The Quiet Pools

Global Technocracy and Faith and Fear. But he gained notoriety with a single work, a series of nine videssays on the sexual mores of the last pre-AIDS generation.

Curiously, A Summer in Eden was seen as validation by both the most conservative and the most experimental elements of society. For the former, it was a cautionary parable, a warning of dire consequences if the rigid mores of the AIDS era were recklessly abandoned. For the latter, it was an exhilarating manifesto, an invitation to abandon now-irrelevant conventions and re-create a lost age of sexual freedom. The two poles had been fighting a war of opinion ever since—more than twenty-two years.

One voice that did not join the debate on either side was that of Thomas Tidwell. In an early interview, he said simply, “Eden is no more important than any other of my works, and everything I have to say on the subject is contained within its nine segments. That was, after all, the point of making it.”

But that did not end the questions, nor restore to Tidwell even the tenth part of the blissful invisibility which he considered one of his two most important working tools. His next work, a serious study of the 2042 Amerussian “Peace Police” treaty, was mispromoted by a syndicator eager for another licensing bonanza and misreviewed by nearly everyone. Popular media condemned it for dullness; dull journals condemned him for his popularity.

Tidwell had no more to say about the reception of The Guardians than he had that of A Summer in Eden. And if the ego-crushing reception given the former was as painful for Tidwell as it would have been for any normal man, not even his friends were allowed to know it. A few, including his wife Marion, even suspected that he had deliberately and calculatedly set out to puncture the balloon of his own fame.

But for what happened next, they might have continued to suspect that.

In the preceding months, Tidwell had rejected two offers from Allied Transcon to become official historian of the Diaspora Project. But he had continued to listen with interest. The opportunity to write the definitive account of what would either be humanity’s greatest leap or its greatest stumble, to create what amounted to the cultural memory of an entire new community, was tempting. Almost tempting enough to coax Tidwell to surrender his other precious tool—his autonomy.

Almost, but not quite.

Then came The Guardians, and on its heels a new offer from Allied which contained new guarantees of access and independence. This time Tidwell signed, insisting, perhaps even believing, that it was the latter that swung the balance.

“I intend to take a thousand-year view of the Diaspora—five hundred years into the past and five hundred years into the future,” he had said at the press conference announcing his appointment. “I will be loyal to the truth and no one else. Allied understands this. I will have the full cooperation of the principals and the freedom to write what my conscience and professional judgment dictate.”

But guarantees were paper things, easily crushed by bureaucracies, frayed by time. It was periodically necessary to breathe life into the cold, precise legalisms. That was the task which faced Tidwell now, which had drawn him from his comfortable manor house near Halfwhistle, within sight of Hadrian’s Wall, to the executive suites of the Selection Section in Prainha.

Waiting for Karin Oker, Tidwell stood at the window and looked out at the spaceport. The contrast between the place Tidwell had left and the place he had come to could hardly have been sharper. The North Country was all rounded edges, a much-tramped land littered with history. Prainha was all hard edges, carved in relatively youthful memory from the Amazon forest.

The fairy-castle mountain of the Kare-Kantrowitz launch tower was a garish superposition on the denuded forest, the spacecraft which screamed away from its four-kilometer summit harsh substitutes for the parrots and macaws they had displaced. The blanketing rectenna, which sprawled across more than sixty square kilometers, was a metallic parody of the former jungle canopy. Spreading its “leaves” wide, it captured precious energy from space; in its shadow, a bustling ecology of technology thrived.

Tidwell wondered if they saw what they had done here, if they recognized the truth in Jeremiah’s charges. Someday I will have to ask Sasaki—

The inner door of the suite opened, and an olive-skinned man emerged, followed closely by a pale, willowy blond-haired woman. “Thank you, Raja,” she said. “We’ll take it up at the weeklies.” Then she looked past her companion to Tidwell. “Professor Tidwell?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Karin Oker. Welcome to Prainha, Professor.” She nodded toward the window. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?”

Both the honorary title she used and the assumption that this was his first visit to Brazil were in error. He noted the lapses, but did not trouble himself to correct them. It was enough to learn from them that she was ignorant of who he was and that she viewed meeting with him as a necessary annoyance.

“I was just contemplating that fact,” he said, settling in a chair facing away from the window. “Will we have privacy here?”

“If we ask for it,” she said, selecting her own chair. “Privacy Level Two, please.”

The offcom acknowledged with a musical note.

“There,” she said. “We won’t be interrupted except by the Director or a base emergency.”

“Thank you,” he said with a polite smile. “I appreciate it the more for knowing that I, too, am an interruption. I very much regret finding it necessary to come here. But this seemed the most direct way of ending the running battle between your people and mine.”

“Battle?”

“My staff’s struggle to collect the information I require, and your staff’s struggle to keep it from us. It’s a sorry business when one branch of Allied has more difficulty getting cooperation from another branch than it does dealing with outsiders who have no reason to help us.”

“I wasn’t aware that you were having such problems,” Oker said. “If there have been, I’m sure that they’re based on misunderstandings. What have you been denied?”

“I’m less concerned about what we’ve been denied than with the fact that the working relationship between us has turned for the worse. We were partners with you. Now we are treated as supplicants, and reasonable, routine requests are met with excuses, delays, denials, and half-answers.”

Oker was unhappy and unpracticed at hiding it. “Professor Tidwell, surely you understand that Selection’s work is the most sensitive area of the Project. Much of the data, even the procedures we use, is personal or proprietary. Obviously, any release—even to the Historian’s Office—needs to be screened and reviewed. And just as obviously, some requests might need to be denied.”

Drawing himself up in his chair, Tidwell said in measured tones, “I am responsible for creating the definitive history of the expedition. That includes the personal histories of every pioneer. Remember, please, that this history is not only for us but for them. I have to anticipate questions which may not be asked for fifty years.”

“I have to ask again—what have you been denied?”

“Personal histories include genetic histories. But we have been told we may not have access to your genetic library,” Tidwell said. “And when we request a briefing on the final selection criteria, I expect more than a copy of the application file you made available to prospective pioneers.”

Oker was shaking her head. “Hordes of lawyers are poised waiting to file suit on behalf of unsuccessful candidates. Every lawsuit has the potential for disrupting the prep schedule, or worse, taking the selection decision out of our hands.”

“We are neither lawyers nor litigants. What has that to do with us?”

“There are thousands of Allied employees holding options,” Oker said stubbornly. “Letting detailed selection data out into the corporation is an invitation to trouble.”

“Perhaps, being comparatively new to the Project,” said Tidwell, “you don’t realize that this sort of information was made available to us for the Ur library.”

“Times are different now,” Oker said.

“Not in any meaningful way. Surely, the first thing that any competent lawyer would do is subpoena our records.”

“And he would fight any order to release them. We would destroy them rather than release them.”

“Interesting,” Tidwell said. “Are the selections that subjective? Are we afraid to defend our selection practices in public?”