The Quiet Pools

to do is listen to the questions and roll out answers. You scam me, I walk. You help me, you walk. Choose.”

A self-satisfied smirk spread across White’s face. “Sure. Sure, we racked the ’heads. Pure gold Olympic. Fagging top jazz.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Who d’you think, scammer?”

“What gave you the idea?”

White shrugged. “Saw the hit on the wire, looked like good jazz. Thought we’d join the party and make our own hit.” He laughed to himself. “ ’Heads seeing stars now.”

Dryke’s face was a mask. “Tell me about the ’heads.”

“Bore.”

“Tell me.”

“D’you know what I hate?” White said, coming up out of the chair, his body suddenly a coiled spring. “ ’Heads got going-away eyes.”

“What do you mean, going-away eyes?”

“Like they’re with you but they’re already gone. You seen ’em. They got their fagging noses in the air and their eyes blind with Starshine and they don’t see you. Like you’re a fagging ghost.” His face was hard and prideful. “Well, we made ’em see us. We gave ’em a proper good-bye.”

“They aren’t the ones who are going,” said Dryke. “The pioneers haven’t even been selected yet.”

“They’re all the same,” White said. “All the same to me.”

“Tell me about Homeworld.”

“Nothin’ to tell.”

“What about ‘For the Homeworld’ on the window?”

The youth sank back down into his seat and his casual slouch. “Jeremiah is cool jazz. You know brotherhood? He and me see the straight together.”

“Who is Jeremiah?”

“You know—Jeremiah. Man, he is the fucking Avenger. The knife in the night. And sweet. You can’t touch him.”

“You believe what he believes?”

“You hurt anybody who hurts you or yours. I believe that, aces.”

“Who did the starheads hurt?”

“They’re so fagging greedy. They get nine zeros handed to them and don’t even think about us,” White said. “What makes one of them worth a billion chits, huh?”

Months ago, a popular satiric comedian had added the Project to his list of favorite targets. Taking a recently published—though inaccurate—estimate of the cost per colonist to build and launch Memphis, he began asking his audiences, “So—what did you do with your billion dollars?”

It was inaccurate. It was unfair. Within Allied Transcon, at least above the work circle level, it was worth your life to admit that you found it funny. But outside the company, especially among those under twenty-five, the routine struck a chord. It had taken the comedian from the club circuit to the big arenas, and the question had joined the slanguage as a catch phrase.

The catch phrase had in turn spawned a hundred variations, from “When I get my billion…” to “He/she must have gotten my billion by mistake…” So it wasn’t much of a surprise for Dryke to hear another variation from Brian Elo White. But it wasn’t much of a pleasure, either, and Dryke had to fight off the temptation to give a sharp answer.

“Do you want to go?” he asked instead.

White snorted. “Hell, no.”

“Are you sure about that? What if I came here to offer you a chance to leave on Memphis?”

“Scammer.” White scowled. “You’d never take someone like me.”

“What if, Brian?” Dryke persisted. “Do you want to go?”

For a brief moment, White hesitated, caught between hope and skepticism. His eyes softened enough to admit a hint of wonder, and his face became that of a pensive child. Then the scowl returned, a cloud across the sun.

“You think I’m like them, beershit?”

“Do you want to go?”

“Spend the rest of my life with a bunch of ’heads, going nowhere fast? The hell with that. Fag ’em, fuck ’em, and rack ’em up. That’s all they’re good for. You understand?”

Nodding, Dryke said, “I understand.” Then he sprang forward, catlike. His right foot lashed out, catching the knee of the youth’s left leg and driving it downward. With the limb pinned between floor and chair, the knee hyperextended, then shattered with a horrible wet tearing sound that left the leg bent backward and started White screaming.

Writhing and wailing, White slid forward off his chair to the floor, clutching helplessly at the grotesquery. The steel toe of Dryke’s left shoe swung forward in a swift arc that intercepted the youth’s unprotected groin. White’s screaming ended with an explosive cry and a strangled whimper, and his already pale skin went shocky white. As Dryke stepped back, the youth disintegrated into a huddled, twitching mass on the floor.

“That’s for Dola Martinez,” Dryke said quietly as a furious Lieutenant Alvarez and several other Transit cuffs burst into the room.

“I promised him he’d walk,” was all he said.

They held him for more than an hour, first while they unraveled the status of a Russian-born British citizen carrying Brazilian diplomatic credentials, then while Lieutenant Alvarez balked at accepting the conclusions of that inquiry. He walked out of the station knowing that he had made no friends by what he had done.

But he also knew that only Mikhail Dryke and Hiroko Sasaki could rightly judge him, and that at least one of them believed that he had done nothing wrong.

Yotama Kimura led Dryke to the back of the clean room, where the jammer lay in pieces on a tear-down table. “This is Anna Romay,” he said, introducing the technician hovering over the dissected machine. “Anna, please show Mr. Dryke what you found.”

The technician reached for the articulated arm of the micro-viewer and pulled the screen forward. “There were three identifiers. The first was on the controller chip. The chip had been fried, of course, but they must have used an off-the-shelf bracket—see, here,” she said, turning it over under the lens of the viewer.

Dryke studied the screen, the block lettering stamped into the foillike metal. “Yes, I see it. ‘Inex, S.A.’ South Africa?”

“No. Inex, S.A., is a chip shop in Mexico City. An old Intel subsidiary, specializing in standard X-ray burns. They have a lot of customers, but the South Africans aren’t among them.”

“So this points toward Taiwan or Chile. Or one of the guerrilla shops in California or Arizona.”

“If you’ll be patient, I can do better.” She reached for another component. “Standard hardened hex-head lock screw. Eight-millimeter, forty-thread. Taiwan uses ten-millimeter, forty-thread.”

“So it’s from the West.”

“I thought so as soon as I saw the controller chip. This was the clincher,” she said, punching up a graph. “I did a mass spec on the casing. It came up with a mix that’s in the base as U.S. Government bronze, spec H. Very old formulation. There’s only seven mills around the world that still make it—three of which are owned by the Chilean government’s National Metals.”

“So it’s Chile.”

“I’d say so. Probably right out of military stores.”

Thoughts tumbled through Dryke’s mind. Could be a straight sale, which won’t take more than a bribe to track. The Chileans don’t worry about much past seeing that your money’s good. Or it could be black market, same reason. Or a sympathizer. That’d be the toughest. Give me greed over idealism any day—

“I hope that is adequate, Mr. Dryke?” asked Kimura anxiously.