. And we’re damn well going to start taking better care of our friends.”

  CHAPTER 3

  —UAU—

  “… a student of history…”

  Sitting back in his bowllike operator’s chair, Christopher McCutcheon studied the center pair of the ten standard displays arrayed before him in the darkened archaeolibrarian’s booth. His gaze flicked from the upper screen to the slim green-bound volume resting on his lap, then back. Frowning, he pressed the black bar on the right armrest.

  “Come on, Ben, you’ve got to have some cross-reference,” he said. “These guys didn’t come out of nowhere, write this book, and then vanish.”

  “I’m sorry, Chris,” replied Benjamin, the most agreeable of the library’s AIP constructs. “I find nothing with the search keys ‘A. Privat Deschanel’ or ‘J. D. Everett.’ I do find entries for the Lycée Louis le Grand, the Academy of Paris, Queen’s College in Belfast, D. Appleton and Company of New York—”

  “What’s the closest match on Deschanel?”

  A third display sprang to life to display a double-column list of names. “A Paul Eugene Louis Deschanel was the tenth President of the Third French Republic in 1920,” Benjamin said as a monochrome photograph appeared on a fourth display.

  “Birth date?”

  “February 13, 1855.” The text of a biography took over a fifth screen.

  “Too late,” Christopher said. “All right. New entry.” All five active displays blanked momentarily. “Key to title, author, coauthor, associations for both. Cross-link to physics, history of science, natural philosophy, mechanical engineering, technology. There’re a lot of cutaway drawings and diagrams in this one, so let’s make it an image upload with text call. Give me the null reference list on the big screen.”

  “I understand,” Benjamin said, and a slotlike drawer opened in the sloping semicircular panel below the bank of screens.

  Christopher leaned forward and laid the green volume in the drawer. “And be careful with that one,” he added. “It’s almost two hundred years old.”

  “Always, Chris.”

  It took bare seconds for the source upload to begin and the results to be reflected on the quiescent displays. Christopher sat back and watched the “picture window” display high above the center of the operator’s panel. As the library’s engine began analyzing the contents of Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy, thirteenth edition, 1898, the list of terms which had no reference anywhere in Ur’s library began to build: Atwood’s Machine, Vase of Tantalus, Morin’s Apparatus.

  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, a
mused.

  “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.”