The Quiet Pools

None of those events had touched Christopher more than tangentially. He recalled them with no sense of involvement or emotional investment, not even that which a witness might feel. Not even for Manly. She was an older woman, a fiction and theater specialist, working in a different project circle in a different part of the building. He was a casual spectator, a passive bystander, the distance between him and her death as great as the distance between him and an image on the multimedia.

He wondered at his own reaction. After the first moment of shock, he could find little more than puzzlement inside. Why had she done it? Building the library was a contribution, a way of taking part. Why was that not enough for Barbara Manly? Daniel Keith had cried for her. Christopher had not. He could not sympathize with the incomprehensible.

Too, part of the distance was numbness. There was too much death to grieve over each departed. All month, the news seemed to cater to a morbid, obsessive fascination with the many and varied ways that people find to die. The running blood in the street, the raglike bodies lying crumpled on the savanna, the burned, the broken, those who went fighting, those taken by surprise—they were all ways to touch the untouchable, to hold in one’s hand the idea of one’s own mortality. How will I die? Like this? Like this? How awful, how sudden, how unfair, how noble, how right. How unready I am—

Death. The world was more peaceful than at any time in a century, and yet there was no end to the dying. The Peace Police were back in West Africa, but not before more than three hundred fell in clashes along the Mauritania-Mali border. A fire in Phobos Station killed three astronauts and left the second largest Martian outpost uninhabitable. One of the Global Environmental Watch’s high-altitude ozonator barges fell out of the sky over the Antarctic, condemning three of its crew to a fiery death and the one who succeeded in ejecting to a slower, icy end. And so on.

Christopher watched the news of the airbarge crash cuddled with Jessica on the huge brown family room couch, with Mobius in turn sprawled on Jessica’s lap in one of the classic boneless-cat positions which had earned him his name. It was the last Saturday of the month. He should have been rehearsing for Sunday’s gig; he could have been at an end-of-summer court party at a residential center just three blocks away. But he had the energy for neither.

Besides, Jessica needed the company. Her left foot was sheathed in an air cast and propped on an ottoman. Inside the cast was a freshly broken ankle, painful trophy of yesterday’s spill down a shopping center escalator. And Loi was in Brussels for the debut of a commissioned sculpture at the Alianti Gallery.

So they cuddled together wordlessly, snacking at crackers and cheese, sipping at a fruity Piesporter that one of Loi’s lovers had sent as congratulations. When the news was over, the screen returned to its normal cycling display, now a Brinwell animate of faces in a flickering fire.

“Aargh,” she said. “Switch off.”

The screen blacked, and Jessica sighed relievedly.

“Do you want to watch something else?” Christopher asked, kissing the top of her head. “We have that new Mojembe film in the capture queue.”

“Loi wanted to see that most,” she murmured.

“That’s right,” Christopher remembered. “No point in paying for two showings. Well—what about Loi’s Hearkentime? It’s a good lazy-evening kind of timesculpt, and I’ve only done it once.”

“Are you bored with me?”

He kissed her head again. “Heavens, no. I just didn’t want you to be bored.”

“I like cuddling,” she said. “Mobius and me. We just kind of gravitate to warm places and cuddly people.”

“McCutcheon Heat Friction, Ltd.,” he said in an affected voice. “You’ve come to the right place, ma’am. No client too female or too furry.”

“What if they’re female and furry?”

“There’s a surcharge.”

She chuckled and snuggled closer. “Chris?”

“What?”

“Can you get into the library from here?”

“The Memphis library?”

“Um-hmm.”

“No,” he said. “There are no external ports to the system. For security. I wish there were. Some days I’d like to be able to work at home like a normal person.”

“If you could work at home, you two’d have stayed in San Francisco, and then I’d never have met you.”

“True. I’ll try to remember that the next time I trudge off to work feeling like a tradesman instead of a professional.”

“What was that you were doing this morning?” He had spent three hours in Loi’s office after breakfast.

“Logs and mail and such,” he said. “Documentation. That’s different. Different system. Why?”

“I was just wondering if you could look me up.”

“Hmm?”

“In the library. I was just wondering what it said about me.”

“Oh,” he said. “No. I can’t do that from here.”

She twisted her neck to look up at him. “Can you do it Monday? When you go in?”

He looked down into her eyes curiously. “I could. Why does it matter? What made you think of this?”

“I don’t know,” she said, turning away from his scrutiny and resting her cheek on his chest. “I guess I just wondered what they’d know about me, when they’re living out there wherever. Do you think I’m in it?”

“Everyone’s in it.”

“What do you think it says?”

Discomfort stirred McCutcheon’s emotions. “Well—your birth will be in the Vital Records stack, linked to your parents and your brother, at least.”

“That’s all?”

“Could be worse—it could have your death, too,” he said. She did not laugh, and he quickly added, “Seriously, if any of your relatives is chosen, as far out as third cousins, there’ll be at least a short biography and a still picture.”

“Have all the selections been named?”

“About half of them by now, I think. It’s hard to find out.”

She shook her head, a quiver against him. “I guess it doesn’t matter. The only one in my family with an option is my uncle— my mother’s brother. And there isn’t any way that they’ll take him. He doesn’t know how to do anything. All he’s got is a head full of dreams.”

His answer sounded patronizing even to his own ears. “It’s a huge library, Jessie. You might be in it a dozen times. A sound-off in the New York Times—your Clean Teeth Club Award for sixth grade —anything.”

“Loi will be in it. They’ll probably have a whole set of her sculpts.”

“I suppose they’ll have a few.”

Jessica started to cry. She was a quiet crier, not even troubling to wipe away the tears that tracked down her cheeks and dampened his shirt. “I just know I’m not in it. And they’ll never even know I was here.”

“I know you’re here.”

He meant the words to be comforting, but they only cut deeper.

“It’s not fair,” she said fiercely. “Everyone ought to be able to go. Or no one should go.”

“Slow down, Jessie,” he said. “There’s no way that everyone could go. We couldn’t even get everyone as far as the Moon. It’s a seventy-five-year project just to build five ships the size of Angleton or Freeport. Everybody calls Memphis a city in space. It’s just a little town, about to become the ultimate one- stoplight rural Hicksville.”

She straightened up and pulled away from him, sending an indignant Mobius to the floor. “I don’t really want to go,” she said in a little voice. “I just don’t want to be forgotten.”

He reached out and touched her cheek tenderly. “Who knows us in Bangladesh, or even Boston? What does it matter if a few people on a one-way trip don’t have stories to tell about Jessica Alexis Cichuan or Christopher