The Quiet Pools

Dryke nodded, a satisfied expression on his face. “That’s all I needed,” Dryke said. “One step closer to Jeremiah. One step at a time. I hope that you’ve pointed me in the right direction.”

“We share that hope,” Kimura said.

“I want you to document what you’ve shown me, then pack up the jammer and send it down to Brazil for safekeeping.”

“Immediately,” Kimura said. “Is there anything else that I can do?”

In the last five minutes, Dryke’s body had begun to remind him that he had had no sleep in thirty hours. “You can point me toward a bed,” he said.

Kimura smiled. “There are sleep tanks in Flight Operations and in Building 7.”

“Flight Operations, please,” he said. Because when I wake up, I’ll be leaving for Santiago.

CHAPTER 7 —CAG— “… fragile ecologies.”

It was the voice of authority vexed, carrying down the corridor of Syncretics’ suite and through the open door of the small counselors’ lounge.

“Malena? Is Gregory here yet?”

Inside the lounge, Malena Graham looked up from her book. She was not pretty, but art and artifice had made her attractive. A spill of chestnut hair framed a young, mannish face. Her blue flower-print dress was long enough to hide her useless legs.

“I haven’t seen him,” she called in reply.

The owner of the unhappy voice appeared in the doorway. “Didn’t he say he was coming in this morning?”

“I don’t know,” Malena said. “I ran late with my three o’clock regression, and he was already gone when we were done.”

A petulant look crossed the facilitator’s face. “I swear he said he was going to resculpt Mr. Barton’s cues.” She shook her head and gestured past where Malena sat in her airchair. “When you get a chance, try the Normandy water—I swear it tastes sweet this time.”

“I did,” Malena said. “It tastes like they didn’t flush the line. Or like what they used to flush it.”

The facilitator made a face and disappeared.

Malena returned to the book that she had been reading—a fantasy about the vengeful return of the Inca gods. Reading was the best way to forget where she was, to absorb the minutes remaining before her first appointment. Reading demanded her full attention. At times, it was hard work. Unlike with dyna-books and vids, she had to build all her own pictures from the author’s sketchy words. Sometimes it seemed more like her book than theirs. Distractions from life, Mother Caroline called them.

But Malena thought that she had every right to her distractions. Twenty years old, and no part of her life was what she wanted it to be. She was still a prisoner of both the airchair and her family’s solicitude, and the continuing lesson of her employment seemed to be that, in the real world, excellence was not always rewarded.

She had excelled in the personal development track, then chosen the thirty-month intensive at Adrian College (over the five-year relationship technology program at Virginia Technical) as the best and fastest route to employment and independence. At Adrian she learned that she could use her differently abled body as a wedge to crack open her clients’ emotional windows. At Syncretics, she often succeeded with those whom other counselors had pronounced truth-deaf.

I’m good. The largest regulars list on the staff, in just three years—so many that she could rarely take any walk-ins. She had no knack for channeling, but she was the best spiritual motivator in the branch, better even than Kirella. She could find the spark inside them and blow it into flame. They leave me better than they came to me.

And yet she was still here, in the smallest Syncretics franchise in the South Bay area. The counselor’s lounge itself said everything that needed to be said. It was no bigger than one of the five little encounter rooms at the front of the suite, half the size of the therapy rooms at the back—and six of them had to share it.

Nor did the lounge earn points for luxury. Its appointments consisted of a few soft chairs arranged around the periphery and a drink tap with waters, juices, and one choice from a rotating selection of caffeinates. That was the price of working for a franchise branch. The price of working for Syncretics, the McDonald’s of mind and body training.

At the company-owned Virginia Beach office, on the other hand, each counselor had his own Network cube, the charge pool was reserved for their use from eight to ten every morning, the sense therapy room from four to six every evening. But one Syncretics branch wouldn’t hire a counselor away from another—professional courtesy. (Bondage by conspiracy.) And the facilities at Interdynamics—she could only dream. You had to be a full R.T. to even think about working there.

That would come, three or four years down the road. It always took longer to catch up when you’d taken a wrong turn.

Kirella breezed into the lounge. “Hi, Malena,” she said, dropping a bulging armbag and herself into adjacent chairs. “How did things go Thursday?”

“Like death. Like slow poison,” she said, tucking the slate into a side pocket on the airchair.

Kirella laughed. “They didn’t like him.”

“They never gave him a chance,” Malena complained. “None of my fathers can think straight on the subject. It’s so obvious. They’re so used to protecting me from the health Nazis and self-pity that they automatically extended the coverage to my virginity.”

“A little late for that, aren’t they?”

Malena smiled mischievously. “Just a little—not that I can tell them that. Not that they’d listen. They won’t listen when I try to explain to them why they’re being such asses. Father Jack even had the nerve to ask to see Ron’s medical record.”

“I hope he refused.”

“He did—which is when open warfare broke out.” She shook her head. “Ever since I met Ron on the net, the family’s been delighted that I finally had a flick friend worth locking them out for. It’d be too much for them if I was sexually repressed on top of everything else. But let him show up in person, flesh and blood instead of shimmers in the cube, and suddenly it’s bar-the-door Katie. Fear and loathing.”

“My old roommate had pet rats named Fear and Loathing,” Kirella said, chewing idly on a stick of strawberry.

“Your old roommate was a mutant.”

“No argument.”

The slate chirped from its pouch. “Malena—your nine o’clock Buddhist is here.”

“ ’kay,” she said, and the airchair lifted off the floor. “My favorite,” she said cynically. “Koan flakes for breakfast.”

Kirella grimaced and looked for something to throw. ” You’re the mutant,” she said pointedly.

“No argument,” Malena said with cheerful insouciance. “Later, love.”

The encounter room was dark save for the single candle on the floor between Malena and the young man seated cross-legged and bare-chested facing her. His eyes were closed, his head tipped slightly back, his arms floating as though weightless a few inches above the floor, his hands palm up and open, fingers loosely curled.

Pretty, she thought. Pretty. If only he was willing to try a few more of the eight Paths— “The negative energy is black and heavy,” she continued in a low, warm, patient voice. “Look inside and find the dark places, the heaviness. The pain of your guilt. The sadness of your loss. It is only your choice that holds them there. Release them. Choose not to keep them, and they will drain from your body.