The Quiet Pools

“Enough to make machines of us? Enough to make a joke of the will?”

“No. Do you know how hard it is to link complex behaviors and simple genes, even now? The Chi Sequence is a challenge, a call—you used the word impulse. We answered because we could.”

“Not because we chose to. You make my point.”

“No,” Oker said forcefully. “A marriage of choice and destiny. Dr. Tidwell, I didn’t accept this easily or happily. I did not want to be convinced. I was a Catholic. This has cost me my God.” She showed a faint frown. “You don’t have to believe, Dr. Tidwell. But the world is as it is. It doesn’t much care what we believe.”

“This is guiding policy?”

“Yes.”

Tidwell paused. “I want to talk to Sasaki.”

Oker nodded. “I’ll call her.”

The closest thing to an expression on Hiroko Sasaki’s face was a slight knitting of her thin black eyebrows.

“You lied to me,” Tidwell said plaintively.

“I did not.”

“She said you knew about the Chi Sequence,” he insisted, gesturing at Karin Oker, who was orbiting about him in Sasaki’s huge office at a psychologically safe distance.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

There was no hesitation. “Nearly ten years.”

“Since before you recruited me.”

“Yes.”

“Then you lied to me.”

Sasaki looked across the room and pinned Oker with her eyes. “Doctor, what instructions did you have concerning Dr. Tidwell and the Chi Sequence?”

“To tell him what I knew—no, I think you phrased it ‘what I believed’—if ever he should ask.” She looked at Tidwell. “I thought that was a mistake.”

“To keep it from me?”

“To tell you. Even now that it’s done, I’m not sure that it wasn’t a mistake. It’s nothing personal, Doctor. But if this gets out, everything we have planned is in danger.”

“Why is that?”

“You have the degree in sociology, Doctor,” Oker said. “Is it that hard to see? To brand ourselves the elect —”

“Yes,” Tidwell said, recalling the promise she had tried to extract from him. You wouldn’t hurt us, would you? “Yes, of course.”

Sasaki rose from her cushion. “Thank you, Dr. Oker. Would you leave us now?”

Nodding, Oker moved toward the door. “I’m sorry, Dr. Tidwell,” she said, pausing. “I really am. I didn’t enjoy waking you.”

“I know,” he said.

She left, and Sasaki turned to Tidwell. “Thomas, will you sit with me?”

They sank to the cushions together. “I hope that you can understand,” she said. “Karin must believe. I must question. I need to know if I am making decisions for one generation or for all generations.”

“Does it matter?” asked Tidwell. “Can you do anything different for knowing?”

“Yes. I already have,” she said. “Thomas, I know that your pride has been hurt by what you view as deception—”

“Why should she know?” he burst out. “You tell her—you tell a hundred—and keep it from me. I considered you a friend, Hiroko.”

She reached for his hand, covered it with her own cool skin. “Karin is a talent, a gift, in her field. Her work for the Project required that she know. Yours required that you not know. I could not tell you, not if you were to do what I needed you to— what I still need you to do.”

“You presume too much.”

“That is pique speaking,” she said. “Thomas, I asked you to write our history because I knew that if this thread was there, you would find it on your own. That if the history you wrote and the history Karin has built coincided, that I would have my proof.”

“So what do you want?”

“Read your own writing. Ask yourself if reason and hubris and lebensraum and frontier fever are enough to explain it, to carry us from Olduvai Gorge to here. Or whether those are all synonyms for some other cause. Whether what we have done makes more sense or less for what you’ve heard today.”

“You think you know the answer.”

She bobbed her head in disagreement. “You misread me, Thomas. I hope that Karin is wrong.”

“Why?”

A faint smile. “Because I do not know that I am equal to a billion-year burden.”

“One starship has already sailed.”

“One is not enough,” she said. “One is a frail reed. You must help me, Thomas. Reflect. And then come and tell me what you see, so that I will better know what it is that I must do.”

He sighed, covered her hand with his. “You ask a great deal.”

“From you, as from myself.”

Tidwell squeezed her hand and then freed it. “A question?”

“Of course.”

“Do I carry the Chi Sequence?”

Sasaki answered without hesitation. “I do not know,” she said. “You were never tested. Do you wish to be?”

His breath caught and he looked at her wonderingly. He had expected an answer, not a choice. Tell me yes, tell me no, and then I’ll go away to worry about what it means. To look inside myself as well as my history. Then he saw with sudden insight that he had been given a gift. Yes, yes—what song does your body sing, and where did you first hear it? It was not something he should have to be told. He would find out for himself.

“I think not,” Tidwell said. “Not yet.”

He could not decide whether he was pleased or annoyed by Sasaki’s approving smile.

CHAPTER 9 —CUA— “…look on your works and weep.”

The next time Christopher McCutcheon looked up, August had vanished, leaving very few tracks on his consciousness. It had been a nothing-much month, one day folding unnoticed into the next, time evaporating in the summer Texas sun.

Even the aftertaste of July’s crises had faded into gentle memory. His father, conscience or curiosity satisfied by Christopher’s visit, had pursued no further contact. And Christopher’s brief panic over Loi and Jessie subsided as his worst fear—that of being excluded when all three of them were home together— failed to materialize. The worst crisis at Kenning House that month was the discovery of a nest of Formosan termites in the backyard.

But in the world around him, and in the greater world beyond, August had been a busy, sometimes turbulent month. At work, the new front gate was opened, freeing Christopher from dependence on the tram. Thomas Tidwell, titular head of Christopher’s division, made not one but two visits, events rare enough by all accounts to be a curiosity. One of the center’s archaeolibrarians was picked for Memphis’s staff; two others quit, and one—a woman named Barbara Manly—committed suicide, when they learned they were not.